CHAPTER VI.ON EDUCATION.
“Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.”—Tennyson, “The Princess”.
“Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.”—Tennyson, “The Princess”.
In order to understand Dorothea Beale’s work and that of her many contemporaries who were working towards the same end, it is necessary to know something of the depths to which girls’ education had sunk in that day. All readers of Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies” are familiar with his bitter invective against the attitude of parents towards this important question, and his passionate appealfor reform. And Ruskin was only one of the many men who realised the pity of the paltry and superficial education that girls received, and the extent to which the whole world suffered on this account. So strong had public feeling become among the better educated on this burning question that, in the year 1864, a Schools’ Inquiry Commission was instituted; and as far as possible a thorough investigation was made of the subject. Reports on Girls’ Schools were given byMr.Fitch,Mr.Bryce, and others.
To all interested in education the Blue Book is an extremely interesting document. The evidence and reports are based on what was seen and known, and present a terrible indictment of the then condition of girls’ schools.
“Although,” saysMr.Bryce, “the world has now existed for several thousand years, the notion that women have minds as cultivable and worth cultivating as men’s minds is still regarded by the ordinary British parent as an offensive, not to say a revolutionary, paradox.”
Dorothea Beale’s report, the one with which we are most concerned here, is very comprehensive, and gives not only her theories of education but also an account of the methods employed in her school. The questions asked give a good idea of the many questions that disturbed the minds of thoughtful people of that day; the anxiety lest higher education should injure the health of girls; the fear of the over-stimulating effects of examinations, of the publicity of examination results and of the possible effects on girls’ natural reserve and modesty.
In her reply to the various questions asked, Dorothea Beale gave a good deal of information about her own school and the condition of education it revealed. The Entrance Examination at Cheltenham showed as a rule deplorable results. Frequently girls came from expensive schools incapable of writing, spelling, or composing in their own language, almost ignorant of Frenchgrammar and scarcely able to work correctly the simplest sums in arithmetic.
“I think the remedy for bad work,” said she, “is to bring such work to the light. I think it is because it has all been carried on in darkness, because the parents are not able to distinguish between good and bad, and nobody knows that things have reached such a state.”
She then went into some particulars about the work at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, hours of work, the rule by personal influence rather than by punishments, the law of silence and her approval of examinations as leading to more thorough work. She also went into the reasons why she considered that women were better educators of girls than men, andceteris paribuswere quite equal to them as teachers. The education of boys at that time she considered to be rather unsatisfactory, and too limited in scope. She did not believe that boys and girls should be taught on absolutely different lines, as that would undoubtedly hinder friendship andcamaraderiein marriage as well as in ordinary social intercourse.
On the question of health Miss Beale was most emphatic. She did not believe that study alone injured health, and in her belief she is more in sympathy with the thought of to-day than with that of twenty or thirty years ago. Examinations and study in the early days of higher education for women seemed to work a good deal of havoc with health. But when we look back in the light of modern thought much of the harm seems to have been wrought by unscientific arrangement of hours of work—it was considered heroic to “burn the midnight oil”; the eating of insufficient or unsuitable food; the undertaking of strenuous work by delicate girls unfit for hard work of any kind; and the lack of wholesome recreation.
When she was asked byMr.Acland about the effect of eagerness in study on the health of girls about sixteen, she replied:—
“I think it improved their health very much, and I amsure great harm is often done by a hasty recommendation to throw aside all study when a temperate and wisely regulated mental diet is really required. They will not do nothing—you cannot say to the human mind that it shall absolutely rest; but if they have not wholesome and proper and unexciting occupations they will spend their time on sensational novels and things much more injurious to their health. When I have heard complaints about health being injured by study, they have proceeded from those who have done least work at college. Indeed I do not know of any case of a pupil who has really worked and whose health has been injured: we have had complaints in a few cases where the girls have been decidedly not industrious.”
The following emphatic statement expresses the opinion of most educationalists on the deplorable effect that “just going to live at home” has on the health of many girls. There are few things that teachers of senior girls dread more than an aimless life in a home where there are no responsibilities and no definite duties. There is no real reason, of course, why this should be so, as a girl of leisure at home has often opportunities of doing work that no one else can do; but many lack the energy and enterprise for seeking out such work, and are, in consequence, idle and miserable:—
“For one girl in the higher middle classes who suffers from overwork, there are, I believe, hundreds whose health suffers from the feverish love of excitement, from the irritability produced by idleness and frivolity and discontent. I am persuaded, and my opinion has been confirmed by experienced doctors, that the want of wholesome occupation lies at the root of much of the languid debility of which we hear so much after girls have left school.”
She also gave some account of her own methods of teaching. French and German were studied before Latin and Greek. In Geometry she always dealt withthe propositions as riders, and employed methods which, twenty years later, became common in all schools. This was somewhat extraordinary at a time when many children, boys and girls alike, understood so little of what was required, that they learned the propositions by heart. Science was taught so as to create not specialists but human beings with an intelligent but general understanding of the phenomena of everyday life. It is interesting to read in a pamphlet published this year, 1919, by the Ministry of Reconstruction, that much of the present day lack of interest in Science is due to the lack of general training of this kind. Foundations are laid at school as if every man and every woman were going to be a scientist, and the average boy and girl leave school with a certain amount of skill in measuring and weighing, but with none of that illuminating general knowledge that makes the world so vastly interesting.
In religious teaching, “we try,” said Dorothea Beale, “to make our teaching practical as regards the daily duties of life upon which we are all agreed, instead of dwelling on points of doctrine wherein we differ”.
Dorothea Beale was always anxious to work in sympathy with parents, not in antagonism to their aims. She realised, as does every wise teacher, that parents see a quite different side of their children and was glad of any information that might be a help in understanding the child. She was very desirous that people should be frank with her if there was any cause of dissatisfaction with the school, and was most anxious to know if a child was at all overworked. Any complaint of this kind was at once dealt with, and if a child was overworked the remedy of dropping one or two subjects was usually applied.
Along with other educationalists of that day Miss Beale deplored the excessive amount of time given to the practice of the piano, complaining that it absorbed energies that ought to be used for the general culture of the mind.She suggested that no girl should give more than one hour a day to the piano, unless she had decided talent, that parents should cease to attach so exaggerated a value to this accomplishment, and that those who had a natural incapacity should be allowed to leave off music altogether.
Our generation is beginning at last to allow music for girls to take only its fair share of time along with other subjects and to train the mind and soul to appreciate rather than the hands merely to perform. We are beginning to realise that born musicians are few, though the need for music in life is universal. To train the ear to hear, the body to feel rhythm, is held to be more important than the mere technique of piano-playing.