of a private school for girls has to live. If she have no one dependent
upon her, so as to make the money-success of her enterprise a matter of
life or death, even in that case she will need all the persistence of
Grant and all the dash and courage of Sherman to carry her for years
along the paths which she is under bonds to her profession to follow,
and to be true to herself and to justice. Personal influence must have
no power to make her think of surrendering a principle; failure arising
from causes entirely beyond her control to carry out her plans for the
whole school, or for individuals, must not avail to weaken her courage;
she must learn to live above immediate results and in the region of
purposes. If she be not too much hampered by pecuniary needs for herself
or for those dearer, she may carry out her ideal, and do really good and
lasting work to a limited extent. If, however, she be so hampered, we
should blame not her so much as the unthinking demand of the public which
has forced her to surrender, as she often does, though at the cost of
some of her own self-respect. If the object of a school be simply to make
money, then, of course, it falls under the head of business enterprises,
and anything short of dishonesty is allowable. If the school is to be
kept up, pupils must be found for it; and it is so easy to agree to do
this or that thing to secure two or three pupils when the last year’s
accounts showed a deficit! It is only to throw a handful of incense
into the flame perpetually burning on the altar of “society.” And yet
this cannot be done. To hold a school up to the highest standard of
excellence, and this by unceasing vigilance, is one thing; to manage it
so as to make the most money and to gain the most friends, is another.
The teacher who tries to do both will probably not succeed in the first.
The aim must be single, and the purpose unfaltering, the courage lofty,
and there must be no looking for results; they are in safe hands, and do
not belong to the worker.
As to the studies which should hold the foremost place in a school for
girls, it may be said that they should not be mathematics, the training
power of which lies along a very narrow track. It is hardly worth while
to force very much work here if the girl be not inclined to it, this
because it is wasted labor, not simply because she does not like the
subject. I believe, although there are minds that seem to lack entirely
the mathematical sense, that in most of the cases where there exists a
thorough dislike of arithmetic, it is simply because of poor teaching at
the beginning. In some of these cases, if the pupil be not too old, the
evil may be remedied; but if she is, we may often flank the trouble by
algebra under good teaching; and this is a far better way than keeping
her on arithmetic when she is really too old to be studying it. In
mathematics, perhaps, more than in any other branch, we too seldom have
children intrusted to us till they have been already spoiled in the
hands of anxious parents who are not teachers, or of ignorant nursery
governesses. In fact, in private schools in America too often we get no
chance at the girl’s mind till it is already half spoiled; and then,
after we have done all we can to remedy the trouble, and are just getting
her where she can do something, she is taken away from us to go into
society. Our work is thus cut at both ends, and it is not our fault, but
our misfortune, that we do so little.
There exists of late years a widely spread impression that natural
science should be the main object of study. It must not be forgotten,
however, that science is not a mere collection of facts, but a system of
laws deduced according to some principle of wise selection from them,
and all facts are not of the same value. There would be no object,
scientifically speaking, in measuring the length and width of rose-petals
and carefully noting the same in neat little books. The lessons given
in many schools under the head of natural science are not lessons in
science at all. The child’s mind is not up to the level of scientific
teaching, and all that it can do in the line of nature is to collect or
to learn facts, which, because it has no means of classification, soon
drop out of the memory. Fortunate is it that they do so; it is difficult
to imagine where we should get sensible women enough to run the world for
the next generation if God had not mercifully given to children the power
of forgetting. The main thing to be gained by lessons in natural science
is a feeling of reverent wonder for the Creator. The moral lessons which
may be thrown in as one traces His ways of working in mineral, plant, and
animal, such as economy, foresight, care, adaptation of means to ends,
and order, are of great value; in fact, this is perhaps the best chance
that we have for moral teaching. But the disciplinary value of these
studies for young children is greatly exaggerated; and we must never
forget that with children it is the disciplinary value of a study that
we, as teachers, have first to consider. The main part of education comes
after the school days are over. If the school succeed in putting the girl
in possession of herself, so that she may be able to use her faculties
intelligently for her future growth, if it open to her paths of rest and
refuge from the too pressing care, or perhaps the otherwise overpowering
sorrow which may come to her, it has done its work. As an English
educational writer asks, is the value of natural science teaching
practical, cultural, or disciplinary? Questions such as this form a large
and, I might almost say, the chief part of the teacher’s work, though the
parent who wants more time given to natural science has probably not been
aware of their existence, and yet sets her opinion over against yours
with an amusing assumption that it is of equal weight. I doubt whether in
any other profession this is so much the case.
When we come to language in all its varied manifestations, we have
reached a subject which affords unlimited scope for disciplinary work,
while at the same time it opens fields of pleasure and profit that are
practically infinite. It is often said with great unction that to study
natural science is to become acquainted with the works of God, while to
study language is to spend our time over the works of man. But it is
hard to see why the nest of the bird and the cell of the bee are more
divine, or can do more good to the mind, than the wonderful vessel of
language which man has shaped and fashioned to save and bear down the
stream of time for the advantage of those who are to come all that he has
done and thought, “that nothing be lost.” In language we have, as has
been said, “a condensed generalization of human experience.” What could
be a more valuable tool for us? It is foolishness to compare words and
things to the intended disadvantage of the former. Words _are_ things,
and of all the inventions which man has painfully thought out, they
are the most important things. To language, then, we should assign the
first and the largest part in the school course, not only because of its
unequalled disciplinary power, but because of the fields of pleasure and
of further discipline which it opens up. As to which language we should
take first, after the vernacular has been in some measure acquired,
for disciplinary purposes, “that would be most successful which is in
its idiom most remote from the reader’s own, and in its literature
most rich and varied.” This is, of course, the Latin,[5] which, in the
hands of a skilful teacher, will do more in the way of discipline and
of development, even for little girls of nine or ten, than any other
subject, while at the same time it affords so much solid enjoyment that
under such circumstances the Latin lesson is the last one which they
would miss, and that for which they will beg to be allowed to come to
school, be the weather never so stormy. With a year’s Latin taught in
this way, all paths are open. French builds itself on it, and comparisons
between the idioms of the three languages offer unlimited advantages for
all sorts of perceptions, and for the training of the growing judgment.
When by-and-by German is added, these opportunities are still more
enlarged. But by that time the girl is reading with facility difficult
French constructions, and her English is so well in hand that she may
with advantage be allowed to drop her Latin (if, indeed, she do not beg
to be allowed to continue it for her own pleasure). When such a result
is reached, we may feel measurably satisfied. There is no more valuable
training than translation, by which I do not mean substituting one word
for another, but the “reducing of the actual to fluidity by breaking up
its literal sequence,” and then crystallizing it again in another idiom.
There is no school task more valuable in inducing the state of mind which
suspends the judgment, waiting till all the circumstances which can by
any possibility bear upon its conclusion have been fairly recognized and
weighed—a habit of mind which is one of the highest results of education.
It is impossible here to do more than to hint at the possibilities of the
different lines of study in æsthetics, history, and literature. But I
should say all in one word in saying that the main object of all teaching
in a private school for girls should be disciplinary, and that the
proportion in which different studies are able to serve this end should
decide the relative amount of time given to them. The order in which they
should be taken up must be decided not only by their relative dependence,
but by the mental readiness of the pupil. To decide this is the function
of the teacher, and her diagnosis must shape the prescription. There is,
however, one more consideration of prime importance—the mental advance
should be always along the whole line at once. I mean by this that
there should never be a time in the girl’s whole school course when she
is not employed at the same time in all the different departments of
human acquisition, if her culture is to be in any degree worthy of the
name. She should not be allowed to spend much time on arithmetic and
almost none on language; neither should she study even language to the
exclusion of history or natural science. Every branch of human knowledge
should supplement, confirm, and support the others. That is a poor school
where the pupil does not find that nothing can exist apart from other
things, and where, through the mutual understanding and constant harmony
of the teachers, she does not find the same persistent thoughts coming up
in all the lessons. In no other way can her work be rendered a whole to
her, and if it be not so, it will be of little use, as it will certainly
give her no pleasure. When we hear the girls in recess discussing some
point in a lesson instead of dress and the theatre celebrities, we know
that the first step has been gained—that of creating interest and of
making knowledge for itself an object of desire. Till this has been done,
nothing has been done.
The work of the school should be by recitations, and not by lectures;
and a recitation does not consist in asking questions and receiving
answers which have been learned beforehand, as many seem to think. In
order to show what it really is in the mind and purpose of the modern
teacher, I may quote from an article in a _Journal of Education_. It
comes, as most of the new life in the profession does come, from the
West—from S. S. Park, of St. Cloud, Minnesota. “We may roughly define the
act of reciting as that mode of the pupil’s thinking which is under the
systematic and continuous direction of the teacher’s superior insight
and skill. The teacher carries on a train of thought by means of which
she applies means to stimulate the pupil to act this way or that, as she
may propose. The pupil exercises her power of thought under the guidance
of the teacher. The function of the teacher is intellectual stimulation
and direction; that of the pupil is free exercise of her powers,
receiving aid only when she cannot go forward by herself. The subject is
a series of symbols and ideas independent of teacher and pupil, which
both translate into intelligent insight into some phase of life and its
conditions and results. The teacher rethinks her own thinking in the
light of the expression her pupil gives to the idea she is seeking to
master. Double consciousness furnishes the intelligent condition for
action upon the pupil. Second, the teaching act consists in directing the
pupil’s attention so that she recombines ideas already in her thought,
and thus suggests new conceptions.” In other words, the object of a
recitation is not so much to find out what the girl knows as to make her
think, and lead her into right ways of thinking, and in every recitation
the teacher should always be clear in her own mind as to just what she
wants to accomplish in that particular hour, and aim straight for it
every minute—as Goethe says, “directly if in favorable circumstances, but
if in unfavorable by circuitous paths, in which, however, we are always
approaching the direct path.” It will be noticed that, as I have said
before, the teacher’s mind must always dominate, and also that there can
be no recitation, properly so called, which does not essentially consist
in the play of thought continually going on between teacher and taught.
It is this which gives charm to the work, and lends to it fascinating
interest, no matter how often one may teach a subject; for though the
subject may remain somewhat the same, no one of the other two factors can
be the same at any two times. The combinations are infinite.
Much has been said lately of the necessity of thoroughness in girls’
schools. In the abstract meaning of the word there can be no such thing
as thoroughness with a child; her knowledge, from the very nature of
the case, must be fragmentary, and therefore lacking in thoroughness.
If her teaching is to consist, as in old-time schools, of pages of
the dictionary learned by heart, or simply of arithmetical rules and
algebraic formulæ, she might perhaps be thorough in those, but no
knowledge can be considered “thorough” in the proper sense which is not
a part of a whole. It is in the gradual approximation to some degree
of wholeness that the interest of the school-days—when they have any
interest—must consist, and we shall wander widely from the path of any
reasonable thoroughness by narrowing the number of studies to two or
three, and holding the girl strictly to these for a year. It is more
our duty to open various paths, the more the better. The situation of a
place can be determined only when we have its latitude as well as its
longitude; to determine the location of so simple a thing as a point we
must have at least two lines; and in the domain of live knowledge a fact
is securely grasped by the mind only when it lies where many lines meet.
The woman teacher never forgets the possible necessity for the future
woman and the head of a family to have some place of refuge to which
she can escape out of the wearying and pulverizing details scarcely to
be avoided by her, if the home is to be comfortable for others, and she
seeks to open all the paths of interest possible. She is more concerned
to do this and to lay foundations for future work than to build very high
for the present. Indeed it is not for the present that she works at all.
All teaching in the modern school-room must be comparative, and it
cannot be so if we have nothing to compare. The unity of the school must
never be destroyed by dividing it into departments, for in so doing we
sacrifice the opportunity for comparison in a higher sense. And always it
is the class that must be looked out for more than the individual, always
the whole school more than the class. It is only in this way that the
individual can be cared for. Human society must be content to work on the
individual not immediately but mediately, and the teacher is not freed
from this necessity in the small society to which she must be a minor
providence.
I can do no more here than to point out some of the conditions of the
girls’ private school in our large cities, and briefly to hint at its
possibilities. It must always hold fast to the principle that the
development of moral character is its highest, and indeed we might
say its only aim. But to secure this, it must always cultivate inner
freedom—“the agreement of the will with its own law-giving judgment.” The
school which puts such a motived force into the characters of its girls
that they cannot lose it in all their after lives—the school, the memory
of which they can never escape, and whose stamp they can never efface,
whose aid is sure to come up strongest whenever need is sorest—that
school, the thought of which is always followed by “a great wave of
gratitude and love,” is the only one that has done its work.
1892.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] William F. Denning, F.R.A.S., in _Telescopic Work for Starlight
Evenings_.
[5] “Both Latin and German are at a stage in which structure is more
exposed to view than it is in the maturer languages of Greek and
French.”—_Earle’s English Prose, p. 508._
THE END.