Chapter XII, and feel responsibility not to let the moral, religious,

and poetic aspects of nature be lost in utilities. Woman should be

true to her generic nature and take her stand against all premature

specialization, and when the _Zeitgeist_ [Spirit of the Times] insists

on specialized training for occupative pursuits without waiting for

broad foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences

that make for psychological precocity. _Das Ewig-Weibliche_ [The

eternal womanly] is no iridescent fiction but a very definable

reality, and means perennial youth. It means that woman at her best

never outgrows adolescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and

glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided interests,

its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that

is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This constitutes her freshness

and charm, even in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than

man, more sympathetic and appreciative. It is not chiefly the 70,000

superfluous Massachusetts women of the last census, but

representatives of every class and age in the 4,000 women's clubs of

this country that now find some leisure for general culture in all

fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpass their husbands.

Those who still say that men do not like women to be their mental

superiors and that no man was ever won by the attraction of intellect,

on the one hand, and those who urge that women really want husbands to

be their intellectual superiors, both misapprehend. The male in all

the orders of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to

expertness and specialisation, without which his individuality is

incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative, and

he rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. This is no subjection,

but woman instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps

educated woman coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted

choice. This granted, man was never more plastic to woman's great work

of creating in him all the wide range of secondary sex qualities which

constitute his essential manhood. In all this, the pedagogic fathers

we teach in the history of education are most of them about as

luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or

as methods of other countries are coming to be in solving our own

peculiar pedagogic problems. The relation of the academically trained

sexes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal

university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of

counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. For

the reinstallation of the humanistic college, the time has come when

cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she

does so and helps to evolve a high school and an A.B. course that is

truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better

than anything now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of

their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay

her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-universitize the

college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers.

But even should all this be done, coeducation would by means be thus

justified. If adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or

even feminized stage of psychic development in which they are

peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare

insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with

all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they

seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will

forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living out more

fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is

abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that intimate daily and

class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or

best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert his own

manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react

against general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are

older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship

and comparisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one

talent that emphasizes his psycho-sexual difference too soon. Again,

he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own

age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone to violate

the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband

to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests, as

maturity begins to decline to age, and in those of their offspring.

Thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead,

and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious

cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with constant

girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years of his

apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its

proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his

time. In this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and

unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother.

Better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny

and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle

eviration. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls'

interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his,

and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex.

Riper in mind and body than her male classmate, and often excelling

him in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full

maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to

fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older

and riper men. In all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate

of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute

disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be, on

her part, with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious

renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is correct in feeling himself

understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a degree that is

sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself

misunderstood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the

humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pass it sooner; and

to find them already there and with their greater aptitude excelling

him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or

cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his

time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her sex of

expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. Of course,

these influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or

measurable by statistics; but I have come to believe that, like many

other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is

all-pervasive and inescapable, and that they will ultimately prevail

over economic motives and traditions.

To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna

conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real

nature. Sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are

long. The elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if

not diseases, of our age. Marholm[4] points out at length how art

again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to

carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child

in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to

entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts

her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts

of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction

to decadent stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate

the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so

in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is

slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can

not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her,

although she become thereby lax and vapid.

The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city

life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion

to greed and pelf; whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed,

bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and

bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her

nature, which is essentially passive. Thus her perversions are his

fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her

protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and

defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to

receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their

inmost souls even young girls often experience disenchantment, find

men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think

stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Sometimes the girlish

conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of

school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that

to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate

expectations and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body

and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is

often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic respects, it seems as

if in human society the processes of subordinating the male to the

female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already

begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less

worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite

and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where

marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing

number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as

follows:

1. Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level;

gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return

luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while

submitting, conquering, and tyrannizing over him, content with present

worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or the above.

This may react to intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman

as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the

devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the

tragedies of life.

2. The disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to assert

her own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to

possess and realize herself fully rather than to transmit. Despairing

of herself as a woman, she asserts her lower rights in the place of

her one great right to be loved. The desire for love may be transmuted

into the desire for knowledge, or outward achievement become a

substitute for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a

productive organism, she gives vent to personal solutions; seeks

independence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps

becomes intellectually emancipated, and substitutes science for

religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided

impressionability characteristic of her sex which, when cultivated, is

so like an awakened child. She perhaps even affects mannish ways,

unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that

she has been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes

where they are most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting,

but never finding, she turns successively to art, science, literature,

and reforms; craves especially work that she can not do; and seeks

stimuli for feelings which have never found their legitimate

expression.

3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes

beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters

a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the

Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if

need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a

shrinking from publicity.

In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment

of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the

above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the

world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their

susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its

highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their

whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with

the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such--Stella

Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff--have

been veritable epics upon woman's nature; have revealed the

characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything

is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least

unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their

scrappy past, if not order and coherence, a justification, and then

alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than

those which are conscious or even personal. This is the age when, if

ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the experiences of this age,

never entirely obliterated in women, that enable them to take

adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these

experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. It is

this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even

unrealized to herself. It is the echoes from it that make vast numbers

of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half

secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and

daughters, with their husbands, or with society.

But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with

American girls, along with rapidly in creasing development of capacity

there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration.

Unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of

invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a

little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of

self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost;

and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and

unconsciously she begins to grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded

into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences;

has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passionately as the

men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement

for enfranchisement felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to

other women and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations

with some one. There is a little more affectation, playing a rôle, and

interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized

and definite. Perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker who will

perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a

slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of

children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to

them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and

insight becomes too clear; sense of responsibility without an object;

a slight general _malaise_ and a sense that society is a false

"margarine" affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child

the real value of a woman is revealed. There are alternations between

excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration

of the other sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries

about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes

generally.

A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, now impends,

viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of finality in the most

perilous first stage of higher education for girls, when, after all,

little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity

to begin reconstructions, so that now, for the first time in history,

methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature

and needs of girls. Now most female faculties, trustees, and students

are content to ape the newest departures in some one or more male

institutions as far as their means or obvious limitations make

possible with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a

thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to sex. It is

the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed

by the female head of a very successful institution,[5] who was "early

convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental

development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to sex,

and I have carried the same thought when I began to develop the

physical, and filled my gymnasium with the ordinary appliances used in

men's gymnasia." There is no sex in mind or in science, it is said,

but it might as well be urged that there is no age, and hence that all

methods adapted to teaching at different stages of development may be

ignored. That woman can do many things as well as man does not prove

that she ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the

best for her. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer[6] was right in saying that

woman's education has all the perplexities of that of man, and many

more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own.

Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great

extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have

done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper

education of woman. To assume that the latter question is settled, as

is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through

many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was

discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not

without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with

the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the

curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few

general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study

themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often

maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. No

one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, where the

richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and

competent research on lines calculated to bring out the

psycho-physiological differences between the sexes and those in

authority are either conservative by constitution or else intimidated

because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here

becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and

the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in

countenance.

Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every

opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of

her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college

is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed,

if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be

trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and

motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even

urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are, as the above

statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do

not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right.

These institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a

new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she nut, maid--old

or young--nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. I recognize the very

great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse class in the

past. Some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of

self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was

meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the class of

superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism

and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did

the monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring about the

Dark Ages, because they were the best and most highly selected men of

their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and

leaving no posterity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and

training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe, can not

yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.

The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of Spencer's law of

the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely

developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line

of descent. She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was

meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with

heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed

individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very

apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological

ethics. While the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman

has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves.

First she loses mammary functions, so that should she undertake

maternity its functions are incompletely performed because she can not

nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the

child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed

can not love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in

the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her offspring, in

the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been

healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the

diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system.

These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the

men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr,

the university student, in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives," who alienated

the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen

pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing

is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in

all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as

charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse

with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the racquet and

on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all

their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies;

and the world owes much and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic

friendships of this kind. These women are often in every way

magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little

wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these

functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern

life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are

functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of

child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the

limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is

called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful

consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for

cultivated women."

The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization

advances, and their training is a noble function. Already it has

produced minds of the greatest acumen who have made very valuable

contributions to science, and far more is to be expected of them in

the future. Indeed, it may be their noble function to lead their sex

out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of its true

position and function, for which I plead. Hitherto woman has not been

able to solve her own problems. While she has been more religious than

man, there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled

in teaching young children, there have been few Pestalozzis, or even

Froebels; while her invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to

man in her diseases. This is due to the very intuitiveness and naïveté

of her nature. But now that her world is so rapidly widening, she is

in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied objectively and

laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because their sex

must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with

regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in

these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and

sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like

Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could become a woman, he can never

really understand _das Ewig-Weibliche_, [The eternal womanly] one of

the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he is a man; and

here the cultivated woman must explore the nature of her sex as man

can not, and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new fields opening

in biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children,

animals, savages (witness Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation,

to say nothing of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking

detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or

her very sex gives her peculiar advantages where she is to lead and

achieve great things in enlarging the kingdom of man. Perhaps, too,

the present training of women may in the end develop those who shall

one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead n the next step of

devising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs.

For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all

distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate

primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that, if that does not

come, single life can best take care of itself, because it is less

intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may

be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of

adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the

sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and

delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect,

let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar comradeship that

ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their

institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals

inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb,

Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs.

Browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done,

and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements,

prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class

of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother

to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to

great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.

We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with

regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she

can, from surreptitious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs

to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman

and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as

she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of

good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious

indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and

encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We

must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole,

than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to

exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so

stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must

not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown with the tares of

ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote

Dr. R.T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of

conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female

obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school

factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's "Song of the Shirt";

and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like

a eminent lady principal,[7] who thought girls' weakness is usually

imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting

illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a

healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.

Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should

be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of

adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and

which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme[8] or _L'Ecole

des Roches_,[9] may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows.

First, the ideal institution for the training of girls from twelve or

thirteen on into the twenties, when the period most favorable to

motherhood begins, should be in the country in the midst of hills, the

climbing of which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends

to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should be water for

boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both

for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion

and religious awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking

and wheeling: playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, with large

covered but unheated space favorable for recreations in weather really

too bad for out-of-door life and for those indisposed; and plenty of

nooks that permit each to be alone with nature, for this develops

inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness from

the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. All

that can be called environment is even more important for girls than

boys, significant as it is for the latter.

The first aim, which should dominate every item, pedagogic method and

matter, should be health--a momentous word that looms up beside

holiness, to which it is etymologically akin. The new hygiene of the

last few years should be supreme and make these academic areas soared

to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only those who realize what

advances have been made in health culture and know something of its

vast new literature can realize all that this means. The health of

woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the

welfare of the race than that of man; and the influence of her body

upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that its needs should be

supreme and primary. Foods should favor the completest digestion, so

that metabolism be on the highest plane. The dietary should be

abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements

possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be one of its

departments, with limited use of rich foods or desserts and

stimulating drinks, but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm.

Nutrition is the first law of health and happiness, the prime

condition and creator of euphoria; and the appetite should be, as it

always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience

steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs.

Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on

plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it

with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with windows more

or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated.

Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet should be

almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. Each

student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study,

respectively, and be responsible for their care, with every

encouragement for expressing individual tastes; but will, an

all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and

elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good part

of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of

parents and to learn self-reliance; and a family dormitory system,

with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous

wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or

more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics,

is suggested.

Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. Swedish

gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points,

because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little

stress upon the rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games should

have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that

methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls

without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in

the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible

adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always have

precedence over indoor or uniform _commando_ exercises. Boating and

basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element

sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most

prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the

stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and

pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even

specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The

history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school

of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the

best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole

educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and

class rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who

can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern

form.[10]

Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savoring of the

primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really

minor or sometimes major morals. They can express everything in the

whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we understand

the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school

of bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. I would

revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of

the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be

neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an

exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others.

Women's ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a

noble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of

good breeding, but nervous health.

Regularity should be another all-pervading norm. In the main, even

though he may have "played his sex symphony too harshly," E.H. Clark

was right. Periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos,

celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years everything

must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. In the

monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the

meaning of the word leisure. The paradise of stated rest should be

revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the

soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development,

expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and

encouraged in every legitimate way, for, in rest, the whole momentum

of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete

development. Then woman should realize that _to be_ is greater than

_to do_; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let

Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when

anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission

of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the

greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the

vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (See Chapter VII

on this point.) The cottage home, which should take the place of the

dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for

these seasons.

There should always be some personal instruction at these seasons

during earlier adolescent years. I have glanced over nearly a score of

books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all

are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls

acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are,

like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and

plain and direct. Moreover, no two girls need just the same

instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the

mind to dwell on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual

instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in

the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which

should pervade all and make everything sacred. This should not be

given by male physicians--and indeed most female doctors would make it

too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence

for it--but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of

wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not

without the necessary technical knowledge.

Another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the

purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the

front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely

intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely

intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably a bad sign

in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead

knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of

scholarship are always morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that

is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to

be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to

overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of

what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the

guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.

Religion will always bold as prominent a place in woman's life as

politics does in man's, and adolescence is still more its seedtime

with girls than with boys. Its roots are the sentiment of awe and

reverence, and it is the great agent in the world for transforming

life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of

altruism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and

self-sacrifice from the Old Testament come naturally first; then

perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent

and Saunders's little series; and when adolescence is at its height

then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon

Jesus's life and work. He should be taught first humanly, and only

later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted should His Deity

be adduced as welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the

heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the

transcendent and supernal had no objective existence, we should have

to invent and teach it or dwarf the life of feeling and sentiment.

Whatever else religion is, therefore, it is the supremest poetry of

the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most

generic and racial in it. Theology should be reduced to a minimum, but

nothing denied where wanted. Paul and his works and ways should be for

the most part deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile well as the

cyclone revivalist should be very carefully excluded; and yet in every

springtime, when nature is recreated, service and teaching should

gently encourage the revival and even the regeneration of all the

religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be allowed to do his

work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and

all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense

should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reënforce, and

go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy; and woman, who

has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further

and higher development. Orthodoxies and all narrowness should forever

give place to cordial hospitality toward every serious view, which

should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather than by that of

criticism.

Nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of

the entire curriculum, but here again the methods of the sexes should

differ somewhat after puberty. The poetic and mythic factors and some

glimpses of the history of science should be given more prominence;

the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should

be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God's

first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a

primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one.

Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should

be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to

devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and

those with special talents or tastes for it should go to agamic

schools. Chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a

subordinate place. The average girl has little love of sozzling and

mussing with the elements, and cooking involves problems in organic

chemistry too complex to be understood very profoundly, but the

rudiments of household chemistry should be taught. Physics, too,

should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology should have a larger,

and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and are

especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are

taught out of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical

and practical aspects should be kept in the foreground. With botany

more serious work should be done. Plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as

in astronomy, should have attention throughout, while Latin

nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all, and

vulgar names should have precedence over Latin terminology. Flowers,

gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. Economic and even

medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the

whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The

moral value of this subject will never be fully understood till we

have what might almost be called a woman's botany, constructed on

lines different from any of the text-books I have glanced at. Here

much knowledge interesting in itself can be early taught, which will

spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence develops

and the great law of sex unfolds.

Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie

resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as

adjuncts. It should start in the environment like everything else.

Bird and animal lore, books, and pictures should abound in the early

stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have ample

illustration, while the morphological nomenclature and details of

structure should be less essential. Woman has domesticated nearly all

the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of

life and psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of

moral qualities to her even more than to man. The peacock is an

embodied expression of pride; the pig, of filth; the fox, of cunning;

the serpent, of subtle danger; the eagle, of sublimity; the goose, of

stupidity; and so on through all the range of human qualities, as we

have seen. At bottom, however, the study of animal life is coming to

be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should have

dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up.

This shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man

and child so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief,

domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy

and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the

higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human

interest where she needs to know the great results, the striking

details, the salient illustrations, the basal principles rather than

to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry,

philology, etc.

All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man--history,

with the biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty

of stories of heroes of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives

and the personal element more prominent, and specialization in the

study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated to

a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped, rudimentary, and in

some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum of her

higher education a place above political economy. The stories of the

great reforms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the

home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should

to the fore.

Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propædeutic way

and individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be

no special training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim

should be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and the

good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is good and

classic over what is cheap and fustian.

In literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps lead, and the

knowledge of the great authors in the vernacular be fostered. Greek,

Hebrew, and perhaps Latin languages should be entirely excluded, not

but that they are of great value and have their place, but because a

smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ignorance of

more valuable things. German, French, and Italian should be allowed

and provided for by native teachers and by conversational methods if

desired, and in their proper season.

In the studies of the soul of man, generally called the philosophic

branches, metaphysics and epistemology should have the smallest, and

logic the next least place. Psychology should be taught on the genetic

basis of animals and children, and one of its tap-roots should be

developed from the love of infancy and youth, than which nothing in

all the world is more worthy. If a woman Descartes ever arises, she

will put life before theory, and her watchword will be not _cogito,

ergo sum_, [I think, therefore I am] but _sum, ergo cogito_ [I am,

therefore I think]. The psychology of sentiments and feelings and

intuitions will take precedence of that of pure intellect; ethics will

be taught on the basis of the whole series of practical duties and

problems, and the theories of the ultimate nature of right or the

constitution of conscience will have small place.

Domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal home building by a

kind of laboratory method. A nursery with all carefully selected

appliances and adjuncts, a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets,

cellars, outhouses, building, its material, the grounds, lawn,

shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other adjuncts of the hearth

will be both exemplified and taught. A general course in pedagogy,

especially its history and ideals, another in child study, and finally

a course in maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without

practical details of nursing, should be comprehensive and culminating.

In its largest sense maternity might be the heart of all the higher

training of young women.

Applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in a department of

teaching as one of the specialties of motherhood and not as a vocation

apart. The training should aim to develop power of maternity in soul

as well as in body, so that home influence may extend on and up

through the plastic years of pubescence, and future generations shall

not rebel against these influences until they have wrought their

perfect work.

The methods throughout should be objective, with copious illustrations

by way of object-lessons, apparatus, charts, pictures, diagrams, and

lectures, far less book work and recitation, only a limited amount of

room study, the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and

everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. Hints that are not

followed up; information not elaborated into a thin pedagogic sillabub

or froth; seed that is sown on the waters with no thought of reaping;

faith in a God who does not pay at the end of each week, month, or

year, but who always pays abundantly some time; training which does

not develop hypertrophied memory-pouches that carry, or creative

powers that discover and produce--these are lines on which such an

institution should develop. Specialization has its place, but it

always hurts a woman's soul more than a man's, should always come

later, and if there is special capacity it should be trained

elsewhere. Unconscious education is a power of which we have yet to

learn the full ranges.

In most groups in this series of ideal departments there should be at

least one healthful, wise, large-souled, honorable, married and

attractive man, and, if possible, several of them. His very presence

in an institution for young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and

gives wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt sexual,

but all unconsciously so. This mentor should not be more father than

brother, though he should combine the best of each, but should add

another element. He need not be a doctor, a clergyman, or even a great

scholar, but should be accessible for confidential conferences even

though intimate. He should know the soul of the adolescent girl and

how to prescribe; he should be wise and fruitful in advice, but

especially should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration for

poise and courage even though religious or medical problems be

involved. But even if he lack all these latter qualities, though he so

poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his

presence and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of such a

being, though a complete realization of this ideal could be only

remotely approximated, would be the center of an atmosphere most

wholesomely tonic.

In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a humanistic and

liberal education and have refrained from all details and special

curriculization. Many of the above features I believe would be as

helpful for boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to

resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this

higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational

institutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal institutions, however,

for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly

divergent.

As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the

predominance of the heart over the mere intellect, I believe myself

not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and

more passionately in love with woman as I conceive she came from the

hand of God. I keenly envy my Catholic friends their Maryolatry. Who

ever asked if the Holy Mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the

astronomy of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or Babylonian, or

even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and who has

ever thought of caring? We can not conceive that she bemoaned any

limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all

these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic,

nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and

intuition than man. The glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more

whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator,

professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be a man is

larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or

millionaire.

But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing

in the growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and

places than one, is in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is

coming to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, and is

just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, methods, and ideals,

until her original divinity may become obscured. But, if our worship

at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and

unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should

have no resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that

she will ere long evolve a sphere of life and even education which

fits her needs as well as, if not better than those of man fit his.

Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can

turn with unabated faith to the eternally childish, the best of which

in each are so closely related. The oracles of infancy and childhood

will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences,

skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coördinate by our

logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of

old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation and

a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures,

we have now at least one source to which we can turn--we have found

the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the

undiscovered pole of human destiny. We know what can and will

ultimately coördinate in the generic, which is larger than the logical

order, all that is worth knowing, teaching, or doing by the best

methods, that will save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of

premature and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and line

of normal development in the child in our midst that must henceforth

ever lead us which epitomizes in its development all the stages, human

and prehuman; that is the proper object of all that strange new love

of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophisticated in human

nature. The heart and soul of growing childhood is the criterion by

which we judge the larger heart and soul of mature womanhood; and

these are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new

education which is to be, when the school becomes what Melanchthon

said it must be--a true workshop of the Holy Ghost--and what the new

psychology, when it rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the

true paradise of restored intuitive human nature.

[Footnote 1: David Starr Jordan: The Higher Education of Women.

Popular Science Monthly, December, 1902, vol. 62, pp. 97-107. See also

my article on this subject in Munsey's Magazine, February, 1906, and

President Jordan's reply in the March number, 1906.]

[Footnote 2: Coeducation. A series of essays by various authors,

edited by Alice Woods, with an introduction by M.E. Sadler. Longmans,

Green and Co., London 1903, p. 148 _et seq_.]

[Footnote 3: The Evolution of Ideals. W.G. Chambers, Pedagogical

Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 101-143. Also, B.E. Warner: The

Young Woman in Modern Life. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1903, p. 218.]

[Footnote 4: The Psychology of Woman. Translated by G.A. Etchison.

Richards, London, 1899.]

[Footnote 5: Physical Development of Women and Children. By Miss M.E.

Allen. American Association for Physical Education., April, 1890.]

[Footnote 6: A Review of the Higher Education of Women. Forum,

September, 1891, vol. 12, pp 25-40. See also G. von Bunge: Die

zunehmende Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. München

Reinhardt, 1903, 3d ed. Also President Harper's Decennial Report, pp.

xciv-cxi.]

[Footnote 7: Physical Hindrances to Teaching Girls, by Charlotte W.

Porter. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 41-49.]

[Footnote 8: Abbotsholme, 1889-1899: or Ten Years' Work in an

Educational Laboratory, by Cecil Reddie, G. Allen London, 1900.]

[Footnote 9: See L'Ecole des Roches, a school of the Twentieth

Century, by T.R. Croswell. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol.

7, pp. 479-491.]

[Footnote 10: See Chapter VI.]

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING

Dangers of muscular degeneration and overstimulus of brain--Difficulties

in teaching morals--Methods in Europe--Obedience to commands--Good

habits should be mechanized--Value of scolding--How to flog aright--Its

dangers--Moral precepts and proverbs--Habituation--Training will through

intellect--Examinations--Concentration--Originality--Froebel and the

naive--First ideas of God--Conscience--Importance of Old and New

Testaments--Sex dangers--Love and religion--Conversion.

From its nature as well as from its central importance it might be

easily shown that the will is no less dependent on the culture it

receives than is the mind. It is fast becoming as absurd to suppose

that men can survive in the great practical strain to which American

life subjects all who would succeed, if the will is left to take its

doubtful chances of training and discipline, as to suppose that the

mind develops in neglect. Our changed conditions make this chance of

will-culture more doubtful than formerly. A generation or two ago[1]

most school-boys had either farm work, chores, errands, jobs

self-imposed, or required by less tender parents; they _made_ things,

either toys or tools, out of school. Most school-girls did house-work,

more or less of which is, like farm-work, perhaps the most varied and

most salutary as well as most venerable of all schools for the

youthful body and mind. They undertook extensive works of embroidery,

bed-quilting, knitting, sewing, mending, if not cleaning, and even

spinning and weaving their own or others' clothing, and cared for the

younger children. The wealthier devised or imposed tasks for

will-culture, as the German Kaiser has his children taught a trade as

part of their education. Ten days at the hoe-handle, axe, or

pitchfork, said an eminent educator lately in substance, with no new

impression from without, and one constant and only duty, is a

schooling in perseverance and sustained effort such as few boys now

get in any shape; while city instead of country life brings so many

new, heterogeneous and distracting impressions of motion rather than

rest, and so many privileges with so few corresponding duties, that

with artificial life and bad air the will is weakened, and eupeptic

minds and stomachs, on which its vigor so depends, are rare. Machines

supersede muscles, and perhaps our athleticism gives skill too great

preponderance over strength, or favors intense rather than constant,

long-sustained, unintermittent energy. Perhaps too many of our courses

of study are better fitted to turn out many-sided but superficial

paragraphists, than men who can lay deep plans, and subordinate many

complex means to one remote end. Meanwhile, if there is any one thing

of which our industries and practical arts are in more crying need

than another, it is the old-fashioned virtue of thoroughness, of a

kind and degree which does not address merely the eye, is not limited

by the letter of a contract, but which has some regard for its

products for their own sake, and some sense for the future. Whether in

science, philosophy, morals, or business, the fields for long-ranged

cumulative efforts are wider, more numerous, and far more needy than

in the days when it was the fashion for men contentedly to concentrate

themselves to one vocation, life-work, or mission, or when cathedrals

or other yet vaster public works were transmitted, unfinished but ever

advancing, from one generation of men to another.

It is because the brain is developed, while the muscles are allowed to

grow flabby and atrophied, that the deplored chasm between knowing and

doing is so often fatal to the practical effectiveness of mental and

moral culture. The great increase of city and sedentary life has been

far too sudden for the human body--which was developed by hunting,

war, agriculture, and manifold industries now given over to steam and

machinery--to adapt itself healthfully or naturally to its new

environment. Let any of us take down an anatomical chart of the human

muscles, and reflect what movements we habitually make each day, and

realize how disproportionately our activities are distributed compared

with the size or importance of the muscles, and how greatly modern

specialization of work has deformed our bodies. The muscles that move

the scribbling pen are insignificant fraction of those in the whole

body, and those that wag the tongue and adjust the larynx are also

comparatively few and small. Their importance is, of course, not

underrated, but it is disastrous to concentrate education upon them

too exclusively or too early in life. The trouble is that few realize

what physical vigor is in man or woman, or how dangerously near

weakness often is to wickedness, how impossible healthful energy of

will is without strong muscles which are its organ, or how endurance

and self-control, no less than great achievement, depend on

muscle-habits. Both in Germany and Greece, a golden age of letters was

preceded, by about a generation, by a golden age of national gymnastic

enthusiasm which constitutes, especially in the former country, one of

the most unique and suggestive chapters in the history of pedagogy.

Symmetry and grace, hardihood and courage, the power to do everything

that the human body can do with and without all conceivable apparatus,

instruments, and even tools, are culture ideals that in Greece, Rome,

and Germany respectively have influenced, as they might again

influence, young men, as intellectual ideals never can do save in a

select few. We do not want "will-virtuosos," who perform feats hard to

learn, but then easy to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any

sort which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and circulation,

and is favored by some of our popular sports but too soon reacts into

fatigue. Even will-training does not reach its end till it leads the

young up to taking a intelligent, serious and life-long interest in

their own physical culture and development. This is higher than

interest in success in school or college sport; and, though naturally

later than these, is one of the earliest forms of will-culture in

which it is safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its own

sake alone. In our exciting life and trying climate, in which the

experiment of civilization has never been tried before, these thoughts

are merely exercises.

But this is, of course, preliminary. Great as is the need, the

practical difficulties in the way are very great. First, there are not

only no good text-books in ethics, but no good manual to guide

teachers. Some give so many virtues or good habits to be taught per

term, ignoring the unity of virtue as well as the order in which the

child's capacities for real virtue unfold. Advanced text-books discuss

the grounds of obligation, the nature of choice or freedom, or the

hedonistic calculus, as if pleasures and pains could be balanced as

measurable quantities, etc., so that philosophic morality is clearly

not for children or teachers. Secondly, evolution encourages too often

the doubt whether virtue can be taught, when it should have the

opposite effect. Perversity and viciousness of will are too often

treated as constitutional disease; and insubordination or obstinacy,

especially in school, are secretly admired as strength, instead of

being vigorously treated as crampy disorders of will, and the child is

coddled into flaccidity. Becomes the lowest develops first, there is

danger that it will interfere with the development of the higher, and

thus, if left to his own, the child may come to have no will. The

third and greatest difficulty is, that with the best effort to do so,

so few teachers can separate morality from religious creed. So vital

is the religions sentiment here that it is hard to divorce the end of

education from the end of life, proximate from ultimate grounds of

obligation, or finite from infinite duties. Those whose training has

been more religious than ethical can hardly teach morality _per se_

satisfactorily to the _noli me tangere_ [Touch me not] spirit of

denominational freedom so wisely jealous of conflicting standards and

sanctions for the young.

How then can we ever hope to secure proper training for the will?

More than a generation ago Germany developed the following method:

Children of Lutheran, Catholic and Jewish parentage, which include

most German children, were allowed one afternoon a week for several

years, and two afternoons a week for a few months preceding

confirmation, to spend half of a school day with instructors of these

respective professions, who were nominated by the church, but examined

by the state as to their competence. These teachers are as

professional, therefore, as those in the regular class work. Each

religion is allowed to determine its own course of religious

instruction, subject only to the approval of the cultus minister or

the local authorities. In this way a rupture between the religious

sentiments and teaching of successive generations is avoided and it is

sought to bring religious training to bear upon morals. These classes

learn Scripture, hymns, church service,--the Catholics in Latin and

the Jewish in Hebrew,--the history of their church and people, and

sometimes a little systematic theology. In some of these schools,

there are prizes and diplomas, and the spirit of competition is

appealed to. A criticism sometimes made against them, especially

against the Lutheran religious pedagogy, is that it is too

intellectual. It is, of course, far more systematic and effective from

this point of view than the American Sunday School, so that whatever

may be said of its edifying effects, the German child knows these

topics far better than the American. This system, with modifications,

has been adopted in some places in France, England and in America,

more often in private than in public schools, however.

The other system originated in France some years after the

Franco-Prussian War when the clerical influence in French education

gave way to the lay and secular spirit. In these classes, for which

also stated times are set apart and which are continued through all

the required grades under the name of moral and civic instruction, the

religious element is entirely absent, except that there are a few

hymns, Bible passages and stories which all agree upon as valuable.

Most of the course is made up of carefully selected maxims and

especially stories of virtue, records of heroic achievements in French

history and even in literature and the drama. Everything, however, has

a distinct moral lesson, although that lesson is not made offensively

prominent. We have here nearly a score of these textbooks, large and

small. It would seen as though the resources of the French records and

literature had been ransacked, and indeed many deeds of heroism are

culled from the daily press. The matter is often arranged under

headings such as cleanliness, acts of kindness, courage, truthfulness

versus lying, respect for age, good manners, etc. Each virtue is thus

taught in a way appropriate to each stage of childhood, and quite

often bands of mercy, rescue leagues and other societies are the

outgrowth of this instruction. It is, of course, exposed to much

criticism from the clergy on the cogent ground that morality needs the

support of religion, at the very least, in childhood. This system has

had much influence in England where several similar courses have been

evolved, and in this country we have at least one very praiseworthy

effort in this direction, addressed mainly, however, to older

children.

Besides this, two ways suggest themselves. First, we may try to

assume, or tediously enucleate a consensus of religious truth as a

basis of will training, e.g., God and immortality, and, ignoring the

minority who doubt these, vote them into the public school. Pedagogy

need have nothing whatever to say respecting the absolute truth or

falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt that they have an

influence on the will, at a certain stage of average development,

greater and more essential than any other; so great that even were

their vitality to decay like the faith in the Greek or German

mythology, we should still have to teach God and a future life as the

most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as in morals,

nothing is so practical as a good theory; and we should have to fall

to teaching the Bible as a moral classic, and cultivate a critical

sympathy for its view of life. But this way ignores revelation and

supernatural claims, while some have other objections to emancipating

or "rescuing" the Bible from theology just yet. Indeed, the problem

how to teach anything that the mind could not have found out for

itself, but that had to be revealed, has not been solved by modern

pedagogy, which, since Pestalozzi, has been more and more devoted to

natural and developing methods. The latter teaches that there must not

be too much seed sown, too much or too high precept, or too much

iteration, and that, in Jean Paul's phrase, the hammer must not rest

on bell, but only tap and rebound, to bring out a clear tone. Again, a

consensus of this content would either have to be carefully defined

and would be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else

differences of interpretation, which so pervade and are modified by

character, culture, temperament, and feeling, would make the consensus

itself nugatory. Religious training must be specific at first, and,

omitting qualifications, the more explicit the denominational faith

the earlier may religious motives affect the will.

This is the way of our hopes, to the closer consideration of which we

intend to return in the future, though it must be expected that the

happiest consensus will be long quarantined from most schools.

Meanwhile a second way, however unpromising, is still open. Noble

types of character may rest on only the native instincts of the soul

or even on broadly interpreted utilitarian considerations. But if

morality without religion were only a bloodless corpse or a plank in a

shipwreck, there is now need enough for teachers to study its form,

drift, and uses by itself alone. This, at least, is our purpose in

considering the will, and this only.

The will, purpose, and even mood of small children when alone, are

fickle, fluctuating, contradictory. Our very presence imposes one

general law on them, viz., that of keeping our good will and avoiding

our displeasure. As the plant grows towards the light, so they unfold

in the direction of our wishes, felt as by divination. They respect

all you smile at, even buffoonery; look up in their play to call your

notice, to study the lines of your sympathy, as if their chief

vocation was to learn your desires. Their early lies are often saying

what they think will please us, knowing no higher touchstones of

truth. If we are careful to be wisely and without excess happy and

affectionate when they are good, and saddened and slightly cooled in

manifestations of love if they do wrong, the power of association in

the normal, eupeptic child will early choose right as surely as

pleasure increases vitality. If our love is deep, obedience is an

instinct if not a religion. The child learns that while it can not

excite our fear, resentment or admiration, etc., it can act on our

love, and this should be the first sense of its own efficiency. Thus,

too, it first learns that the way of passion and impulse is not the

only rule of life, and that something is gained by resisting them. It

imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. As if it

felt its insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower

phase of its development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a

passion. As the vine must twine or grovel, so the child comes

unconsciously to worship idols, and imitates bad patterns and examples

in the absence of worthy ones. He obeys as with a deep sense of being

our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce him, if the

means be wisely chosen. The authority must, of course, be ascendancy

over heart and mind. The more absolute such authority the more the

will is saved from caprice and feels the power of steadiness. Such

authority excites the unique, unfathomable sense of reverence, which

measures the capacity for will-culture, and is the strongest and

soundest of all moral motives. It is also the most comprehensive, for

it is first felt only towards persons, and personality is a bond,

enabling any number of complex elements to act or be treated as whole,

as everything does and is in the child's soul, instead of in isolation

and detail. In the feeling of respect culminating in worship almost

all educational motives are involved, but especially those which alone

can bring the will to maturity; and happy the child who is bound by

the mysterious and constraining sympathy of dependence, by which, if

unblighted by cynicism, a worthy mentor directs and lifts the will.

This unconscious reflection of our character and wishes is the diviner

side of childhood, by which it is quick and responsive to everything

in its moral environment. The child may not be able to tell whether

its teacher often smiles, dresses in this way or that, speaks loud or

low, has many rules or not, though every element of her personality

affects him profoundly. His acts of will have not been _choices_, but

a mass of psychic causes far greater than consciousness can estimate

have laid a basis of character, than which heredity alone is deeper,

before the child knows he has a will. These influences are not

transient but life-long, for if the conscious and intentional may

anywhere be said to be only a superficial wave over the depths of the

unconscious, it is in the sphere of will-culture.

But command and obedience must also be specific to supplant nature.

Here begins the difficulty. A young child can know no general

commands. "Sit in your chair," means sit a moment, a sort of trick,

with no prohibition to stand the next instant. Any just-forbidden act

may be done in the next room. All is here and now, and patient

reiteration, till habit is formed, and no havoc-making rules which it

cannot understand or remember, is our cue. Obedience can, however, be

instinct even here, and is its chief virtue, and there is no more fear

of weakening the will by it than in the case of soldiers. As the child

grows older, however, and as the acts commanded are repugnant, or

unusual, there should be increasing care, lest authority be

compromised, sympathy ruptured, or lest mutual timidity and

indecision, if not mutual insincerity and dissimulation, as well as

parodied disobedience, etc., to test us, result. We should, of course,

watch for favorable moods, assume no unwonted or preternatural dignity

or owlish air of wisdom, and command in a low voice which does not too

rudely break in upon the child's train of impressions. The acts we

command or forbid should be very few at first, but inexorable. We

should be careful not to forbid where we cannot follow a untrusty

child, or what we can not prevent. Our own will should be a rock and

not a wave. Our requirements should be uniform, with no whim, mood, or

periodicity of any sort about them. If we alternate from caresses to

severity, are fields and capricious instead of commanding by a fixed

and settled plan, if we only now and then take the child in hand, so

he does not know precisely what to expect, we really require the child

to change its nature with every change in us, and well for the child

who can defy such a changeable authority, which not only unsettles but

breaks up character anew when it is just at the beginning of the

formative period. Neglect is better than this, and fear of

inconsistency of authority makes the best parents often jealous of

arbitrariness in teachers. Only thus can we develop general habits of

will and bring the child to know general maxims of conduct

inductively, and only thus by judicious boldness and hardihood in

command can we bring the child to feel the conscious strength that

comes only from doing unpleasant things. Even if instant obedience be

only external at first, it will work inward, for moods are controlled

by work, and it is only will which enlarges the bounds of personality.

Yet we must not forget that even morality is relative, and is one

thing for adults and often quite another for children. The child knows

nothing of absolute truth, justice, or virtues. The various stimuli of

discipline are to enforce the higher though weaker insights which the

child has already unfolded, rather than to engraft entirely unintuited

good. The command must find some ally, feeble though it be, in the

child's own soul. We should strive to fill each moment with as little

sacrifice or subordination, as mere means or conditions to the future,

as possible, for fear of affectation and insincerity. But yet the

hardier and sounder the nature, the more we may address training to

barely nascent intuitions, with a less ingredient of immediate

satisfaction, and the deeper the higher element Of interest will be

grounded in the end. The child must find as he advances towards

maturity, that every new insight, or realization of his own reveals

the fact that you have been there before with commands, cultivating

sentiments and habits, and not that he was led to mistake your

convenience or hobby for duty, or failed to temper the will by

temporizing with it. The young are apt to be most sincere at an age

when they are also most mistaken, but if sincerity be kept at its

deepest and best, will be least harmful and easiest overcome. If

authority supplement rather than supersede good motives, the child

will so love authority as to overcome your reluctance to apply it

directly, and as a final result will choose the state and act you have

pre-formed in its slowly-widening margin of freedom, and will be all

the less liable to undue subservience to priest or boss, or fashion or

tradition later, as obedience gives place to normal, manly

independence.

In these and many other ways everything in conduct should be

mechanized as early and completely as possible. The child's notion of

what is right is what is habitual, and the simple, to which all else

is reduced in thought, is identified with the familiar. It is this

primitive stratum of habits which principally determines our deepest

belief which all must have over and above knowledge--to which men

revert in mature years from youthful vagaries. If good acts are a diet

and not a medicine, are repeated over and over again, as every new

beat of the loom pounds in one new thread, and sense of justice and

right is wrought into the very nerve-cells and fibers; if this ground

texture of the soul, this "memory and habit-plexus," this sphere of

thoughts we oftenest think and acts we oftenest do, is early, rightly

and indiscerptibly wrought, not only does it become a web of destiny

for us, so all-determining is it, but we have something perdurable to

fall back on if moral shock or crisis or change or calamity shall have

rudely broken up the whole structure of later associations. Not only

the more we mechanize thus, the more force of soul is freed for higher

work, but we are insured against emergencies in which the choice and

deed is likely to follow the nearest motive, or that which acts

quickest, rather than to pause and be influenced by higher and perhaps

intrinsically stronger motives. Reflection always brings in a new set

of later-acquired motives and considerations, and if these are better

than habit-mechanism, then pause is good; if not, he who deliberates

is lost. Our purposive volitions are very few compared with the long

series of desires, acts and reactions, often contradictory, many of

which were never conscious, and many once willed but now lapsed to

reflexes, the traces of which crowding the unknown margins of the

soul, constitute the organ of the conscious will.

It is only so far as this primitive will is wrong by nature or

training, that drastic reconstructions of any sort are needed. Only

those who mistake weakness for innocence, or simplicity for candor, or

forget that childish faults are no less serious because universal,

deny the, at least, occasional depravity of all children, or fail to

see that fear and pain are among the indispensables of education,

while a parent, teacher, or even a God, _all_ love, weakens and

relaxes the will. Children do not cry for the alphabet; the

multiplication table is more like medicine than confectionery, and it

is only affected thoroughness that omits all that is hard. "The fruits

of learning may be sweet, but its roots are always bitter," and it is

this alone that makes it possible to strengthen the will while

instructing the mind. The well-schooled will comes, like Herder, to

scorn the luxury of knowing without the labor of learning. We must

anticipate the future penalties of sloth as well as of badness. The

will especially is a trust we are to administer for the child, not as

he may now wish, but as he will wish when more mature. We must now

compel what he will later wish to compel himself to do. To find his

habits already formed to the same law that his mature will and the

world later enjoin, cements the strongest of all bonds between mentor

and child. Nothing, however, must be so individual as punishment. For

some, a threat at rare intervals is enough; while for others, however

ominous threats may be, they become at once "like scarecrows, on which

the foulest birds soonest learn to perch." To scold well and wisely is

an art by itself. For some children, pardon is the worst punishment;

for others, ignoring or neglect; for others, isolation from friends,

suspension from duties; for others, seclusion--which last, however, is

for certain ages beset with extreme danger--and for still others,

shame from being made conspicuous. Mr. Spencer's "natural penalties"

can be applied to but few kinds of wrong, and those not the worst.

Basedow tied boys who fell into temptation to a strong pillar to brace

them up; if stupid and careless, put on a fool's cap and bells; if

they were proud, they were suspended near the ceiling in a basket, as

Aristophanes represented Socrates. Two boys who quarreled, were made

to look into each other's eyes before the whole school till their

angry expressions gave way before the general sense of the ridiculous.

This is more ingenious than wise. The object of discipline is to avoid

punishment, but even flogging should never be forbidden. It maybe

reserved, like a sword in its scabbard, but should not get so rusted

in that it can not be drawn on occasion. The law might even limit the

size and length of the rod, and place of application, as in Germany,

but it should be of no less liberal dimensions here than there.

punishment should, of course, be minatory and reformatory, and not

vindictive, and we should not forget that certainty is more effective

than severity, nor that it is apt to make motives sensuous, and delay

the psychic restraint which should early preponderate over the

physical. But will-culture for boys is rarely as thorough as it should

be without more or less flogging. I would not, of course, urge the

extremes of the past. The Spartan beating as a gymnastic drill to

toughen, the severity which prevailed in Germany for a long time after

its Thirty Years' Wars,[2] the former fashion in many English schools

of walking up not infrequently to take a flogging as a plucky thing to

do, and with no notion of disgrace attaching to it, shows at least an

admirable strength of will. Severe constraint gives poise, inwardness,

self-control, inhibition, and not-willingness, if not willingness,

while the now too common habit of coquetting for the child's favor,

and tickling its ego with praises and prizes, and pedagogic

pettifogging for its good-will, and sentimental fear of a judicious

slap to rouse a spoiled child with no will to break, to make it keep

step with the rest in conduct, instead of delaying a whole school-room

to apply a subtle psychology of motives on it, is bad. This reminds

one of the Jain who sweeps the ground before him lest he unconsciously

tread on a worm. Possibly it may be well, as Schleiermacher suggests,

not to repress some one nascent bad act in some natures, but let it

and the punishment ensue for the sake of Dr. Spankster's tonic. Dermal

pain is not the worst thing in the world, and by a judicious knowledge

of how it feels at both ends of the rod, by flogging and being

flogged, far deeper pains may be forefended. Insulting defiance,

deliberative disobedience, ostentatious carelessness and bravado, are

diseases of the will, and, in very rare cases of Promethean obstinacy,

the severe process of breaking the will is needful, just as in surgery

it is occasionally needful to rebreak a limb wrongly set, or deformed,

to set it over better. It is a cruel process, but a crampy will in

childhood means moral traumatism of some sort in the adult. Few

parents have the nerve to do this, or the insight to see just when it

is needed. It is, as some one has said, like knocking a man down to

save him from stepping off a precipice. Even the worst punishments are

but very faint types of what nature has in store in later life for

some forms of perversity of will, and are better than sarcasm,

ridicule, or tasks, as penalties. The strength of obstinacy is

admirable, and every one ought to have his own will; but a false

direction, though almost always the result of faulty previous training

when the soul more fluid and mobile, is all the more fatal. While so

few intelligent parents are able to refrain from the self-indulgence

of too much rewarding or giving, even though it injures the child, it

is perhaps too much to expect the hardihood which can be justly cold

to the caresses of a child who seeks, by displaying all its stock of

goodness and arts of endearment, to buy back good-will after

punishment has been deserved. If we wait too long, and punish in cold

blood, a young child may hate us; while, if we punish on the instant,

and with passion, a little of which is always salutary, on the

principle, _ohne Affekt kein Effekt_, [Without passion, no effect] an

older child may fail of the natural reactions of conscience, which

should always be secured. The maxim, _summum jus summa injuria_, [The

rigor of the law may be the greatest wrong] we are often told, is

peculiarly true in school, and so it is; but to forego all punishment

is no less injustice to the average child, for it is to abandon one of

the most effective means of will-culture. We never punish but a part,

as it were, of the child's nature; he has lied, but is not therefore a

liar, and we deal only with the specific act, and must love all the

rest of him.

And yet, after all, indiscriminate flogging is so bad, and the average

teacher is so inadequate to that hardest and most tactful of all his

varied duties, viz., selecting the right outcrop of the right fault of

the right child at the right time and place, mood, etc., for best

effect, that the bold statement of such principles as above is perhaps

not entirely without practical danger, especially in two cases which

Madame Necker and Sigismund have pointed out, and in several cases of

which the present writer has notes. First, an habitually good child

sometimes has a saturnalia of defiance and disobedience; a series of

insubordinate acts are suddenly committed which really mark the first

sudden epochful and belated birth of the instinct of independence and

self-regulation, on which his future manliness will depend. He is

quite irresponsible, the acts are never repeated, and very lenient

treatment causes him, after the conflict of tumultuous feelings has

expanded his soul, to react healthfully into habitual docility again,

if some small field for independent action be at once opened him. The

other case is that of _ennui_, of which children suffer such nameless

qualms. When I should open half a dozen books, start for a walk, and

then turn back, wander about in mind or body, seeking but not finding

content in anything, a child in my mood will wish for a toy, an

amusement, food, a rare indulgence, only to neglect or even reject it

petulantly when granted. These flitting "will-spectres" are physical,

are a mild form of the many fatal dangers of fatigue; and punishment

is the worst of treatment. Rest or diversion is the only cure, and the

teacher's mind must be fruitful of purposes to that end. Perhaps a

third case for palliative treatment is, those lies which attend the

first sense of badness. The desire to conceal it occasionally

accompanies the nascent effort to reform and make the lie true. These

cases are probably rare, while the temptation to lie is far greater

for one who does ill than for one who does well, for fear is the chief

motive, and a successful lie which concealed would weaken the desire

to cure a fault.

We have thus far spoken of obedience, and come now to the later

necessity of self-guidance, which, if obedience has wrought its

perfect work, will be natural and inevitable. It is very hard to

combine reason and coercion, yet it is needful that children think

themselves free long before we cease to determine them. As we slowly

cease to prescribe and begin to inspire, a very few well-chosen

mottoes, proverbs, maxims, should be taught very simply, so that they

will sink deep. Education has been defined as working against the

chance influences of life, and it is certain that without some

precepts and rules the will will not exert itself. If reasons are

given, and energy is much absorbed in understanding, the child will

assent but will not do. If the mind is not strong, many wide ideas are

very dangerous. Strong wills are not fond of arguments, and if a young

person falls to talking or thinking beyond his experience, subjective

or objective, both conduct and thought are soon confused by chaotic

and incongruous opinions and beliefs; and false expectations, which

are the very seducers of the will, arise. There can be little

will-training by words, and the understanding can not realize the

ideals of the will. All great things are dangerous, as Plato said, and

the truth itself is not only false but actually immoral to unexpanded

minds. Will-culture is intensive, not extensive, and the writer knows

a case in which even a vacation ramble with a moralizing fabulist has

undermined the work of years. Our precepts must be made very familiar,

copiously illustrated, well wrought together by habit and attentive

thought, and above all clear cut, that the pain of violating them may

be sharp and poignant. Vague and too general precepts beyond the

horizon of the child's real experience do not haunt him if they are

outraged. Now the child must obey these, and will, if he has learned

to obey well the command of others.

One of the best sureties that he will do so is muscle-culture, for if

the latter are weaker than the nerves and brain, the gap between

knowing and doing appears and the will stagnates. Gutsmuths, the

father of gymnastics in Germany before Jahn, used to warn men not to

fancy that the few tiny muscles that moved the pen or tongue had power

to elevate men. They might titillate the soul with words and ideas;

but rigorous, symmetrical muscle-culture alone, he and his Turner

societies believed, could regenerate the Fatherland, for it was one

thing to paint the conflict of life, and quite another to bear arms in

it. They said, "The weaker the body the more it commands; the stronger

it is the more it obeys."