Page:On Secondary Instruction, as relating to Girls.djvu/9

. There seems to be as yet no body of opinion formed out of the floating mass, unanimous enough to be authoritative and competent to pronounce upon what branches of study are in themselves most worthy, what are most useful as educational instruments, what proportion of time should be allotted to each, and the many other complicated questions which must be answered before a scheme of education can be produced. When that happy discovery shall at last have been made, it will probably be found also that the same course is, in the main, the best for both boys and girls, the object being substantially the same, that of awakening and strengthening and adorning the human spirit. That this great work should at least be well begun during the period allotted to secondary instruction, is especially necessary in the case of women, because with this first stage their education ends. I do not mean, of course, that a girl necessarily lays aside all study on leaving school, any more than a man does on taking his degree, but that the end of the school course is the same kind of educational terminus to a woman that graduation is to a man. When a girl leaves school, her strictly professional studies assume a greater prominence. In using the word professional, I do not refer to any trade or business, but to the profession which absorbs the great majority of women, that of marriage. For this calling, some technical preparation is required. The amount cannot be great, as under existing social arrangements, a thorough acquaintance with needle-work and cookery—the very easiest of arts—includes I believe all the special knowledge required by the mistress of a household. But setting aside the question, whether it is desirable that the merely professional training should begin so early—"the second and finishing stage of a liberal education" being altogether omitted—it seems obvious enough, that if regular, methodical instruction is to cease at the age of eighteen, it is the more imperative that the culture, up to that period, should be wide and deep and humane in the highest possible degree. A man has some chance of making up at the university the deficiencies of his school training; or if he passes direct from school to business, there is a possibility that he may find in his daily work something of the mental and moral discipline that he needs. But a girl who leaves school unawakened, is not likely to be roused from her lethargy by anything in her home life. The dissipation to which, in the absence of any spur to wholesome activity, so many girls give themselves up, completes the deadening process begun at school.

I have endeavoured to set forth, very imperfectly, but at least without exaggeration, some of the reasons for devoting to this subject more attention than has hitherto been bestowed upon it. Once again I would venture to urge, with the utmost insistance, that it is not a "woman's question." Let me entreat thinking men to dismiss from their minds the belief, that this is a thing with which they have no concern. They cannot help exerting a most serious influence upon it. Silence sometimes teaches more