Page:The physical training of children (IA 39002011126464.med.yale.edu).pdf/318

 much more effectually than from home. Moreover, it is a serious injury to a girl, in more ways than one, to separate her from her own brothers; they very much lose their affection for each other, and mutual companionship (so delightful and beneficial between brothers and sisters) is severed.

If home education be not practicable, great care must be taken in making choice of a school. Boarding-school education requires great reformation. Accomplishments, superficial acquirements, and brainwork are the order of the day; health is very little studied. You ought, in the education of your daughters, to remember that they, in a few years, will be the wives and the mothers of England; and if they have not health and strength, and a proper knowledge of household duties to sustain their characters, what useless, listless wives and mothers they will make!

Remember, then, the body and not the mind ought in early life to be principally cultivated and strengthened, and that the growing brain will not bear, with impunity, much book learning. The brain of a school-girl is frequently injured by getting up voluminous questions by rote, that are not of the slightest use or benefit to her or to any one else. Instead of this ridiculous system, educate a girl to be useful and self-reliant. "From babyhood they are given to understand that helplessness is feminine and beautiful; helpfulness, except in certain received forms of manifestation, unwomanly and ugly. The boys may do a thousand things which are 'not proper for little girls.'"

From her twelfth to her seventeenth year is the most important epoch of a girl's existence, as regards her future health, and consequently, in a great measure, her future happiness; and one in which, more than at any other period of her life, she requires a plentiful supply of fresh air, exercise, recreation, a variety of innocent amusements,