Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/178

 separation which are unconnected with our subject, it will be found that the one, or the other order of minds, suffers a disadvantage by being compelled to keep to the same pace. Boys especially, would not easily be brought up to that pitch of strenuous application which in itself, and as a habit, is of the utmost importance to them, while in training with their sisters. It may indeed happen that the girls of a family surpass their brothers in intelligence, and in assiduity, and so might with ease be made to advance step by step with them, even in the severer studies. Nevertheless the former must be made to buckle on an armour, and to gird themselves for a conflict with which it would be not merely useless, but a positive disadvantage to the latter to have any thing to do. No good end can be answered by inuring the female mind to arduous, long-continued, mental exertions.

It is chiefly a moral advantage that boys will derive from association with their sisters at home; and it is chiefly an intellectual advantage which will accrue to the latter from this combination: for while the girls of a family will leave their brothers to advance beyond them in certain arduous paths, they will, with them, come under an animating intellectual treatment, such as it would be very difficult to realize in training them apart.

The points of difference between male and female education relate, first, to that natural diversity of TASTES, which distinguishes the two, from the very dawn of the mind.

It must be theorists, not parents, or not the parents of many children, who attribute this diversity to arbitrary circumstances of treatment. But if, as is manifest, it result from the constitution of nature, it should be respected and allowed for. Taking what is proper to male education as our standard, then female education should be modified in respect of the tastes of the female mind, by never going very far, if ever at all, from the pleasurable associations of