The Education of American Girls Part 3

MENTAL EDUCATION,

or,

THE CULTURE OF THE INTELLECT.

"Now, as refusal to satisfy the cravings of the digestive faculty is productive of suffering, so is the refusal to satisfy the craving of any other faculty productive of suffering, to an extent proportioned to the importance of that faculty. But, as G.o.d wills man's happiness, that line of conduct which produces unhappiness is contrary to his will."--FRANCIS BACON.

If one is to educate the body, she would be presumptuous in the extreme if she made the attempt without first understanding in some measure its anatomy and physiology. With as much reason, in approaching the subject of mental education--that one third of education which with too many persons stands for the whole--we must pause a moment for a few reflections on the nature of mind and the necessary results thereof.

"_Mind is essentially self-activity_." In this, as we have been taught, lies its essential difference from mere matter, whose most essential property is inertia--_i.e._, absolute inability to move itself or to stop itself.[16]

When, therefore, mind acts at all, it must act from within, and no amount of information given will be of the slightest concern to it, unless by its own activity the mind reach forth, draw it in, and a.s.similate it to itself. This voluntary activity, directed towards any subject, is Attention, and so great is the power of mind when in this state, that it dissolves and draws in all food, no matter how abstruse, that may present itself. Thus the problem of mental education, which had seemed so complex, resolves itself very simply. We have first to educate the attention of the child, so that she shall be able to use it at will, and to turn it towards any object desired; and secondly, we simply have to present to the aroused attention the knowledge which the past centuries have created and acc.u.mulated, and to present this in such quant.i.ty and in such order as the experience of the same centuries has decided to be best for its normal growth.

To begin with, then, we must educate the child from the first into a habit of controlling and directing her naturally drifting and capricious attention by the will. The power of the child is very limited in this respect. Her eyes, the index of her attention, wander easily from one external object to another, and consequently our work must be very gradual, for, if we attempt to hold the attention one moment longer than the mind has strength for, the tense bow snaps, and the overstrained activity lapses into inanity. We must ask her attention for very short intervals at first, and during many years; for every time that we attempt to convey information for so long that the attention gives way, we have weakened, and not strengthened the power. Exercise, to be judicious, we must remember, must, in mind as well as body, be regular, and increase steadily in its demand. The object of the first teaching should, therefore, be the steady and methodical cultivation of the faculty of attention, and not the acquisition of knowledge. Our first work must be to give such judicious exercise that the mind shall acquire a habit of exercise and an appet.i.te for it, and not to spoil at the outset the mental digestion. A healthy appet.i.te being once created, we have then only to spread the table and place the courses one after another, at proper intervals, and within convenient reach, in regular order, and the work is done.

But the child, as she grows from child to woman, must pa.s.s through three stages, showing three different directions which are successively taken by the intelligent activity. First, she is occupied in perceiving objects. She then pa.s.ses into the years dominated by the imagination, and she should emerge from this into the dominion of rational, logical thought, but, through the fault of a defective education, she often never pa.s.ses beyond the second stage. Thus dwarfed and crippled she remains during her whole life, physically a woman, mentally a child.

Better days are, however, dawning, though the sun be but one hour high.

Again, serious errors are made in education, from the want of a proper appreciation of the time at which the girl pa.s.ses inevitably from one to the other of these stages. When, for example, authors of text-books on Natural Science, History and Reading, designed for pupils of fifteen and sixteen years of age, cover more s.p.a.ce with ill.u.s.trations than with text, we recognize the fact that they forget that at that age, the first or intuitional stage is past; and when publishers endeavor to recommend their books to teachers, by sending them specimens of the pictures in the books, instead of specimens of the explanations and statements, the teachers know that they are supposed to be equally admirers of fine wood-cuts.

In the first, or intuitional stage, when the child is chiefly employed with perceptions, there is little to be done but to train the eye, the ear, the hand and the voice, and to teach the correct use of distinctly spoken language.

It is clearly impossible to investigate the subject of mental education in detail in the present essay; I must content myself with a few suggestions and statements.

First, is it not evident that it is all-important what kind of training the little girl receives in the first years of her school life, while she is yet in the intuitional or perceptive stage? A failure to properly train her attention here, and the whole of her after-work is invalidated. Her school work becomes, in its progress, tiresome, and hence disagreeable, from the constant necessity of repet.i.tion, a necessity arising from the want of a trained power of attention. She is found fault with for restlessness and want of interest, as if that were her fault, and not her misfortune; and, at the end, her knowledge is at best but "a thing of shreds and patches," till, when all is done and the result exhibited, we ask, with a sigh, "whether it be really worth while to go through so much to gain so little." And yet, what care do guardians take to secure the best advantages for their daughters at fifteen and seventeen, and of how little importance do they consider it, under what kind of teaching they place them between eight and fifteen! The error is all the same in the intellectual as in the physical education of our girls. We are continually carefully locking the stable-door after the horse is stolen; we are continually allowing things to go wrong, and then making superhuman efforts to right them, not remembering that it is far easier to keep out of trouble than to get out of it. If a girl must be trusted to incompetent, or, at the best, doubtful, teachers during half her school life, let that half be the last, and not the first, and incompetency will be shorn of half its power to injure. Not only directly in the interest of the girls, but in the interest of my own profession--though the two are one--I ask this, for in that case, our profession would soon be elevated in its general tone by the elimination from it of those who ought never to have entered it.

Pa.s.sing from the intuitional epoch to the age when the imagination and emotion become the ruling powers, we next arrive at the time at which it becomes necessary for parents to see to it that plenty of good reading is provided for the eager child. It makes not so much difference what kind of books she reads, but they should always be the very best of their kind, for this is the time in which the formation of a correct taste becomes, perhaps, the most important duty of the educator. To poetry, either in verse or not, each child inclines naturally, as did the race in its childhood, and the stories of the Old Testament and Homer are never wearisome. Generally, "the proper cla.s.sical works for youth are those which nations have produced in the earliest stages of their culture."

Now is the season for fairy stories, and the Germans, who, of all nations best understand the needs of children, have them ready furnished to our hand. I do not mean the absurd, aimless, and meaningless fairy tales with which modern writers endeavor to supplant the fairy cla.s.sics, and which, for the most part, the instinct of a child at once condemns.

I doubt very seriously whether it is possible at the present time, and in America, to write a fairy story which shall have the true ring in it, any more than it would be possible for any one to write a genuine epic poem. The circ.u.mstances favorable to the production of both have pa.s.sed away with modern times, but the productions are left us, a perpetual legacy of delight and charm to every little girl.

We are too apt to forget that the child must live through certain stages of thought and feeling in order to arrive at maturity. And perhaps Americans are more liable to this error than any other nation. We might as well expect the full bloom of the rose to burst from the root without the intervention of stem and bud, and the slow pa.s.sing of the years. It is right that the children should devour fairy stories, and she, who, at this period of life, fails to read the _Arabian Nights_, must miss forever a most valuable part of her mental education: for this period, once past, never returns. Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels may be also mentioned here. It is true that they were not written for children, but so true and genuine are they, that the child enjoys them thoroughly, while the most mature find them a profitable study. This peculiarity of adaptation to all ages belongs to all the genuine myths of any nation, its best modern master being Hans Christian Andersen. It is the royal sign and seal of authority in stories. Ballad poetry belongs too to the beginning of this stage. Scott comes in later, but Tennyson does not belong in it at all. These examples will be sufficient to express my meaning.

It would be a very valuable aid in the education of our girls at this time, if some one who is capable would, out of her riches of wide reading, give us a list, with publishers' names, of these books of all time which ought to be read by every child; a list to which any mother, anxious for the right guidance of her little girl's taste, and yet ignorant of the best means, might refer with perfect confidence.

We must not, as has been well said, deprive books for children of the "shadow-side" of life, because in that case they become artificial and untrue, and the child rejects them. "For the very reason that in the stories of the Old Testament we find envy, vanity, evil desire, ingrat.i.tude, craftiness and deceit among the fathers of the Jewish race, and the leaders of G.o.d's chosen people, have they so great an educational value," and when we have purged the narrations of all these characteristics, and present to the child an expurgated edition, we find that they no longer charm her. Nothing disgusts a child sooner than _childishness_ in stories written for her, and it is because very few people can rightly draw the line between what is childish and what is child-like, that we find so few who are able to write stories which are really adapted to children, and that so many who address Sunday-schools fail to interest. Every woman who has proved her power in this direction may be said, in the dearth of valuable books for children, to owe a duty to her country by giving them more. As the child grows towards womanhood, tragedy will take the place of the epic poem and ballad, and will lead, it may be unconsciously, to a deepening of the sense of responsibility.

The question what the girl shall read belongs not at all to herself, but to those who know the world better than she, and who, through the fact that they are educated while she is not, know what and when to select.

Hence the immense importance, not only to the girl herself, but to the whole country, of the thorough intellectual education of our girls.[17]

But enough has been said on the subject of reading, and of the distinctions which should be made. I may add, however, that the line before alluded to is to be drawn in novels. As, for instance, the girl is ready for d.i.c.kens before she ought to read Thackeray, as d.i.c.kens dwells more in the region of the simple emotions, while Thackeray has moved on into the sphere of emotion which is conscious of itself, or of the reflecting and critical understanding.

Supposing now that the girl has pa.s.sed beyond the psychical stage of the Imagination into the stage of Logical Thought, it is immensely important that in this stage also she should not miss a systematic education. If this should be the case, she is defrauded of the key which alone can render intelligible the scattered work of the previous epoch. The work of education in the first, or intuitional epoch is general; in the second, or imaginative, special; and in the third, or logical, returns again to the general; and thus only can it const.i.tute a whole. In the first, the child picks up facts and general principles from them; in the second, the little girl pursues, each for itself, different branches of study; in the third, she should be led to see the connection and interdependence of these branches, to weave together the loose ends. If she is not so led, if her education stops with the work of the second stage--the only work which it is possible to do in the second stage, on account of the laws of the development of the intellectual power--her education remains forever unfinished, a garment not firm enough to endure the stress of time, not fine enough to bear a moment's keen scrutiny, and only strong enough to fetter and trip feet that endeavor to make any real after-progress by its aid.

And yet this is what we are in the majority of cases doing for, or rather against, our intelligent and energetic American girls. Does it ever occur to us to ask what becomes of this energy, deprived thus of its natural outlet? We have only to turn to the records of our insane asylums or to the note-books of the physician and we are partially answered. This is more true than is generally supposed. If these girls had had real work for which they were responsible, and felt themselves able rationally to utilize the power of which they were blindly conscious, they would not be found to-day in the wards of asylums, or condemned to the luxurious couches on which they spend their "inglorious days." Or, thirdly, we may find another and quite different development of this perverted but not destroyed energy,[18] this closing of the top of the chimneys. Many a woman is antagonistic, is combative, because she is forced into such a position, not because she herself desires it. The smoke starts for the top of the chimney, as it should; but, baffled, it frets itself in eddying whirls against the bricks, till, driven by the necessity of an outlet somewhere, not understanding what the trouble is, but only dimly realizing that there is trouble, it rushes back, choking in its pa.s.sage the fire, and revenging itself on the author of the repression.

Men and women are wonderfully alike after all. The same motives move them, the same incitements spur to honorable effort, and if a girl is a.s.sured that, being half-educated, half-educated she must remain, she will not, unless driven by the internal fire of irrepressible genius, try very earnestly to fit herself for the higher plane which she can never reach.

"Were it not better done, as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?"

By all means it were far better, if effort for broader work be of no avail, to cease to think of it, and to make one's self as comfortable as possible. And yet, how about the comfort in the coming years, when her girls, who, thanks to the inevitable march of Truth, will have a better chance than she, and her boys, to whom the last stage of education is to be had for the asking, come to her in vain for sympathy and appreciation, to say nothing of the husband, from all understanding of whose rational thought she finds herself barred out?[19] Babies and half-educated children are very pretty to play with, interesting to watch, and delightful to care for, but when they are married and have children, for they can never be said, in any true sense, to be wives or mothers, they appear in a somewhat different aspect. I have sometimes, out of sheer pity, wished that there were some State asylum for such children, when they are left, as the chances of life and death so often leave them, unprotected in the world, with dependent children clinging to their useless hands. I have never seen a sadder sight than such a woman, her physical system in perfect order and superbly developed, looking stunned and helpless into the world, unable to do anything for herself or her children, and dependent upon the charity of her dead husband's friends--and perhaps the wise thought and tender care of a faithful servant, whose practical education was complete in the stern school of necessity--for food, clothing, and shelter. They have been only half-educated, and it seems as if the authority which has refused in the past to provide them with the power for their own maintenance, ought to recognize their right to be supported; as much as it does recognize the duty of supporting others, for whose education it has failed properly to care in their youth, in jails, penitentiaries, and prisons.

As to the effect of the want of education and culture upon what are known as the most characteristic womanly qualities, whether physical or mental, no better ill.u.s.tration can be furnished than that of the women among the Arkansas refugees, who during the war came crowding for protection into Missouri. They had not dwelt in a frigid and contracting climate; they had not been physically overworked, and they had not been co-educated, for they had not been educated at all, either physically, intellectually, or morally. Should we not have expected to find in these children of nature, these women who had spent their lives in idleness, undisturbed by any brain-work, at least, finely developed forms? But what did we find in the quarters a.s.signed them? Without a single exception, they were tall, thin, and angular in face and form, while the masculine loudness, harshness, and depth of their voices, and the masculine expression of features and movement, made us involuntarily recoil from them as if they were something monstrous, in being neither man nor woman. The animal nature, informed only in a small degree by the spiritual, inevitably descends through lower forms, and when we find it deprived entirely of spiritual guidance, we find a something lower than the dog that is grateful for our kindness, or the horse that whinnies as he hears our step on the gravel-walk; for we find the idiot.

But meantime, while the child is pa.s.sing through all these stages of mental development, as ordained by the Creator, the definite school-work is intrusted to the hands of professional teachers. American parents throw this responsibility entirely off from their own shoulders when they send their girls to school, with somewhat the same feeling of relief as that with which they lead their family physician to the bedside of the little girl, for whose indisposition they have, before summoning him, anxiously endeavored to care. There is only one difference: in the case of the physician, they relate to him fully all the symptoms and previous treatment; they remain by the bedside after he has gone, in the capacity of nurses, and they see to it that his prescriptions are obtained and administered, and his suggestions in every respect exactly followed, while, in the case of the teacher, they send the child, leaving her to make her own discoveries as to previous symptoms and treatment, and they do not inquire into the directions given, the nature of the work prescribed, or the effect. Having thus, as they think, placed the whole matter in the hands of the teacher, they are often surprised and annoyed at the result. I am taking it for granted here that the teacher is qualified for her part of the work, as to method; and, if not working under a course of study laid out for her, as in the public schools, is herself able to arrange and plan. This is the most favorable aspect of the subject. But there is indisputably another side. If mothers would only work with the teachers, so that the home influences brought to bear on the girls in matters already discussed, especially in the direction of the reading of their daughters, should be healthful and strong, the teachers would be saved much time and energy, which could be far more usefully applied for the benefit of the child. I speak from the midst of a profession which often suffers in reputation, nay, even in actual character, from this very cause.

To go in detail through the part of intellectual education which belongs especially to the teacher, is impossible here, nor would such a discussion be in place in these pages. It has its place properly only in professional literature, just as the details of the treatment of a case placed under medical care, whether preventive or curative, belong only in the pages of a medical journal. A few suggestions only will be added in this department.

It is evident to the most superficial observer that a vast amount of time is spent over such studies as grammar, geography and history in our schools, with but little perceivable result. This is due in great measure to the fact that the manufacture of text-books has become in America a profitable business in a money point of view, and that, consequently, what text-books shall be used in our schools, both public and private, is decided more by the publishers than by the educators.

Hence the graded series of School Geographies, for instance, through some five or six of which the pupil is obliged to wade, one after another, to find in each, only the same matter in sentences of a somewhat greater length. Hence, to go one step farther, the stupefying of so many minds in our schools. Nothing is more deadening to all mental activity than unmeaning repet.i.tions, a fact easily verified by any one who, wakeful through mental disturbance at night, will take the trouble to repeat and re-repeat any meaningless thing. It is the lounging, deadening brain-work of which we have too much, not the active, vivifying brain-work of which we have too little, that does injure the system. The whole healthy tone of the mind is destroyed, and evils, mental and physical, follow in rapid succession.

From the process of text-book manufacturing also spring the endless number of compendiums and abstracts with which our schools are deluged, mental power diluted, and the pockets of the parents unnecessarily taxed for the support of large publis.h.i.+ng houses, not for the education of their children.

Another cause of this stupefying process is the rigid system by which most large schools are conducted, where promotions, from one cla.s.s to another, can take place, say, once a year, the pupil who, on examination, falls short of the required per cent of correct answers, being forced to review the work of the entire previous year before going on. More elasticity, more fluidity, as it were, is sadly needed in our system of public school education before this evil will be to any great extent modified.[20]

It would be a waste of time to say that one ought not to be overworked, were it not that some persons always seem to imply that any intellectual work is overwork. It would seem equally superfluous to say that for intellectual health there ought not to be any surplus energy, for the latter statement seems as axiomatic as the former.

The problem with which educators are chiefly concerned is that of fully employing the energies without overtasking them. If the dividing line between _enough_ and _too much_ could be determined as exactly as the Mississippi River marks the series of lowest points where the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains meets the western slope of the Alleghenies, our work as teachers were easy indeed. Teaching, however, is not the only profession where such unsolved problems exist, for individual cases, and we teachers are thus but a part of a n.o.ble army of professional workers, so we take heart of grace, and are not ashamed.

But the fact remains to be considered that the work of school education is, as the result of unavoidable destiny, in America, pa.s.sing very rapidly into the hands of women. We may deplore this, but we cannot prevent it. The last census showed that the number of women teachers in the United States stands already to that of the men as 123,980 to 78,709, and the ratio is daily increasing. There is no other country in the world, then, where it is so all important that the girls should receive a complete education. In one view, this tendency of the times is of great value. The years spent in teaching are often the most valuable training for the work of the mother. No other employment calls for a greater exercise, and hence, a greater development, of the directive power, and of the knowledge of human nature which will enable her well and wisely to direct her children, successfully to grapple with the "servant problem," and to sweep a large circle of details within the compa.s.s of generalized rules. She has learned what industry means, not, as was said by a Christian writer of the thirteenth century, only "to pray to G.o.d, to love man, to knit and to sew." She has not "everlastingly something in her hand, though no one profits by her labor, and she is reduced to look for her sole reward in civil speeches made for useless gifts, or insincere praise of household ornaments that are in everybody's way," covers, and covers for covers, and covers for covers of covers.

Many women "are busy, very busy; they have hardly time to do this thing, because they really wish, or ought to do that, but with all their driving, their energy is entirely dissipated, and nothing comes from their countless labors," and I ask, in the words of a Russian woman, "Is it not a great loss to the economy of society when such an amount of strength is wasted and leaves behind it no good work!"

But many persons continually pursue self-contradictory ends, simply for the reason that their education has been so narrow and limited that they are not able to see these ends as self-contradictory.

Indeed, there are other disabilities than the physical for the duty of a mother. "The want of self-control that comes of an objectless life, the uninquiring habit of frivolous employment, disable her from fulfilling this duty, and to remain a child does not give the ability to educate children."[21] The power of independent thinking, without which there can be no judgment, and which alone frees the soul, the real mother must have, and our girls should be most carefully educated into it.

Which course, then, will be best to fit the average child for her future work in the active world, a course of private lessons, or the life of the school, which is in itself a miniature world, where she learns to measure her own acquirements and character by those of others, and is educated into the knowledge that individual caprice cannot be allowed as a rule of conduct? And is there any country in the world whose citizens need to learn a respect for law more than in America?

As to the branches which girls have the ability successfully to pursue, the question is no longer an open one. The experiments at Oberlin, Antioch, the Northwestern University, Michigan University, Va.s.sar and many other inst.i.tutions, not to go out of our own country, are sufficiently positive and conclusive to convince the most incredulous.[22] If the question be as to the branches which she ought to pursue, that is also to some extent settled. The courses of study which are laid down for students in European and American universities, represent simply the condensed judgment of centuries of experience and induction as to the means by which the human intellect may be most surely strengthened and developed. They are the results of long generalization, and are founded deep on a knowledge of the human mind.

Shall we venture to depart from the old ways, and to decry the customs handed down to us from the ages gone by? Do we not know that the wisdom of twenty centuries, as to the best means for developing the human mind, is greater than the knowledge of one? Since we are "heirs of all the ages," why throw away our inheritance?

In one word, our girls should be so educated intellectually that there will no longer be any internal barriers to their progress, and when this is done they will find that the external barriers, against which they fret themselves, have disappeared. When Britomart had fairly conquered and bound with his own chains the enchanter within the castle, she found, as she pa.s.sed out, that the castle walls, the iron doors and the fire which had barred her entrance had no longer any existence. We can yet afford to learn lessons of wisdom from the prophetic "woman's poet"

of the sixteenth century.

Whether our school girls and college girls will be injured physically, mentally or morally, by granting to the boy and man students, in our high schools and universities, the advantage of fellow-workers of the other s.e.x, is a question which, though practically settled to a large extent by experience, ought not perhaps to be pa.s.sed over here in entire silence. One very curious feature of this question with regard to the education of our girls seems to be this: those who are most urgent that the question should be decided by facts do not bring them forward, but base their position on general principles a.s.sumed, and on theory. As has been well said by President White, of Cornell, to seek for information on the real results, so far, of the experiment in our colleges from the authorities of colleges that have never tried it, would be to commit the same absurdity as "if the j.a.panese authorities, aroused to the necessities of railroads and telegraphs, had corresponded with eminent Chinese philosophers regarding the ethics of the subject, instead of sending persons to observe the working of railroads and telegraphs where they were already in use." Where inquiries were made of universities which had never tried the experiment, "the majority of responses were overwhelmingly against the admission of women. It was declared to be 'contrary to nature,' 'likely to produce confusion,'

'dangerous,' 'at variance with the ordinances of G.o.d;' in short, every argument that a mandarin would be sure to evolve from his interior consciousness against a railroad or a telegraph which he had never seen."

I am not forgetful that the high ground of philosophy is the only proper one from which to settle the question of the sphere of any human being, and what education will fit her for it; but after this has been done, if special objections are raised against the possibility or advisability, in a utilitarian or physiological point of view, such special a.s.sertions, in default, from their very nature, of any other possible demonstration, must be proved or disproved by experience--and yet these material facts are not allowed in evidence by those who theoretically insist most vigorously upon facts.[23] The opponents of higher education for women, which practically is the same thing as co-education, have within a few years s.h.i.+fted their ground. At first it was a.s.serted that woman was not equal, mentally, to the thorough mastering of the higher branches of study. Having been driven from that position by the indisputable evidence of percentages on written examinations, they have taken up their new position with the a.s.sertion that women are not able physically to pursue a thorough and complete course of study--for, I repeat again, that for the ma.s.ses, co-education and higher education for women are practically one and the same thing.

In this position of the question, we have only two things for which to be profoundly thankful: The first is that we, as living women, are a.s.serted by no one to be composed of more than two parts--spirit and body. The second is, that we have in our own hands, at last, the means of finally disposing of this question, by disproving the second a.s.sertion.

To us as women, as wives, as mothers, as older sisters, as friends, as teachers, as college girls, as school girls, and to us alone, the settlement of the question has at last been fairly handed over. We have only, in all these relations, to learn the laws of physical health, and to obey them, and the whole matter will be set forever at rest. We have only to see to it, day and night, that our girls are educated into proper ways of living as regards food, clothing, sleep and exercise, till we have created for them a second nature of fixed, correct physical habits--and we alone can do this--and the end is at hand. We have at last the right to settle our own questions conceded to us. The responsibility of the decision, whether our girls are to have what we demand for them--nay, what they themselves are eagerly and persistently demanding, is decided, by the new position, to belong to us, and to us alone. Responsibility means duty. Are we ready to accept the one, and to perform the other?

FOOTNOTES: