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 unworthy 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 en- vironment; 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 ad- vances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasi- ness, 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 w^hich parodies Hood's " Song of the Shirt "; and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by precep- tresses like an eminent lady principal,^ who thought 1 Physical Hindrances to Teaching Girls, by Charlotte W. Porter, lorum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 41-49.
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for in- timating 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 ^ or L'Ecole des Eoches,^ 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 inward- ness, 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 mxore important for girls than boys, significant as it is for the latter.
1 Abbotsholme, 1889-1899: or Ten Years' Work in an Educational Laboratory, by Cecil Reddie. G. Allen, London, 1900.
2 See L'Ecole des Roches, a School of the Twentieth Century, by T. R. Croswell. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE The first aim, which should dominate every item, peda- gogic method and matter, should be health — a momen- tous 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 sacred to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only those who realize what advances have been made in health cul- ture 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 neat- ness 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 con- stant suggestion. Each student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study, respectively, and be responsi- ble for their care, with every encouragement for^express- THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS ing individual tastes, but with an all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and elegance, with- out 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 re- duced 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 re- duced, 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, w^hieh 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 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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.^ 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 under- stand the primacy of movement over feeling, we can ap- preciate what a school of bearing and repose in daily con- verse with others means. I would revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of the draw- ing-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.
Eegularity 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. Perio- dicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos, celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years every- thing must give way to its thorough and settled estab- lishment. 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 develop- ment, expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and encouraged in every legitimate way, THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 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 he 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 them- selves, 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 in- struction at the time, concise, practical, and never, es- pecially in the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make every- thing sacred. This should not be given by male phy- sicians— 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 neces- sary technical knowledge.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 intel- lectual 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 hold 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 altru- ism. 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 a welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the trans- cendent and supernal had no objective existence, we A THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 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 re- duced 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 as well as the cyclone revivalist should be very care- fully excluded; and yet in every springtime, when na- ture is recreated, service and teaching should gently en- courage the revival and even the regeneration of all the religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be al- lowed 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 ex- cluded, while esthetics should supplement, reenforce, 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. Ortho- doxies 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 some- what 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 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 com- plex 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 practi- cal 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 at- tention throughout, while Latin nomenclature and mi- croscopic 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 in- teresting 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, THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 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 bot- tom, 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 illustra- tions, the basal principles rather than to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry, philol- ogy, etc.
All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man — history, with the biographical element very promi- nent throughout, with plenty of stories of heroes of virtue^ acts of valor, tales of saintly lives and the personal YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 re- forms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should come to the fore.
Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propaedeutic 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 ver- nacular 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 ig- norance 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 ani- mals 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 THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS theory, and her watchword will be not cogito, ergo sum,'^ but sum, ergo cogito.^ 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 constitu- tion 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 ad- juncts, 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 gen- erations 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, 1 1 think, therefore I am. 2 1 am, therefore I think.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. Hints that are not followed up; information not elab- orated 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 al- ways 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 com- bine 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 con- ferences 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 be so poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his presence THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 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 in- tellect, I believe myself not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and more pas- sionately 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 glori- fied madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, pro- fessor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, gen- eral, president, or millionaire.