Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/811

 unhealthy soil of ennui in a depressing atmosphere of dullness; and, as too frequent a consequence, she leaves school with a sickly and enervated constitution, capable perhaps of high vivacity for a short time, but speedily collapsing under the strain of a few hours of bodily or mental activity. Now all this is the precise reverse of what school life ought to be. The only aim of most of the higher girls' schools seems to be that of turning out pupils with a superficial knowledge of a variety of subjects, with such accomplishments as they may be able, by hard practice, to acquire, and with a well-drilled sense of the part that a young lady is to play in the complicated tragedy of etiquette. Now it is no doubt sufficiently desirable that girls, and especially young ladies, should be well educated; but, in my opinion, it is of far greater importance that schoolgirls should leave school with the maximum of bodily vigor that a wise and judicious nurture can impart, than that they should do so with minds educated to any level that you please to name within the limits of natural possibility. I should therefore like to see all girls' schools professedly regarded as places of recreation no less than as places of education—as places of bodily, no less than as places of mental culture. And, if this is considered too strong a statement of the case, it must at least be allowed that far more permanently beneficial work would be done by girls, both at school and after they leave it, if more permanently beneficial play were allowed. At present in most schools, with all indoor romping sternly forbidden as unladylike, all outdoor games regarded as impossible recreations for girls of their age and social position, the unfortunate prisoners are restricted in their exercise to a properly prison-like routine—a daily walk in twos and twos, all bound by the stiff chains of conventionality, with nothing to relieve the dull monotony of the well-known way, and one's constant companion being determined, not by any entertaining suitability of temperament, but by an accidental suitability of height. Could there be devised a more ludicrous caricature of all that we mean by recreation?

Do we want to know the remedy? The remedy is as simple as the abuse is patent. Let every school whose situation permits be provided with a good playground, and let every form of outdoor amusement be encouraged to the utmost. Schools situated in towns, and therefore unable to provide private playgrounds, might club together and rent a joint playground—care, of course, being taken that the social standing of all the schools which so club together should be about equal. Some such arrangement would soon be arrived at by town schools if parents generally would bestow more thought on the importance of their children's health, and turn a deaf ear to all the qualifications of a school, however good, which does not provide for the proper recreation of its pupils.

Of course I shall be met by the objection that, by encouraging active outdoor games among schoolgirls, we should rub off the bloom,