Chapter V: Part 5

In a school thus managed, disorder becomes impossible, and the problem of government an insignificant factor. For, in the first place, there is no time for the wandering of attention, which gives room for disorder; and, in the second place, the whole spirit of the united school is against it. Governing does not consist in allowing disorder to happen, and then punishing it. It consists in seeing every smallest wandering of attention at its very beginning, and so preventing disorder. To do this the teacher must be conscious of every pupil at every second. Nothing is easier than this when one can do it. The experienced teacher seems to have acquired a kind of sixth sense, by which she knows at once when she has lost the attention of any one of twenty pupils whose minds should be on the same subject. She feels that in that particular part of the room the electric current is not running; that is all there is of it. To a certain degree, every one who addresses an audience has this consciousness, feels the connection between himself and his hearers as a mass, and is inspired or deadened by its condition; but the teacher must feel it with every individual mind of the class, and there is no more vital contact than that of teacher and pupil. Especially is the matter of order and government important in girls’ schools, where the popular mind thinks it to be of small consequence. But in this matter, as well as in that of learning, while the mind of the guide must retain continually a strong dominating influence, the governing force must come from the little girl herself, and hence to arouse and cultivate the power of self-control must be the first aim in every regulation of the whole school. It is not so much knowledge as power that the growing girl and the mature woman need, and that is what the school must, above all, give her, or fail lamentably of its mission. There can be no greater reward for a teacher than to have one of her girls, grown to womanhood, come to her and say: “I have been through such or such a hard experience, and I know that if it had not been for the self-control which I learned in this school, I should have failed; but I thought of the school and of you, and I went through it. I had to come and tell you so.” The school to which such testimony can be brought is a success, and has no need of long rows of percentages of ninety-nine against the names of its graduates in competitive examinations. But such testimony can be won only through the eternal vigilance of its principal in every smallest detail of its management. The unthinking will call her a martinet, and the mothers who are tender of their children will think her severe. But the tenderness which seeks to arm the woman for the battle of life, and to give her adequate views of her responsibility, is perhaps not unworthy of its name, and

“need not fear the spight
Of grudging foes, ne favor ask of friends,
But in the strength of its own constant might,
Neither to one itself nor other bends.”

As to bad schools—schools that in stretching after the mint and anise and cumin lose all that might have given success—they are many. It seems sometimes that there is no profession in which there is so much humbug as in that of education; and the utter inability of the parent to determine what kind of a school it is into which he decides to put his little girl has, to those who stand behind the scenes, very much of the pitiful. When, however, we think of one or two other professions, we doubt, and are silent. One is reminded of the nurse-maid who never stood in need of a thermometer for the water for the baby’s bath, because if the baby came out red, she knew it had been too hot, and if it came out blue, she knew it had been too cold. Too many a father finds, when it is too late, that he made a mistake in the school to which he trusted the training of his little girl. But how could he have known before? There was much shrewdness in the employer who, quite unmindful of the applicant’s having afterwards been graduated from Yale, engaged him at once as soon as he knew that he had been expelled from a certain university. For a girl to have been at some schools for any length of time is a certificate of frivolity, lack of consistent purpose and thoroughness, and, what is of far more consequence, of any real reverence for truth or her own womanhood.

Dr. Fitch says, “Human beings, whether male or female, come into the world not only ‘to get a living,’ but to live; and the life they live depends largely on what they know and care about, upon the breadth of their intellectual sympathy, upon their love of truth, upon their power of influencing and inspiring other minds;” and “even if the knowledge or power may seem to have no bearing at all upon the special business or definite duties of a woman, yet if it be felt by its possessor to make life more full, more varied, and more interesting and better worth living, no other justification is needed for placing the largest opportunities within her reach.” Two points in these words deserve special notice—the first, that it is the satisfaction of the woman herself in the knowledge acquired, and not the opinion of the outside world, which should decide what she should study; and the second, the stress which Dr. Fitch lays upon the desirability of rendering her life more varied than it has been in the past. For these have a bearing on the arrangement of the school studies for the little girl, though they are often entirely left out of account by those who are ready to tell the teacher what should be done in school. While it is true that knowledge should be varied—a little in many directions is far better, perhaps, than a great deal in only one—it still must be insisted on that the main object of the school is not to convey information, but, if the term may be used without offence, to make the girl “level-headed,” so that she shall have possession of herself, and be able to meet any demands, no matter how unexpected, which may front her in the years to come. Professor James says, and truly, “To give power to suspend belief in presence of an emotionally exciting idea is the highest result of education.” But Professor William G. Hale had said this before him, and not only theoretically, but practically, in every Freshman recitation in his class-room at Cornell University, for the power to suspend belief is the very essence of all the teaching to translate. There could be no more apt illustration of the way in which character is affected for better or worse by intellectual teaching—which at first sight would seem to have no connection with morals—than the way in which those students are taught to suspend their judgment over an ablative or genitive till the rest of the sentence has shown which ablative or genitive it really is. No woman who has been taught after this model will be very likely in difficult circumstances to make up her mind as to a course of action till she has carefully taken note of all the elements which should go to form a decision. And if this were the characteristic of American women, how it would transform American homes!

The girls who go to private schools are, as a rule, from families of at least moderate wealth. But in our fluctuating country this is no proof that they will go through their lives without feeling the necessity of doing something at some time for their own support or the support of others. What that will be we cannot tell, for the march of invention is so swift that if we should prepare the girl for any one industry, she might find herself unable to make her living out of it when the need should come. She will probably be, we may say, a wife and a mother. But if we assume this, we still do not know how to fit her for the duties of those positions in a definite way. The best thing still is to make the most of a woman we can out of her, and then to trust the disciplined woman we have fashioned to answer for herself the demands to come to her in the misty future, which she will see, and which she can judge, but which we shall not see and which no man can foretell. The province of education is to lift the individual out of her naturalness, and not to allow her to remain in it. All education is this. The child would prefer to take her food in her fingers, for it is natural to her to do so; but education takes her immediately in hand, and makes her eat in the way not of nature, but of civilization. There is no natural way of education; it is all completely unnatural, and must be so. The natural child protests against discipline of whatever kind, and seeks to follow her cravings; but out of this fools’ paradise—which would be no paradise at all, as her teacher knows—she must be driven, and out of it she must be kept, though it be with a flaming sword. It has been said that the natural man washes up on the shores of knowledge as the shipwrecked Irishman on the desert island, exclaiming: “Is any government established in this country? If so, I’m agin it!” This not too strongly illustrates the opposition made by the natural mind to the training necessary for its attainment of the stature which rightfully belongs to it as heir of all the ages. If the home do its work well, the task of the teacher and the school is comparatively easy; but there are too many American families, as every teacher knows, where this work has not been done, and where, consequently, much effort has to be spent in supplementing the lack of skill or the foolish indulgence of the mother. When a little six-year-old girl on her first day at school tries to strike her teacher over the head with her heavy slate because she is told to do some little thing, we may not unreasonably assume that that home has failed of its purpose, if indeed it ever had any.

The main object of the school may be said to be to create character, and for this end it should seize upon every opportunity of strengthening the will and of making it controlled and consecrated. There is no lesson and no regulation which may not be consciously used for this; and when everything is used for this purpose, everything will fall into its proper place, and the school will be what it should be. The soul, which is the person, is not divisible; we cannot work on the intellect without affecting the play of the feelings; nor can there be in the life of man or woman any great moral lapse without the intellect’s suffering. Wherever God’s distinctions are blurred in any one of the so-called faculties of the soul, the power of distinction is blurred in all. The soul is one, and any school will be a failure, no matter how much money it may make, where this truth does not stand at the foundation of every detail of its work. Two hundred years ago Mary Astell wrote, as she was pleading for a wider education for her countrywomen, “The great secret of education lies in affecting the soul with a lively sense of what is truly its perfection, and exerting the most ardent desires after it.” We can find no wiser word in all the pedagogical societies of to-day. I quote also, as bearing on the same point, from an article by the Rev. L. A. Griffin in the _Unitarian Review_: “The teacher reflects not ‘What shall I have when I am forgotten?’ but ‘_What shall I be when I forget?_ When all I know has vanished, leaving only its effect on character, _what shall I have_?’ Shall the inner man recall his aliment any more than the outer? In both alike it passes away, for its function is fulfilled; it was not to be stored, but assimilated. Men will hereafter boast of what they knew no more than of what they ate. There is naught we know now that we may need to know hereafter, but what we _are_ now, in every worthy quality of the spirit, that we must needs be, so long as it pleases God to continue us in life.” It might be well for teachers to ponder these things in their hearts.

The teachers who attain to and hold this doctrine firmly, carrying it out in every smallest detail of their daily work, constitute the profession, and they need no diploma from any school of pedagogy. The rest belong more or less to a trade-union, which seasons its talk with the usual amount of cant. Next to religious cant, there is nothing so disgusting as educational cant. The members of the profession are all artists, and they live in regions and partake of divine pleasures of which the world knows not. In the great future professional _Verein_, if this ever exist, they will associate with Theodore Thomas, whose whole career, as George William Curtis says, has been a campaign of education, “because of its dignity, its absolute fidelity to a high ideal, and its total freedom from charlatanry of every kind.” But such company as this is to be won only by a very high quality of courage and persistence. Of the forces at work tending in the other direction, we may know more clearly when we come to consider some of the conditions under which the teacher of the private school for girls must work in any American city.

Professional teachers know that they cannot test the worth of their effect on their pupils by abstract arithmetical signs. They know that the girl is not an arithmetical problem, but a living soul, and they are ever aiming at moral and educational influences, to which marks and daily percentages are only impediments. Sometimes they labor for these ends under fetters which make of their most worthy efforts only continual failures. I know of two strong women at this moment who are working under protest as heads of large schools, because they cannot get authority from the trustees of the schools to abolish the use of what one of them wittily calls “weak stimulants” to induce her girls to study. She sees the evil effect of the marks, prizes, and rewards which are daily and yearly given, and knows that she is gaining only a factitious success while she is using them. Again and again she has begged to be allowed to abolish the whole old system, and to show what she could do, both intellectually and morally, if she could bring to bear only the real stimulant of interest in work for the work’s sake. She has represented the evil effects, which she cannot avoid seeing, on the characters of the girls; but her protest has been so far of no use, and she does the best she can, knowing that the whole tendency is in the wrong direction, but unable to straighten it. The other in the same situation came to me a few years ago with the question how, since she was not allowed to do the educationally right thing, she was to diminish as far as possible the evil effect of the wrong order. After a long conversation, in which she showed by her questions that she knew exactly what she wanted to get at, she said, with a deep sigh, “I see; it is of no use to try anything unless you can make the thing right from the bottom up.” She had got a new insight into the way in which a school might be founded so on principle that “the stout-hearted trunk below and the firm-set roots” would take care of the branches and the twigs, out to the farthest little tips, but it grew for her in a land that was very far off.

I am sure that I utter the simple truth when I say that if the private schools for girls are failing to-day, they are failing not primarily because of the low aims or the lack of insight of the women who stand at their heads. I know, and pretty well, a great many principals of girls’ schools, and I know that in a large majority of cases they want and try to do better things for their girls than the mothers will let them do. They deserve that some one who knows should make widely public this testimony to their character and their aspirations, as well as to the discouragement under which they are forced to do their daily work. An Englishwoman said lately, in the London _Journal of Education_, with a keenness of insight for which every teacher will respect her: “In England the choice of schools is almost entirely in the hands of the parents; but here [in America] it is very frequently entirely left to the children, and as at the end of every school year pupils are free to leave without notice, the principal is obliged to depend for her school connection on the whims and caprices of the girls. This necessitates a constant attention to their comfort and happiness, which, though beneficial in many respects, is apt to allow the consideration of temporary ease to overrule that of the girl’s highest good.” The truth is that there are to-day in every American city a large number of highly educated and cultivated women of the noblest character and aims who are too often literally at the mercy of the whims and caprices of a lot of ignorant, often under-bred, and petted little girls.

The conditions under which the girls’ private school must exist remain to be more fully spoken of. The average mother is most especially anxious that her little girl shall not suffer from the home treatment which she feels was a mistake in her own case; but instead of considering from any philosophical point of view the treatment which is needed, taking into account the different nature of the child, the different circumstances, and the different influences which are around her, and then making and working upon a reasonable plan, she resolves to do only the diametrical opposite of that which was done with herself. As the little girl grows up, she does the same with her own children, and thus there results in one family a pulse of sternness and indulgence which bids fair to perpetuate itself, not in favor of advancement, unless there can be secured for the girls of this generation what I have already referred to as being the chief end of all education—an ability to poise the judgment in the presence of emotionally exciting causes. If we can secure this, we have secured potentially everything. It must be noticed, however, that this assumes the existence of the cultivation of something that can be called judgment—a thing hardly to be tested by the percentages which so many schools produce as evidence that they have done the work rightfully belonging to them.

Parents may be roughly divided into two classes—those, to use a proverbial expression, to whom all their own geese are swans; and those who are persuaded that their swans are geese; there is a middle class, but it is so very small that it may almost be disregarded in a description. Strange to say, the second class is quite as large as the first. Then, again, with regard to confidence in their own judgment, they may be divided also into two classes—those who desire no suggestions from the teacher, and become very angry if they are offered; and those who will not be satisfied till she tells them whether they shall put corned-beef, tongue, or ham into the sandwiches which the child is to bring for luncheon if they should decide to send her to that school. Between the danger of offending if we suggest anything, and that of offending if we do not at once answer categorically any question which may be sprung upon us, the problem of first conversations with parents presents considerable difficulty.

The teacher’s position in the educational world is that of the physician, and not that of the trained nurse; this is a point which is not generally understood, and one that needs to be insisted on. It is as respectable to be a nurse as to be a doctor, but the fact remains that if you are competent to be the latter, you do not consent to be put by the relations of the patient into the place of the former. What physician would accept a case if the father and mother of the little patient, to say nothing of the aunts and uncles and grandmothers, were to prescribe the medicines, and he were expected only to give them? And yet this is exactly what parents too often propose to do in the case of the education of their girls. There is no fancy in this statement. I have known of a father who took five children at once out of a school, though he had engaged places for them months before, because the teacher arranged to change one study for one of the five; the girl was gaining nothing in the study which was to be dropped, and the one proposed was in the same line, and yet, by its difference and novelty, might be hoped to accomplish that which the other had failed to do. That was the judgment of the teacher, and she had known the girl for years and understood her character, as she did that of every other girl in her school. She declined to be put in the position of a nurse, and to teach the child only what the parent prescribed. It was a question of principle, and of respect for the profession. The five sisters left the school. The father was a physician. This story could be paralleled over and over again from the remembrance of every professional teacher.

One often regrets that she cannot, at least for a time, live in a country where the question of precedence is fixed, and sometimes looks back longingly to the caste system in India. It is easy to remember the time when many a New England village, at least, had circles of what was really “the best society,” into which no amount of wealth could give entrance. We all know that there was such a time even in New York, but that time is long gone by; it takes people of steady heads to live there now and not get drawn into the great currents of society which swirl around them, not to desire to make as much show as their neighbors, not to have all simple and sweet home life spoiled by the outside influences. It is doubly hard if one has lately come into possession of money, and sees the whole city filled with all sorts of indulgences and show which his money can purchase. So it often happens that a family which, if it had lived in some country place, would have been a delight to see, gets carried off its feet by the mad rush of the currents around it, fascinated by the glitter, and loses all its own character by becoming one more of the struggling drops which are trying to overtop each other in the social ocean. Now the private schools for girls, as has been said before, are composed almost entirely of daughters of wealthy families, and the parents are subject to all these influences.

It is a hard thing to utter, and yet it is the truth, that the mothers do not really mean what they say when they tell you that what they ardently desire is the best education possible for their girls. They may think so, but what they really want for the little girl is that she shall grow up into what an Englishwoman says “we expect American girls to be—bright, witty, apparently intelligent, and possessed of sufficient knowledge to conceal an ignorance of which they may or may not be conscious.” The President of Wellesley College once showed a foreign gentleman who was supposed to have a great interest in education, over the buildings. He listened to the work of the eager students, saw all the beautiful things which had been provided, and as he said farewell at the door, remarked, with great interest, “This is all very fine, but may I venture to ask, how does it affect their chances?” The story carries its own suggestion. It is really true that what the mother is in many cases thinking of, when she selects a school for her little girl, is not whether the teaching is what it ought to be, but how association with the girls already members of the school in question will “affect her chances.” To a real teacher the tardily acquired knowledge that the school to which she has given her life and all her power is regarded simply as a social “Exchange,” only as a means by which some young woman may press her way into a certain “set,” comes as an insult. If that is what the school is for, were it not better to do any other work than this? Pearls are very beautiful things, and it takes much deep-sea diving where the billows go over one’s head to gain them. She may perhaps find some bitter consolation for her pain by recognizing the fact that people do not hesitate to use the churches of the city for the same purpose, but her work drags heavily after the discovery has been made.

The girls that attend private schools—mostly from the moneyed class—have scarcely any remembrance of nursery life, and of simple games and pleasures. From their earliest years they have been satiated with all sorts of ingenious toys, fit things for adults, but not for children. Many of them have spent every summer of their lives in large hotels, amusing the loungers on the piazzas with their speeches and their dresses; they have been carefully shielded from pain and trial of any kind. Effort has been a stranger to them. What wonder that it is difficult to lead them to make real and persistent effort on their school tasks! What wonder that they balk at any honest and unsparing work! Many of them are under the spell of hereditary tendencies handed down from ancestors of varied nationality, who earned their bread by the sweat of their brows and the skill of their hands, while their children and grandchildren have nothing to do. Among no children, perhaps, is the tendency to mental mechanism so strong as among the Americans. It is not, perhaps, entirely the fault of the teachers that this tendency has had its course and been glorified in our schools. But it is the teacher’s great duty to fight it, if she would produce in never so small a degree out of these languid, amusement-desiring minds anything which may be fit to stand the storm and strain of life—to

“keep at bay
The changeful April sky of chance
And the strong tide of circumstance.”

Few people realize in the least degree the change in the popular philosophy which, in this country especially, has transformed the whole aspect of teaching within forty years. Miss Beale, the well-known principal of the college for girls at Cheltenham, England, says: “The _tabula rasa_ theory of Locke, the impressionist, has given way to the mixed idealism of Kant, who emphasizes the constructive power of the mind; and for passive creations we have substituted the theory of active development. Once we thought rather of the child as acted upon; now we think much more of making _her_ active, of invigorating, of showing her how to learn.” It is probable that not many have realized how all-powerful has been this influence in every smallest school-room in the land. There could be no more beautiful and striking example of the secondary nature of the work of education, and none more wonderful in showing the fruitful power of really great thoughts—how they filter down and penetrate the strata of thought and life which would seem farthest removed from them. The teacher of children now does not keep in mind the subject she is teaching so much as the mind of the child; that it is which she is working on, and the studies are only the tools that are used; it is the live mind of the child that she is watching, and by its reactions she directs her labor. The parent should decide upon the school to which the little girl is to go by the best light he has, and when the decision is made, he should leave the child to the teacher, in the same way as he would leave the arrangement of the pipes in his house to the best plumber he knows. If the teacher be not better fitted to direct the education of the child than is the parent, then she is not a fit person to be at the head of the school, or, indeed, to teach at all.

In addition to all these conditions under which, at least in America, the school has to work, there must not be forgotten the present excited state of the public mind with regard to education. This produces, to supply a constantly increasing demand for better results, a vast number of new “systems” and “crazes,” towards which the teacher is pushed, if she have not strength enough to keep steady in her course. The schools do not depend so much as of old on the services of teachers or lecturers who come in only for special hours, and who therefore cannot work into the general effect of the whole school, and this is well. But, on the other hand, we have all sorts of so-called new ways presented. I think if Pestalozzi and Froebel were now living, they would ask for new names, so weary would they be of having all sorts of crude and absurd labor ascribed to them, though the spirit in which they worked is in the schools—especially the girls’ schools—to-day everywhere. But to do just what they did in other countries, circumstances, and times, is to destroy that spirit. Then we have those who claim a great discovery in the “natural method” of teaching, and who forget that the natural order of acquisition must always differ widely from the logical order of exposition. In the study of languages these people would have us throw away all that we have already gained of facility, and reduce ourselves to a state of primitive ignorance, assuming that because a child through his poverty is obliged to learn in such a way, we with our experience and stored minds must also do so. They would have the carpenter throw away his tools and build houses with his hands, or the implements which he should be able to fashion for himself, not those which the practice of all the ages has given him as his birth-right. They forget that the child mind and that of the adult are so different as to be almost of different stuff, and insist upon teaching us as if we were children, in spite of our humble protest that we are no longer so. They remind us of the old people who used to insist upon it that we should go to bed when and because the chickens went to roost. Even in our childhood we dimly felt that the reasoning was faulty somewhere, long before we timidly ventured to suggest that we were not chickens, and also that we did not go to roost. Because a child who knew nothing had to learn English in the “natural way”—though even this assertion is not absolutely true as it stands—it does not follow that she must learn French in the same way after she has acquired some knowledge of English, and it by no means follows that any foreigner who may have immigrated is the best teacher for her. The manual-training craze is one of the latest. It is true that for a joint to fit or a seam to go into its place without a wrinkle, the maker must work with accuracy; but it is also true that she must be accurate with an example in arithmetic if she is to solve it, and there is no one of all the qualities claimed to be won for the mind by manual training which cannot also be secured without it, if the school be what it ought to be. The colleges for women were expected to raise the level of teaching in the girls’ schools, and some principals have gone so far as to say that in future they will have none but college-trained women for teachers. But it is a great disadvantage to a teacher to have been for four years entirely out of touch with children and with the regulations which, not in place in a college, are yet imperatively necessary in a school for children. And, again, the new methods of teaching penetrate the colleges slowly. The larger part of the work in them is, as it should be with comparatively mature minds, in the form of lectures, not of recitations, and generally the college graduate is entirely ignorant of what a recitation is. It takes her a long time to get out of the ways to which she has been accustomed, and to grasp the conditions under which she must labor with the mind of the child, so poor in material, and generally so wanting in anything that can be called imagination. To know about a subject, and to know about teaching it, are two entirely different things. What we do need for those intending to teach is a normal school with a course of at least a year at the top of the college course. I can imagine no more delightful work, unless it be giving a child its first lessons in language, than to have the management of such a school; but such a school, with the competent teacher as its head, lies far in the future. Towards it all the psychologists are working. In view of the great problems which teaching presents, and the great value of wide experience in it, it might be worth while for the colleges to insert a course in Humility for the last part of the Senior year, especially for the benefit of those who are proposing to teach. The profession to which Dr. Arnold belonged is not to be stormed by girls simply because they have read Latin and Greek, and the questions which waylay its every step are not to be so lightly settled.

For the girls’ school the question of health is a grave one. If the children in the average American home were properly fed, properly dressed, and properly exercised, if they had plenty of fresh air and plenty of sleep, if they were allowed to grow in quietness, with simple pleasures, and in an atmosphere undisturbed by the passions and ambitions of the grown-up world, our task would indeed be easy. If the mothers could understand that health and activity of the mind are an essential to health of the body, we should be in a sort of paradise. There is one phrase which I am sure no teacher of girls who may read these pages will be able to see without a smile. It is this: “Health is the first consideration.” It generally comes from the lips of mothers of homes where little if any reasonable thought is given to the question of health till the doctor becomes a frequent visitor, and kindly provides this formula. The teacher can do nothing with a child if she be not healthy. To her, indeed, health _is_ the first consideration, and all her efforts are towards its maintenance. But such as the mothers have made the children that they bring us to teach, we have to work with them, and to do the best we can. This is little enough in many cases.

I have noted some few of the difficult conditions under which the teacher 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.