Dame school

“ It will be time enough to talk of doing away with a portion of the girls' school year when the schools have fulfilled their high mission, when they have sent out a large body of American women prepared, not for a single profession, even the high feminine vocation of pedagogy, but equipped for her highest, most general and congenial functions as the source and centre of the home. ”

“ For the High Schools are training more and more of the most influential class among the women of England, as the public schools are training the men, and the influence of women must of necessity be of the first importance; for it is they who determine the religious training and the atmosphere of the home, and thus profoundly affect the national character. Let us all alike try to keep before ourselves from day to day and from year to year these high ideals of education which can nowhere be so well attained, both by mistresses and girls, as in a High School. ”

“ She was the foremost instigator and influence for the higher education of womanhood. In that first fifty years of her Seminary, it was estimated that more than fifteen thousand young women were enrolled, a large majority of whom became teachers and directors, who carried the influence of the school far and wide, in Europe as well as in America. ”

“ Private schools in our large cities cannot be said to overwork their pupils. Fifty years ago, when my mother was educated, far more was required of girls at school than was ever possible in my day. Thirty years ago, when my school education ended, far more was possible to me than has ever been required of my daughter. It is the uniform testimony of teachers, that girls now study less, that the hours of recitation are fewer, and that dilatoriness and absences are far more frequently excused than was once the case. ”

“ The Lady Principal, with her advanced ideas on women’s examinations, her desire to help teachers, to increase the number of the pupils, seemed to some members of the Council to be pushing the work into other fields than those for which it was intended when first the Proprietary College for Ladies was founded. ‘Local interest,’ a term not ominous of good in the ears of great educators, demanded a good day-school for the daughters of gentlemen, and nothing more. ”

“ The high-school system that has developed in England during the last quarter of a century has done much for the education of the middle classes, affording sound instruction and mental discipline for all. At the present day, poor girls, who, if they were dependent upon their personal resources, would never acquire an education, have wider facilities than were enjoyed by the women of the aristocracy a century earlier.
Of those who promoted the secondary education for girls, perhaps no name among female educators in England stands higher than that of Frances Mary Buss. ”

“ A very usual course seems to be for girls to spend their early years in a haphazard kind of way, either at home, or in not very regular attendance at an inferior school; after which they are sent for a year or two to a school or college to finish. The heads of schools complain [Pg 41] with one voice that they are called upon to ‘finish’ what has never been begun, and that to attempt to give anything like a sound education, in the short time at their disposal, is perfectly hopeless. ”

“ Its aim is to prepare women for the duties of life, whatever they may prove to be; and will it not generally be admitted that some further preparation is needed, that too much is expected from girls whose school training is over at the age of eighteen? The college training is not intended as a substitute for the education of life, but as a temporary stage. It will not be specifically directed towards changing the occupations of women, but rather towards securing that whatever they undertake shall be done wisely and well. In works of philanthropy thoughtless activity is not the most fruitful. ”

“ III SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHING The girls' secondary day schools of this country, largely built up in the first place by the individual pioneer work of broad-minded women during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, are now in most cases coming, if not under State control, at least into the sphere of State influence. These women educationists in some cases worked on old foundations, in others obtained from guilds or governors a share for girls' education of funds previously allocated to various benefactions or to the education of boys only. ”

“ There is no reason why both school and college may not fit girls for a broad and general usefulness, for "independence and self-support," and at the same time give them the training for that which, with the majority already mentioned, comes to be the great work of their lives. ”

“ That this great work should at least be well begun during the period allotted to secondary instruction, is especially necessary in the case of women, because with this first stage their education ends. I do not mean, of course, that a girl necessarily lays aside all study on leaving school, any more than a man does on taking his degree, but that the end of the school course is the same kind of educational terminus to a woman that graduation is to a man. When a girl leaves school, her strictly professional studies assume a greater prominence. ”

“ And if this is the evidence as regards the school period, during which girls are receiving more or less regular and systematic instruction, it is likely to be still more unanimous and emphatic as to the later stage, during which men are, in however antiquated and foolish a manner, as the reformers tell us, at any rate in some sort taken in hand by the universities, while women are for the most part left altogether to their own resources. ”

“ So deeply is the writer impressed with the importance of this, as a branch of female education, at school, that she would deem it far safer and wiser to omit any other, rather than this.
Another reason, for introducing such a branch of study into female schools, is, the influence it would exert, [Pg 67] in leading young ladies more correctly to estimate the importance and dignity of domestic knowledge. It is now often the case, that young ladies rather pride themselves on their ignorance of such subjects; and seem to imagine that it is vulgar and ungenteel to know how to work. ”

“ In our primary school system, the education for the one sex runs side by side with that for the other, with very slight differences. Girls are taught very nearly the same things as boys, and examined by the same Inspectors in precisely the same manner; the pupil teachers of the one sex have a nearly identical training with that of the other; and there are female Training Colleges, very closely resembling the male Training Colleges. ”

“ The first fact mentioned by the learned writer is the existence of schools, which are called "professional schools for females," into which young girls are received at twelve years of age and upwards, for the purpose of continuing their education and learning a profession. These schools have been founded by women, free-thinkers, who formally and expressly declare it to be their object to train the youth of their own sex in rationalism and infidelity. ”

“ The best class of girls from the country towns everywhere now met each other, and mingled, too, with many girls who had had the opportunities of city life. The teachers in these schools were women of high character and real refinement, and though they were not all accustomed to the usages of society, there were always some among them who were so, and who gave a certain finish to the solid work of the others. The advantages of these boarding-school girls were so far beyond those of the previous generation that the line between mothers and daughters became abnormally broad. ”

“ It follows that the curriculum for girls presents greater difficulties than the curriculum for boys, and that those ladies who are responsible for the organisation of a school for girls need to be women of great resource, great patience, and endowed with much sympathetic insight. The adolescent girl will generally do little to help her teachers in this matter. ”

“ It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition; but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously [167] behind her brother. In 1774 a few rash innovators conceived the project of an advanced school for girls; one that should approach from afar a college standard, and teach with thoroughness what it taught at all; one that might be trusted to broaden the intelligence of women, without lessening their much-prized femininity. ”

“ The present work is intended to unfold the natural objects of female education. This is accomplished in a series of lectures written in a perspicuous, pleasing style, and treating of the various studies pursued in a well regulated school for young ladies. It is really and truly what it proposes to be, a guide in the intellectual education of woman, and will, we have no doubt, become a standard work in our schools and families.—Ladies' Magazine.
We think this plan is generally executed in a manner calculated to instruct pupils and to furnish useful hints and maxims for teachers. ”

“ The relaxation of rules in favour of women who have passed certain recognised examinations, and the opening [17] of day training classes in connection with recognised colleges, such as Owen’s College, Manchester, and several of the local University Colleges, may do much to open the elementary schools to a more cultured class of women. Such women would soon obtain the headship of a school, and would then, under a liberal Board, find a good field for the exercise of talent and organising power. ”

“ Women of our class may be, they ought to be, "benevolent institutions." And such women exist among us; pity is there are so few of them. They can unobtrusively be centres of happiness, and knowledge, and generous attitudes of mind. [Pg 36] Now there ought to be more of such women, and I look to our High Schools with hope. They ought to make girls public-spirited and large-minded.
There is another element in girls' education which is only imperfectly as yet brought out, and which you yourselves can do something to develop. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What the deuse do we men go to school for? If our wits were equal to women’s, we might spare much time and pains in our education: for nature teaches your sex, what, in a long course of labour and study, ours can hardly attain to.—But, indeed, every lady is not a Pamela. ”

“ In truth, school is no place of education for any children whatever till their minds are well put in action. This is the work which has to be done at home, and which may be done in all homes where the mother is a sensible woman. ”

“ We know from experience that nations are more successful when their women are successful. When girls go to school -- this is one of the most direct measures of whether a nation is going to develop effectively is how it treats its women. When a girl goes to school, it doesn’t just open up her young mind, it benefits all of us -- because maybe someday she’ll start her own business, or invent a new technology, or cure a disease. And when women are able to work, families are healthier, and communities are wealthier, and entire countries are more prosperous. ”

“ 'T is pleasing to be school'd in a strange tongue By female lips and eyes—that is, I mean, When both the teacher and the taught are young, As was the case, at least, where I have been; ”

“ “Yet that is considered an excellent school, I find, and I dare say it would be if the benighted lady did not think it necessary to cram her pupils like Thanks-giving turkeys, instead of feeding them in a natural and wholesome way. It is the fault with most American schools, and the poor little heads will go on aching till we learn better.” ”

“ Since I was a little girl in dancing-school I've been criticised by the mothers of all the little girls who weren't as popular as I was, and I've always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute." ”

“ The Minister's wife, in the course of conversation, had very naturally—apropos of Liana and Roquairol—fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be broken in childhood or the heart in old age. ”

“ There is such eagerness to get to college, such blind belief in what is to be learned there, such a demand for a college education for women, that we are overwhelmed by it. Every year these doors are closed upon hundreds of disappointed women, who turn elsewhere, or relinquish the much-prized college education. The day is not far distant when it will be a distinct reproach to a woman that she is not college-bred. ”

“ Thus we have seen a lady Senior Wrangler and a lady Senior Classic, and I myself have the honour of knowing a sweet girl-graduate with golden hair, who got two Firsts at Oxford.
The face of the earth is covered with Girls' High Schools, and Women's Colleges standing where they ought not. I am told, but do not know, that girl-undergraduates are permitted to witness physiological experiments in the torture-dens of science; and a complete emancipation in the matter of reading has introduced women to regions of thought and feeling which in old days were the peculiar domain of men. ”