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THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS.*

What better provision ought to be made for the Education of Girls of the Upper and Middle Classes?

I

By the Rev. F. D. MAURICE.

HAVE taken part for some years in a London College for the Education of Girls. Those who established it were convinced (1) that it was desirable for girls to have as much male instruction and superintendence as possible; (2) that it was desirable that they should receive their lessons in classes; (3) that it was desirable that their lessons should not be separated, as they must be in boardingschools, from the influences of home. I do not mean that they hoped or wished to supersede female instruction, or the teaching of separate masters, or any existing schools. I mean merely that they were led by various observations and reflections to believe that an education was wanted, and might perhaps be given, which even the best schools managed by ladies, or the best teaching which is not social, does not supply. What these observations and reflections were it may not be of much importance to record. But each person who is engaged in such a college may fairly be asked whether his experience-it must be, of course, in great part an experience of his own mistakes and failures-appears to him to justify the maxims on which it was founded. Mine has been small in comparison with that of many of my colleagues, but so far as it goes, it has convinced me that the maxims were sound.

1. My belief that male instruction-formal, methodical male instruction-is needed for girls, is certainly not derived from any apprehen sion that female lessons are likely to be more frivolous or insincere than those which we impart. Those words sound almost impious when one remembers the testimonies which the most earnest thinkers and doers in the world have borne to the influence of their mothers, in saving them from frivolity and insincerity, in making them steady and conscientious in their study and their work. I should suppose that men of science and men of business have owed the habit of observing facts-the preservation from mere dreaminess and flights of fancy-very much indeed to the counsels of their mothers, still more to the examples of minute and steady diligence which they have afforded. And if we consider the women who have done most for their own sex or for ours, especially on the subject of education, we shall find that there is nothing for which they have laboured more than to cultivate an honest and truthful temper-to banish whatever they thought was likely to interfere with it. Miss Edgeworth is an obvious instance. Whatever defects we may find in her scheme of education, or in the remarkable series of books which illustrates it, the last complaint any reasonable person can make of her is that she exalts the fancy too highly, that she deos not

* See Transactions, 1862, p. 339, 342; 1864, p. 394, 404.

encourage the most profound reverence for fact. If any man starts with the notion that this reverence does not exist as strongly in the other sex as in his own, if he supposes that to inculcate it is his peculiar vocation, I suspect he will misunderstand his pupils, and will never give them the help which he might give them. It has always seemed to me that I acquire more of this blessing from my female pupils than I can impart to them.

Precisely because I have this conviction, I think that it is in our power to give them a kind of aid which they could not ordinarily obtain, even from women far more accomplished than we are. In trying to teach them a little modern history, I am continually reminded of a tendency in my own mind to generalize. I see how dreary my lessons become to them if I give way to that tendency; what a demand there is in them for acts and characters, for living deeds and living persons. That which is especially our masculine infirmity is discovered and rebuked whenever we seek to hold any serious intercourse with them. But it may also be cured. Our temptation is to seek for laws apart from facts; theirs is to seek facts apart from laws. If they compel us always to connect our grand enunciation of laws with their lively apprehension of particular facts, we may be saved from much vagueness and pedantry from building on mere hypotheses-from describing circles when we suppose we are making progress. On the other hand, they may be saved from that passion for petty details, which characterises some of the female writers, in many respects highly instructive and useful, who have dealt with history. They may be saved from the still more dangerous habit of supplying the want of principles by exaggerations of the fancy.

The temptation to do this arises from no indifference to reality. One may see in the most outrageously sensational novel, written by a female pen, what a desire there is to dwell on all the little points which convey the sense of reality and minister to the craving for it. But the powerlessness to group the separate facts and the different personages, to find out some living and intelligible connection between them, suggests desperate experiments for making them cohere. By fair means or foul, human life, and and every one's own life, must be contemplated as a whole. If we are desirous that the means shall be fair and not foul, that there shall be some discovery of the actual relation between acts and the doers of acts, we must not confide the education of girls exclusively even to those who would most faithfully impress them with the superiority of the smallest fact to the most elaborate fiction. We must put them in communication with those who have, even to excess, the habit of referring all particular cases to some principle; at any rate who are always in search of some principle to which they may be referred. I have admitted fully, that as much is taken by the instructor as he gives; that the action and reaction exactly correspond; that just so far as he is profited by that disposition of an attentive pupil in which she differs from him, just so far she will gain by what he tells her.

If this be a true statement, it may go some way towards settling certain questions which occasionally trouble us more perhaps than is necessary. Controversies about the relative capacities of men and women may be discussed, it seems to me, for ever, with very little result, whilst we repeat the phrases "equality" or "inequality" and make the decision turn upon them. The necessity of each sex to the other may be surely taken for granted as a preliminary. And if it is taken for granted, the inference would at least be probable à priori, were it not established by evidence, that each had capa cities which the other did not possess, and which could only be unfolded through the help of the other; that each had defects answering to these capacities, which can only be remedied by the same help. I am ashamed to utter such truisms; but since they are often overlooked, and much precious time is wasted from the neglect of them, some one or other must recal attention to them.

The far more serious practical question, how many of the studies which boys are expected to pursue should be demanded of girls, must perhaps stand over till we have settled what studies boys are expected or should be expected to pursue. While so many debates are pending upon that subject it must be premature to pronounce upon the other. But these inferences would follow from what I have said. First, that the difference in the capacities of boys and girls does not the least involve a necessity for a difference in their studies; secondly, that if the studies were exactly the same the peculiar strength and weakness of the two sexes would undoubtedly reveal themselves in the manner in which they received the lessons that were imparted to them.

Thus, if we take the study which has given the name of "Grammar" schools to our schools for boys, there can be no doubt, I suppose, that there is a peculiar inaptitude in the English boy for receiving the sounds of any language except his own, even if he has been ever so much imbued with its etymology, its syntax, its prosody. There can be no doubt again that girls who find much difficulty in the etymology and syntax and prosody, have a hundred times the aptitude of their brothers for speaking any language, or singing in it, even though they acquire it in comparatively mature years, without any early assistance from a native. If this difference is referred to organisation, so let it be; the difference remains.

But besides this facility for seizing the vocal part of a language, the girl apprehends the usages and idioms of it, all that belongs to daily converse, much more rapidly than boys or men do. Now this faculty clearly demands cultivation. It can receive none so effectual, it seems to me, as that which proceeds from a man, who having had his lips accustomed from infancy to the language, has the grammatical knowledge and grammatical habit which the girl finds it so hard to acquire. Whether or not she ever obtains the same knowledge of Grammar as the boy, it will do her at least as much good as it will do him. I should say it will do her more good. It will enable her to arrange the parts of the speech which she catches so readily, to

see a meaning and an order in them of which the boy, however well acquainted with the rules, is not always conscious. This observation applies no doubt strictly to modern languages. But a girl whose parents thought it desirable for her to learn Latin or Greek, would, I doubt not, bring the same keen perception to bear upon them. She would wish much more than we do in general to have the power of hearing and of speaking the words which she reads out of books. But she would enter, often much more than we do, into the force and life of the words. And their construction, however dry the explanation of it might be, would commend itself to her as a strange and wonderful order which relieved her own language of a great many perplexities, and threw light upon the French or Italian and any other which she had learned.

I have dwelt longer upon this instance because it is the one most likely to occur to us as marking the line between male and female education. I have alluded to it also, because my remarks on it may show how much the musical education of girls-which I trust will never be less regarded than it is or has been, though one may hope that the method of imparting it will become less oppressive-may bear upon her other pursuits, this of language especially. One great means of making instruction in language effectual will be lost if it is divided from musical instruction. I trust some way will be discovered of bringing them into a closer relation to each other.

I do not like to speak of physical science, being very ignorant of it. But I cannot help perceiving how much the study of physics through books without experiments, belonged to the monkish, celibate, scholastic age; how the pathway to discovery through the testing of facts was marked out by laymen who held free intercourse and communion with female intellects. Ever since that path was marked out, there has been the danger of experiment becoming empiricism, there has been the danger of the student retreating again into his cave. The taste of ladies for lectures on science may rather foster the first evil, tempting quacks to exhibit the results of painful investigations as inere glittering marvels; it may also promote the other evil by leading hard thinkers to exalt their theories in contrast to these outward displays. But if the aptitude for observation, and the taste for particular facts in girls, are cultivated by those who have the masculine habit of reflection and of combining facts, the benefit to both, and to the progress of inquiry itself, might be greater than we can at all imagine.

My own lectures to girls have been either on history or English literature. I have alluded to the former subject already. I will say this much about the latter, that the liveliest female intellects are most likely to make Taste-which means their own taste, or the taste of the circle that surrounds them-the standard of what is good in writings past and present-are most likely, at the same time, to be entertained and moulded by a clever, fastidious criticism. They may meet with women whose tastes are pure and refined, much purer and more refined than those of most men; they may receive from them

sensible and acute praises of the best writers, and warnings against the ill-nature of reviewers. I do not underrate the very great advantage of the examples and counsels of such friends; they are precious to the characters, as much as to the understandings of girls; but I believe a rougher masculine teacher who has been wont, even rigidly and pedantically, to subject his taste to principles, who regards criticism as a study and an art for all time-not as an exercise of wit and skill which may be taken up at a moment's notice, to gratify some particular fancy or spite-can do for the regular education of girls what the instinctive wisdom of the excellent teachers of their own sex cannot do. If, indeed, that were wanting, I should not expect much from his lessons. They can, I think, fill up what is deficient in the feminine wisdom; and in this case, as in others which I have noticed, the peculiar aptitudes of the pupil offer a most useful correction to the formality of the master, a most useful direction to his instruction. He must come down from his stilts, he must be personal and biographical; he must trust more to the words of his author than to his own explanations of them; if he is to have the slightest influence on the minds of the girls to whom he speaks.

2. That the male teaching of girls should be, when it is possible, in classes, I think no one can dispute. I do not overlook the disadvantages which are incidental to all class teaching; but I do not reckon among those disadvantages the comparative ignorance which the master must have of the particular temptations, even of the particular gifts, of his individual pupils. The ignorance, of course, will be least in the case of an experienced and sympathising observer of them, a careful student of their answers and their looks. But where it is greatest there is a compensation. He speaks to something which is common to them all. His words find their way to those for whom they are intended, without those devices to adapt them to special characters, which are often awkward, often dangerous, founded, it may be, upon false judgments in him who makes the experiment, promoting morbid self-consciousness in the subjects of it.

On the other hand, I do not reckon it among the benefits of this teaching that it promotes rivalship or competition among the members of the class. Till I see more distinct good from that feeling among boys, I shall not desire greatly to stimulate it among girls. I hope that the learning in class may have exactly the opposite effect to this. I believe it encourages sympathy and fellow work. It gives a common interest in higher subjects, to those who would only have their narrow separate interests. It must make conversation less frivolous.

One accidental evil I have found in my own class, to which I think those who understand class teaching better, and have more skill in making it catechetical, are less exposed. The girls appear to think that they shall improve their memories, at the cost of their health, by leaning over a desk and writing for an hour, as fast as their fingers can move, all that the lecturer says to them.

The

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