Three Addresses to Girls at School Part 1

Three Addresses to Girls at School.

by James Maurice Wilson.

PREFACE.

The following addresses were printed for private circulation among those to whom they were delivered. But they fell also into other hands; and I have been frequently asked to publish them. I hesitated, on account of the personal and local allusions; but I have found it impossible to remove these allusions, and I have therefore reprinted the addresses in their original form.

J.M.W.

CLIFTON COLLEGE,

_Sept. 1890._

I.

EDUCATION.

Now that I have given away the certificates it will be expected that I should make a few remarks on that inexhaustible subject, Education. My remarks will be brief.

I take this opportunity of explaining to our visitors the nature of the Higher Certificate examination. It is an examination inst.i.tuted originally to test the efficiency of the highest forms of our public schools, and to enable boys to pa.s.s the earlier University examinations while still at school. The subjects of study are divided into four groups. In order to obtain a certificate it is necessary to pa.s.s in four subjects taken from not less than three groups. A certificate therefore ensures a sound and fairly wide education. The subjects of the groups are languages, mathematics, English history, and lastly science. One concession is made to girls which is not made to boys. They are allowed to pa.s.s in two subjects one year, and two others the next, and thus obtain their certificates piecemeal. Boys have to pa.s.s in all four subjects the same year. The High School sent in seventeen candidates for the examination in two or three of the subjects--History, Elementary Mathematics, French, German, and Latin,--and fifteen of these pa.s.sed in two subjects at least: and, inasmuch as seven of them had in a previous year pa.s.sed in two other subjects, they obtained their certificates. The rest carry on their two subjects, and will, we hope, obtain their certificates next summer; six of them appear to be still in the school.

This is a very satisfactory result. The value of these certificates to the public is the testimony they give to the very high efficiency of the teaching. These examinations are not of the standard of the Junior or Senior Local Examinations. They are very much harder. And all who know about these matters see at a glance that a school that ventures to send in its girls for this examination only is aiming very high. The certificates for Music, given by the Harrow Music School examiners, are also recognised by the profession as having a considerable value. But on this subject I cannot speak with the same knowledge.

The value of these examinations to the mistresses is that they serve as a guide and standard for teaching. We are all of us the better for being thus kept up to the mark. Their value to you is that they help to make your work definite and sound: and that, if it is slipshod, you shall at any rate know that it is slipshod.

Therefore, speaking for the Council, and as the parent of a High School girl, and as one of the public, I may say that we set a very high value on these examinations and their results. They test and prove absolute merit. Now, you may have noticed that one of the characteristics of this school is the absence of all prizes and personal compet.i.tions within the school itself; all that only brings out the relative merit of individuals. I dare say you have wondered why this should be so, and perhaps grumbled a little. "Other girls," you say, "bring home prizes: our brothers bring home prizes; or at any rate have the chance of doing so--why don't we?" And not only you, but some friends of the school who would like to give prizes--for it is a great pleasure to give prizes--have sometimes wondered why Miss Woods says "No." I will tell you why. Miss Woods holds--and I believe she is quite right--that to introduce the element of compet.i.tion, while it would certainly stimulate the clever and industrious to more work, would also certainly tend to obscure and weaken the real motives for work in all, which ought to outlive, but do not always outlive, the age at which prizes are won.

Intelligent industry, without the inducement of prizes, is a far more precious and far more durable habit than industry stimulated by incessant compet.i.tion. Teaching and learning are alike the better for the absence of this element, when possible. I consider this to be one of the most striking characteristics of our High School, and one of which you ought to be most proud. It is a distinction of this school. And when you speak of it, as you well may do, with some pride, you will not forget that it is due entirely to the genius and character of your Head-mistress. I believe that one result will be, that you will be the more certain to continue to educate yourselves, and not to imagine that education is over when you leave school.

Is it necessary to say anything to you about the value of education? I think it is; because so many of the processes of education seem at the time to be drudgery, that any glimpses and reminders of the n.o.ble results attained by all this drudgery are cheering and encouraging. The reason why it is worth your while to get the best possible education you can, to continue it as long as you can, to make the very most of it by using all your intelligence and industry and vivacity, and by resolving to enjoy every detail of it, and indeed of all your school life, is that it will make you--_you yourself_--so much more of a person. More--as being more pleasant to others, more useful to others, in an ever-widening sphere of influence, but also more as attaining a higher development of your own nature.

Let us look at two or three ways in which, as you may easily see, education helps to do some of these things.

Education increases your interest in everything; in art, in history, in politics, in literature, in novels, in scenery, in character, in travel, in your relation to friends, to servants, to everybody. And it is _interest_ in these things that is the never-failing charm in a companion. Who could bear to live with a thoroughly uneducated woman?--a country milkmaid, for instance, or an uneducated milliner's girl. She would bore one to death in a week. Now, just so far as girls of your cla.s.s approach to the type of the milkmaid or the milliner, so far they are sure to be eventually mere gossips and bores to friends, family, and acquaintance, in spite of amiabilities of all sorts. Many-sided and ever-growing interests, a life and aims capable of expansion--the fruits of a trained and active mind--are the durable charms and wholesome influences in all society. These are among the results of a really liberal education. Education does something to overcome the prejudices of mere ignorance. Of all sorts of ma.s.sive, impenetrable obstacles, the most hopeless and immovable is the prejudice of a thoroughly ignorant and narrow-minded woman of a certain social position. It forms a solid wall which bars all progress. Argument, authority, proof, experience avail nought. And remember, that the prejudices of ignorance are responsible for far more evils in this world than ill-nature or even vice. Ill-nature and vice are not very common, at any rate in the rank of ladies; they are discountenanced by society; but the prejudices of ignorance--I am sure you wish me to tell you the truth--these are not rare.

Think, moreover, for a moment how much the cultivated intelligence of a few does to render the society in which we move more enjoyable: how it converts "the random and officious sociabilities of society" into a quickening and enjoyable intercourse and stimulus: everybody can recall instances of such a happy result of education. This can only be done by educated women. How much more might be done if there were more of them!

And think, too, how enormously a great increase of trained intelligence in our own cla.s.s--among such as you will be in a few years--would increase the power of dealing with great social questions. All sorts of work is brought to a standstill for want of trained intelligence. It is not good will, it is not enthusiasm, it is not money that is wanted for all sorts of work; it is good sense, trained intelligence, cultivated minds. Some rather difficult piece of work has to be done; and one runs over in one's mind who could be found to do it. One after another is given up. One lacks the ability--another the steadiness--another the training--another the mind awakened to see the need: and so the work is not done. "The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few." A really liberal education, and the influence at school of cultivated and vigorous minds, is the cure for this.

Again, you will do little good in the world unless you have wide and strong sympathies: wide--so as to embrace many different types of character; strong--so as to outlast minor rebuffs and failures. Now understanding is the first step to sympathy, and therefore education widens and strengthens our sympathies: it delivers us from ignorant prepossessions, and in this way alone it doubles our powers, and fits us for far greater varieties of life, and for the unknown demands that the future may make upon us.

I spoke of the narrowness and immovability of ignorance. There is another narrowness which is not due to ignorance so much as to persistent exclusiveness in the range of ideas admitted. Fight against this with all your might. The tendency of all uneducated people is to view each thing as it is by itself, each part without reference to the whole; and then increased knowledge of that part does little more than intensify the narrowness. Education--liberal education--and the a.s.sociation with many and active types of mind, among people of your own age, as well as your teachers, is the only cure for this. Try to understand other people's point of view. Don't think that you and a select few have a monopoly of all truth and wisdom. "It takes all sorts to make a world," and you must understand "all sorts" if you would understand the world and help it.

You are living in a great age, when changes of many kinds are in progress in our political and social and religious ideas. There never was a greater need of trained intelligence, clear heads, and earnest hearts. And the part that women play is not a subordinate one. They act directly, and still more indirectly. The best men that have ever lived have traced their high ideals to the influence of n.o.ble women as mothers or sisters or wives. No man who is engaged in the serious work of the world, in the effort to purify public opinion and direct it aright, but is helped or hindered by the women of his household. Few men can stand the depressing and degrading influence of the uninterested and placid amiability of women incapable of the true public spirit, incapable of a generous or n.o.ble aim--whose whole sphere of ideas is petty and personal. It is not only that such women do nothing themselves--they slowly asphyxiate their friends, their brothers, or their husbands.

These are the unawakened women; and education may deliver you from this dreadful fate, which is commoner than you think.

In no respect is the influence of women more important than in religion.

Much might be said of the obstacles placed in the way of religious progress by the crude and dogmatic prepossessions of ignorant women, who will rush in with confident a.s.sertion where angels might fear to tread: but this is neither the time nor the place for such remarks. It is enough to remind you that in no part of your life do you more need the width and modesty and courage of thought, and the delicacy of insight given by culture, than when you are facing the grave religious questions of the day, either for yourself or others.

But let me turn to a somewhat less serious subject. We earnestly desire that women should be highly educated. And yet is there not a type of educated woman which we do not wholly admire? I am not going to caricature a bluestocking, but to point out one or two real dangers.

Education is good; but perfect sanity is better still. Sanity is the most excellent of all women's excellences. We forgive eccentricity and one-sidedness--the want of perfect sanity--in men, and especially men of genius; and we rather reluctantly forgive it in women of genius; but in ordinary folk, no. These are the strong-minded women; ordinary folk, who make a vigorous protest against one or two of the minor mistakes of society, instead of lifting the whole: I should call these, women of imperfect sanity. It is a small matter that you should protest against some small maladjustment or folly; but it is a great matter that you should be perfectly sane and well-balanced. Now education helps sanity.

It shows the proportion of things. An American essayist bids us "keep our eyes on the fixed stars." Education helps us to do this. It helps us to live the life we have to lead on a higher mental and spiritual level it glorifies the actual.

And now, seeing these things are so, what ought to be the att.i.tude of educated girls and women towards pleasures, the usual pleasures of society? Certainly not the cynical one--"Life would be tolerable if it were not for its pleasures." Pleasures do make up, and ought to make up, a considerable portion of life. Now I have no time for an essay on pleasures. I will only offer two remarks. One is that the pleasure open to all cultivated women, even in the pleasures that please them least, is the pleasure of giving pleasure. Go to give pleasure, not to get it, and that converts anything into a pleasure. The other remark is, Pitch your ordinary level of life on so quiet a note that simple things shall not fail to please. If home, and children, and games, and the daily routine of life--if the sight of October woods and the Severn sea, and of human happy faces fail to please, then either in fact or in imagination you are drugging yourself with some strong drink of excitement, and spoiling the natural healthy appet.i.te for simple pleasures. This is one of the dangers of educated women: but it is their danger because they are imperfectly educated: educated on one side, that of books; and not on the other and greater side, of wide human sympathies. Society seems to burden and narrow and dull the uneducated woman, but it also hardens and dulls a certain sort of educated woman too, one who refuses her sympathies to the pleasures of life. But to the fuller nature, society brings width and fresh clearness. It gives the larger heart and the readier sympathy, and the wider the sphere the more does such a nature expand to fill it.

What I am now saying amounts to this, that an educated intelligence is good, but an educated sympathy is better. I recall certain lines written by the late Lord Carlisle on being told that a lady was plain and commonplace:--

"You say that my love is plain, But that I can never allow, When I look at the thought for others That is written on her brow.

"The eyes are not fine, I own, She has not a well-cut nose, But a smile for others' pleasure And a sigh for others' woes.

"Quick to perceive a want, Quicker to set it right, Quickest in overlooking Injury, wrong, or slight.

"Hark to her words to the sick, Look at her patient ways, Every word she utters Speaks to the speaker's praise.

"Purity, truth, and love, Are they such common things?

If hers were a common nature Women would all have wings.

"Talent she may not have, Beauty, nor wit, nor grace, But until she's among the angels She cannot be commonplace."

There is something to remember: cultivate sympathy, gentleness, forgiveness, purity, truth, love: and then, though you may have no other gifts, "until you're among the angels, you cannot be commonplace."

And here I might conclude. But I should not satisfy myself or you, if I did so without paying my tribute of genuine commendation to the High School, and of hearty respect for the Head-mistress and her staff of teachers. Clifton owes Miss Woods a great debt for the tone of high-mindedness and loyalty, for the moral and intellectual stamp that she has set on the School. She has won, as we all know, the sincere respect and attachment of her mistresses and her old pupils; and the older and wiser you grow the more you all will learn to honour and love her. And you will please her best by thorough loyalty to the highest aims of the School which she puts before you by her words and by her example.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: An Address given at the High School, Clifton, Oct. 25, 1887.]

II.

HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION FOR GIRLS.

HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION FOR GIRLS.[2]

It is a real pleasure to find myself in Bath on an educational mission.