What is a rational education for the home-maker? If the ideal mother must have, in addition to a literary education, a knowledge of kindergarten, general needlework, including dressmaking, art in at least its elementary forms, bookkeeping, the chemistry of foods and practical cooking, house cleaning, first aid to the injured and nursing, and yet have the time and strength to be a comfort and companion to her husband and a teacher to her children, is it not asking too much of women?
The answer is plain. While many of our household industries must necessarily be placed in outside hands, the power controlling these industries must remain in the hands of the home-makers. These demands are not more than a woman can meet, for the same training that enables her to know all this teaches her the laws governing her physical self, how to control and conserve her energies so that they may be expended to the best advantage. It prepares her for making and maintaining a good home, the highest and best profession that a woman can enter; and the mother in the home, teaching, as she does, by precept as well as by example, during the greater part of the twenty-four hours, has need of a scientific training for her lifelong occupation.
There are many women who do not surround themselves with the security of home, there to peacefully work out life’s problems. Many find it necessary to enter the industrial and commercial fields, and a preparation which commands for these a living salary is imperative.
Texas, one of the youngest states, but already outstripping many of her elders in the spirit of progressiveness, has taken up the question of the industrial training of her girls with characteristic vigor. With a system of state public schools provided for by the allotment of public lands, whose revenues furnish a magnificent school fund, with a State University in the first rank among its kind, with State Normal Schools in every district whose population warrants it, with an Agricultural and Mechanical College second to none, and with manual training in practice in city schools all over the state, she established, by an act of the Legislature in 1901, the school known as the College of Industrial Arts. Denton, situated about midway between Dallas and Fort Worth and somewhat north of them, was selected as the site of the school. The idea met with hearty support all over the state, and it opened in September, 1903, with one hundred and eighty-six students, representing eighty-eight out of the two hundred and thirty-four counties of the state.
TYPEWRITING.
These girls come from the country, town and city; from the homes of bankers, lawyers, real estate men, mechanics, contractors, stockmen, teachers, druggists, farmers, ministers, merchants and physicians. Some are the daughters of widows and some are orphan girls. Some have earned, in whole or in part, the means by which they maintain themselves, while some are contributing to their own support by working while in school. Some of them entered on teachers’ certificates, some on high school diplomas, but the great majority entered on examination.
The student body is not only thoroughly democratic, but it is composed of earnest, conscientious, hard-working students, who appreciate their opportunity of obtaining a thorough, practical education.
The college is situated on the outskirts of Denton, in a campus of seventy acres of rising ground overlooking the city and surrounding country. It is well supplied with large, shady trees, and is covered with Bermuda grass. In the rear is a fine grove of oaks, where it is proposed to erect additional dormitories and class-rooms when the financial growth of the school admits of it. At present only the main building has been finished.