Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/813

 Now, if less time were consumed in girls' schools by mental work, more time would be allowed for mental as well as for bodily recreation. And, if the time thus gained were judiciously expended, I believe that, even as a matter of mental culture, more would be gained than lost. Suppose, for instance, that some time in every day were set apart for mental occupation of a voluntary kind—a good library of general though selected literature being provided for the use of the pupils, and the cultivation of art being allowed to rank as "mental occupation." In this way the more intellectual of the pupils would be able to receive that culture which only general reading can impart, the more artistic would be able to improve themselves in their art by additional practice, and even the unstudiously disposed would find in a standard novel a kind of reading less distasteful than Euclid.

And here, while treating of mental recreation among girls, I may add that school-life is the time when provision ought to be made for mental recreation in after-life. Be it observed that mental recreation is impossible unless there is a natural and more or less cultured taste for some branch or branches of mental work. Indeed, the capacity for such recreation is clearly proportional to the degree of such culture—an idealess mind being incapacitated for obtaining any variety of ideas. Hence the great importance of width of cultured interest, and the consequent duty of the heads of schools to ascertain the mental predilections of their pupils individually, and, in each case where such a predilection is apparent, to bestow special attention on its culture. If this were more generally done, I am convinced that the gain to their pupils in after-life would be enormous. We are living in a world teeming with interest on every side, but to make this interest our own possession we require a trained intelligence. It ought, therefore, to be one of the first aims of education to supply special training to special aptitudes, whereby the mind may be brought en rapport with the things in which it is by nature fitted to take most interest, and so in them to find a never-ending source of mental recreation. If this method were more universally adopted in girls' schools, ladies as a rule would be supplied with more internal resources of mental activity and cease to be so dependent for the stimulation of such activity on the mere excitement which is supplied by the external resources of society. But as it is, whether in the concert-room, the picture-gallery, the library, or the country walk, it is of most ladies literally and lamentably true, that having eyes they see not, and having ears they hear not, neither understand. Most ladies have a natural taste for some one or other of the many lines of intellectual activity, and if this taste were developed in early life it would grow with the knowledge on which it feeds, till in mature life it would become an unfailing source of pleasurable recreation. Yet in most cases such a taste in early life is not so much as discovered. For instance, how seldom it is that we meet, even among musical ladies, with any knowledge of harmony!