May 31, 1871 — Society of Arts, London, England

 

Some time ago, the Pall Mall Gazette said that “the world was vexing itself to distraction over woman’s health, woman’s rights, woman’s wrongs, woman’s work, and woman’s education,” and it is undoubtedly true that the women’s question, as it is called, has assumed of late a very prominent place among those which occupy the attention of the public. A wit once remarked that the best way to get rid of a temptation was to yield to it; and I would suggest to those who are distanced by the various pleas advanced on behalf of women, that the best way to be rid of hearing of their wrongs would be to right them.

The grievance I have specially to call your attention to this evening is the low condition of women’s education, the inadequate provision made for it out of the endowments of the country, and the difficulty of obtaining support from the general public for any scheme having for its object their higher education.

In what I have to say, I shall only touch very slightly on the classes which come under the Elementary Education Act, and for this reason, that in those classes girls do, on the whole, share all the educational advantages equally with the boys. They receive the same instruction, with the addition of sewing; they are examined by the same inspectors and by the same standards; their teachers undergo the same special training for their work, and receive the same certificates of efficiency. In their case, therefore, there is no special grievance to complain of the inferiority of girls’ schools of that class, and of the results obtained in them, is due, where it exists, to the general causes which affect women’s education as a whole, causes, which I propose to point out further on, and which can be removed, only by a change in the public opinion whence they spring. It is, then, to the education given to girls in all schools above the elementary schools, that I propose to dwell this evening. I shall leave theories aside, and bring before you facts resting upon authority which cannot be questioned; and the main source I have drawn upon is the volume before you, containing “Reports of the Schools Inquiry Commission on the Education of Girls,” together with the evidence given before the Commissioners by ladies of tried ability and great experience in the education of their own sex. To these I have added extracts from the evidence given before the Commissioners by various gentlemen interested in education. The reports were collected and reprinted in the convenient shape you see here, with the sanction of her Majesty’s commissioners, by Miss [Dorothea] Beale, who is at the head of a most successful educational institution for girls — the Ladies’ College at Cheltenham — one of the very few proprietary schools for girls in the country; and Miss Beale has added to the volume a very valuable preface, giving the results of her own large experience, and adding all the weight of her testimony to the truth of the sad picture presented by the reports.

The Commissioners, in their General Report, sum up the result of the assistant-Commissioners’ inquiries in the following words: — “Want of thoroughness and foundation; want of system; slovenliness and showy superficiality; inattention to rudiments; undue time given to accomplishments, and those not taught intelligently, or in any scientific manner; want of organisation.”

Mr. Norris’s evidence, quoted in the above report as the most concise and accurate view of the state of girls’ schools, is to this effect: — “We find, as a rule, a very small amount of professional skill, an inferior set of school books, a vast deal of dry, uninteresting task work, rules put into the memory with no explanation of their principles, no system of examination worthy of the name, a very false estimate of the relative value of the several kinds of acquirement, a reference to effect rather than solid worth, a tendency to fill or adorn rather than to strengthen the mind.” Taking these points more in detail, I will try to reproduce, in slight but accurate outline, the picture given in this volume of the education by which the future wives and mothers of the lower and upper middle-classes of this country, and the large and ever-increasing number of single women who have to earn their own bread, and often the bread of others, are trained for their work in life. I must first, however, remind you that the standard of comparison by which the inspectors judged the education of girls was not any standard of ideal or theoretical perfection, but that of the education given to boys in the same grades of society, — an education which, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold, leaves our young men of the upper classes barbarians; of the middle class, Philistines; of the lower class, heathens. Without accepting this extreme view, it is abundantly evident, from the reports of the Schools Inquiry commission, that the standard is not a high one, and that nothing can give so deplorable a measure of the low condition of girls’ education as the fact that it is unanimously pronounced, on the best authority, to be very inferior to that of boys.

The only points on which this judgment is reversed in favour of the girls are reading and spelling. The reading is almost invariably spoken of as good. As regards religious knowledge, again, the evidence is not unfavourable, and it is worth noticing that the religious difficulty is even less felt in girls’ schools than in boys’ schools. The religious knowledge, however, for which the girls get credit seems too be little more than a tolerably accurate acquaintance with the facts of Scripture history and the outlines of the Christian faith, and cannot therefore rank high as an element of education. As regards the mere facts of history and geography the girls are sometimes better than the boys; but, with rare exceptions, the teaching is superficial, and from miserable catechisms or compendiums of knowledge, such as Mangnall’s Questions, and others of the same type.

With regard to grammar, Mr. Bryce’s statement expresses the substance of all the reports on the subject. He says: — “In four-fifths of the schools, both higher and lower, English grammar means the committal to memory of Lindley Murray or of some one of his less illustrious brethren, and it was surprising to see how little notion even intelligent teachers had of handling the subject in a rational way.”

The arithmetic is even more unsatisfactory than the grammar. The Commissioners, in their general report, refer to it as the “weak point” in women teachers. Mr. Bryce says “the teaching in this subject is poor, slow, unintelligent; to speak more correctly, there is no teaching, only a languid working of sums.” “I feel quite certain,” says Mr. Fearon, “that if the girls in half a dozen of the best national schools, formerly under my inspection, were tried in elementary arithmetic against the young ladies of an equal age in half a dozen of the best schools that I examined, the national schools would produce better results. It would be tedious to multiply quotations all repeating the same testimony. I would only remark, that this arithmetical deficiency in girls’ schools does not appear to be owing to any natural ineptitude, for where the teaching was good, the girls proved themselves equal and even superior to the boys.

Physical science has a place in girls’ schools, but Mr. Bompas found it only “a subject for lectures.” Mr. Giffard reports it “as read only from text-books;” and Mr. Fitch says that “it is nowhere taught systematically, and that it is commonly unintelligible.” After mentioning that astronomy and the use of the globes, by some curious law, seem to be recognised as constituting the one department of science especially interesting to girls, he adds, “few things are sadder than to find how the sublimest of all physical sciences is vulgarsed in ladies’ schools.”

Modern languages and music, to which, according to Mr. Fitch, one-third of a girl’s school life is devoted, fare little better.

“In fashionable schools,” says Mr. Bryce, “girls of good abilities, when they leave school at 17, can usually translate an ordinary author with some facility, and turn an easy phrase of English into French, which, if neither idiomatic for accurate, is at least intelligible.” . . . . “It is quite exceptional to find them able to do more than this, that is to say, to write a theme in French, or to show such a familiarity with words and phrases as would enable them to keep up a conversation for ten minutes.”

Mr. Fearon says: — “Young ladies of 16 or 18, who’s parents were paying from £100 to £150 a year for their education, were found ignorant of the inflections of the most common irregular verbs, and unable to turn a simple sentence into French without blunders.”

The specimens given are almost incredible, and, for that reason, I should have been glad to quote them verbatim, but must refrain from want of time. Two of the assistant-commissioners class French with arithmetic as the weak points in the school teaching of girls, a result not a little astonishing, considering that it is one of the two subjects (music being the other) which are considered by parents all-important in a girl’s education.

But though such stress is laid upon music, though commissioner after commissioner complains of the manner in which it interferes with other studies by the time it requires, and with the discipline of a school by the impossibility of teaching it in class, music is apparently no better taught, as a rule, than French.

Mr. Bryce says he was assured that the common way of teaching it was not “only unscientific but irrational and wasteful.” The same opinion is given by other inspectors, yet Mr. Bryce adds: — “At present music occupies pretty nearly as much of a girl’s life as classics do of a boy’s.”

Drawing, of course, is taught with an equal disregard to thoroughness, to scientific principles, and to the cultivation of artistic feeling and taste, and it has, besides, this disadvantage, that the common practice of masters in touching up their pupils’ performances for exhibition at home fosters a habit of dishonesty, and that too prevalent tendency running through the whole of female education, the tendency to care more for appearance than reality, to seem rather than to be. I will now give you some of the general results of their inspection of girls’ schools expressed by the different assistant-commissioners.

“It is no exaggeration to say,” states Mr. Fitch, “that in the mass of girls’ schools the intellectual aims are very low, and the attainments lower than the aims. The course of instruction is ver narrow. It leaves many of the pupils’ best faculties unused . . . If the reproach be just that women do not reason accurately, and that their knowledge, even when they possess it, is deficient in organic unity, in coherence, and in depth, there is no need to look for any recondite explanation of the fact. The state of the schools in which they are educated sufficiently explains it.”

Mr. Stanton says: — “The ignorance in many of these lower and middle class schools was most profound, and I cannot but remember that I probably only saw the better specimens.”

Mr. Gifford sums up the impressions he derived from his visits to girls’ schools thus: — “That the mental training of the best girls’ schools is unmistakably inferior to that of the best boys’ schools; and the great and obvious feature of all girls’ schools, except those of the very humblest, is the enormous preponderance given to accomplishments.”

I might multiply these extracts to any extent, but, my time being limited, I will add only a few passages from the reports of Mr. Fearon and Mr. Gifford, whose districts, embracing London and its neighbourhood, and Surrey and Sussex, contains the highest grade girls schools in the country. Mr. Fearon concludes, as regards schools of the first grade: — (1.) “The provision in London is most inadequate.” (2.) “The cost of education is very high.” (3.) “The buildings and premises of almost all these schools, whether day or boarding, is most unsatisfactory.” “Except Queen’s and Bedford Colleges, where gentlemen are employed in teaching, and at a very few private schools whose principals have determined to make a stand against the frivolous character of girls’ education, the quality of the visiting teachers of language and science is very inferior in girls’ schools of the first grade.” Further on, after stating that he thought it advisable to pitch his standard in judging of the elementary work in secondary girls’ schools not quite so high as he had been used to pitch it in reporting on elementary girls’ schools, he says: — “I have no record of any class of girls about twelve years old, in any first grade school that I examined, reaching the standard of good.”

I will complete this picture of the state of women’s education by some extracts from the evidence given before the Schools Enquiry Commissioners. Mr. Sargant stated in his evidence — “That the education of girls in Birmingham, of what he terms the middle class, is disgracefully bad; that they are very much worse educated than their brothers — very much worse than those who go to any school under Her Majesty’s Inspectors.”

Mr. Roche, whose classes in Cadogan-gardens have been attended for years by girls of the higher classes, says — “The defects which I have observed in my pupils, as the result of their previous education, are, a want of grammatical knowledge, even in English, and an indistinct pronunciation of the mother-tongue. Everything is done by memory, with abominable books of exercises and keys for grammar, of questions and dry answers for history, geography, and astronomy. There is very little development of intellectual faculties.”

Miss Emily Davies, now a member of the London School Board, and well known as having devoted herself to the cause of female education, says: — “I have come across the best school-mistresses. They always speak a great deal of the bad preparation of the girls who come to them. They say they are perfectly ignorant. Their ignorance is unfathomable.”

Miss Beale, the editor of these reports, states of female education in the class of life to which her pupils belong, i.e. of independent gentlemen and professional men, that “it is defective in an extraordinary degree. That it is worse than that received by persons of a much humbler condition at the national schools; and, in a note to page 198, she says: — “Some, who produced papers almost inconceivably bad, have, to my knowledge, spent many years at school. . . . . Evidence is afforded that there are expensive schools where pupils who have naturally fair abilities may remain for years without obtaining the rudiments of education. . . . . I mean, leave them incapable of writing, spelling, or composing fairly in their own language; almost ignorant of French grammar, and scarcely able to work the simplest sum correctly.”

Miss Wolstenholme, herself the mistress of a young ladies’ school, says “that from what she hears, she should imagine that, in spite of external accomplishments, the girls of the middle-class really are not very much better educated than the girls of the same age in the National Schools. They have external accomplishments, but no solid information.”

Miss Buss, the principal of the North London Collegiate School for Girls, which she has raised to an endowed school by investing in trust for its benefit the earnings of her 20 years’ work there, says, in answer to the question whether she thought that the girls who came there from the preparatory schools were in a better or worse state of instruction than boys similarly circumstanced, “I do not know about the boys, I know that the girls could not be worse prepared than they are.”

Some tables which have been furnished to me by the head of a large secondary day-school, attended by daughters of tradesmen, clerks, and a few of independent means, give the following results of entrance examinations: — Of 26 girls, whose ages averaged 12 1/2, the number of faults in an easy English dictation of ten lines were about nine to each girl. Out of ten questions in easy arithmetic given to each girl, there was an average of nine incorrect answers. The reading generally was bad. One pupil, not reckoned among the above, who was entered as the daughter of a gentlewoman, could not do anything. She had not been to school, and implied she had not leart anything.

Mr. Carleton Tufnell, in answer to my request that he would give me the results of his experience, wrote me a letter, of which the following are extracts: — “Every teacher appointed to a school under the Poor-Law Board must undergo an examination, and in this way I have come to know the sort of education which many of the women who apply for these situations have received. The examination is extremely slight . . . . . The questions are not at all more difficult than could be ready answered by any pupil in the first class of an ordinary village school. A first class in a really good village school would go far beyond them . . . . . The papers are sometimes so bad that we are only justified in passing the writers at all by the consideration that if we do not accept them we should get no candidates for the places at all. The candidates are always respectable women of the middle-class, and have sometimes been governesses in private families, yet their writing is often hardly intelligible, and deformed with such mistakes in spelling as will put them any examination for the lowest Civil Service examination. Their Biblical knowledge is excessively meagre, and their arithmetic worst of all, generally not going further than the simple rules, and if they try a sum in multiplication of money, the working commonly shows fatal blunders. Sometimes, seeing that candidates know nothing of these elementary branches of education, I have asked what they do know, and what they have been accustomed to teach in private families. The answer is crochet, the piano, French, Italian. Of course, it is obvious that their knowledge of all these subjects must be extremely limited.”

The evidence I have given applies mainly to the middle-class in its three strata, lower, middle, and upper; but I have reason to believe that in the higher classes, the gentry and aristocracy, who are mostly educated at home, although the instruction given may be better, and the standard of information somewhat higher, there is just as little systematic training of the intellectual powers, of reason and imagination, just as little appreciation of knowledge, of the higher forms of literature, or of real excellence in the pursuit of any art.

It should be noted that the education given to girls, the results of which I have just laid before you, is exceedingly expensive; the Commissioners in their general report, state that the cost of girls’ schooling, where it varies from that of boys of the same class, varies on the side of more expense. Mr. Bryce says “that the charges in first-rate schools in Manchester seem moderate compared with those of the most fashionable London or Brighton schools, but they make a girl’s education nearly twice as expensive as that far more solid and practically useful education which a boy receives.” So that the practical British parent not only procures for his daughter a very and article but pays very highly for it.

It would be gross unfairness to lay the blame of the miserably low standard of equation given in girls’ schools upon the mistresses. The number of proprietary or endowed schools for girls is very small. The immense majority are private schools, kept by ladies who must live by them, who cannot afford to refuse pupils on the ground of their insufficient preparation, and who must supply the kind of education the pupils’ parents are willing to pay for. As Miss Buss says, in her evidence given before the Commissioners, “It is so entirely a matter of necessity for the mistress to live, that she is obliged to allow the children to do as they like, and the parents too.” Miss Davies, after saying that many of those she had had to do with were intelligent and conscientious, added: — “They complain very much of their difficulties, and explained their difficulties to be that they have had very imperfect training themselves, and they are hampered by want of money. Very often, too, they are at the mercy of very ignorant parents.”

This is the root of the whole matter; there is no demand for a better education for girls. “Although the world has existed several thousand years,” says Mr. Bryce, “the notion that women have minds as cultivable and as well worth cultivating as men’s minds is still regarded by the ordinary British parents as an offensive, not to say a revolutionary, pardox.” The same commissioner says, “that he lost no opportunity of inquiring from schoolmistresses their experience in this matter. Their answer was invariably the same. Mothers are acutely sensitive to anything which may affect their daughter’s social success, whether it be the “selectness” of the school or its situation, or the fame of the music and dancing masters. They are profoundly indifferent to their diligence (as a moral quality), or to their progress in the more solid branches of an English education. If a girl begins to get interested in the school work, and is seen in the evening busy over her theme, her mother comes to me and says, ‘Now, Miss, you must not make Augusta a blue.'”

It would be tedious, even if I had time, to repeat the opinion of each inspector. Suffice it to say that their testimony, and that of the ladies examined before the commissioners, is unanimous upon the point that the indifference of parents to the education of their daughters, beyond the conventional standard of the society they live in, and the accomplishments which may promote their success in it, is the real stumbling-block in the way of any improvement. This holds good even in the class who receive their education in the national schools. If we seek for the cause of this indifference, we shall find it in that fatal view of education which regards only its money value, and estimates it solely as a means of “getting on.” “The knowledge which will pay in the business or pursuits a lad is likely to enter is fully appreciated by the parents,” Says Mr. Fitch; “but the only business of life which they contemplate for their daughters is marriage, and they ask for an education which will fit her for this end. And the accomplishments which they value are those which promise rather to increase her attractiveness before marriage than her happiness or usefulness after that event.” I could quote passage after passage to the same effect from these reports, and from every writer on female education, and I appeal to the experience of everyone present to confirm the accuracy of the statement. There is a pretty theory abroad, which is always brought forward when women’s education is talked about, i.e., that they are educated to be wives and mothers. I do not know a more fallacious one. They are not educated to be wives, but to get husbands. They are not educated to be mothers; if they were, they would require and obtain the highest education that could be given, in order to fit them for the highest duties a human being can perform. They are not educated to be the mistresses of housholds; if they were, their judgment would be as sedulously trained, habits of method and accuracy as carefully formed, as they are now neglected. They would not give, as Mr. Bryce calculates, 5,520 hours of their school life to music against 640 to arithmetic; and social and political economy, which are scarcely thought of in their course of instruction now, would take the foremost place in it. What they are educated for is to come up to a certain conventional standard accepted in the class to which they belong, to adorn (if they can) the best parlors or the drawing-room, as it may be, to gratify a mother’s vanity, to amuse a father’s leisure hours, above all, to get married. And here I must mention the cruel result of this fixed idea in men’s minds that their daughters are to be provided for by marriage. No other provision is made for them, nor are they trained or allowed to provide for themseles. From the highest ranks of the aristocracy down to the lowest stratum of the middle-class, the rule, which is best proved by the few exemptions to it, is that no adequate provision, if any, is made for daughters. £5,000, which invested in Consols would produce £150 per anum, is the ordinary fortune of a peer’s or country gentleman’s daughter, who has been bred up from her cradle in the lap of luxury. A solicitor in large practice told a friend of mine that he had constantly reason, in drawing up wills and settlements for rich and aristocratic clients, to ask the question, “Do you intend your daughters to live in lodgings with one servant?” Among the poorer gentry and the professional classes, no provision at all is or can be made for daughters, and the only thing which might be done for them, i.e., to train them by education and habits to provide for themselves, is not done or even thought of. They are brought up to think it a degradation to gentlewomen to work for their bread, and when the time comes, as it too surely must come to large numbers, when they can get no bread but what they work for, they find themselves as utterly unfitted for the work as they were taught to believe the work was unfitted for them. The only occupation open to them is the very one for which they are least prepared, i.e., that of a governmess, which, for that reason, is overstocked with incompetent people; and even that involves some loss of caste. We hear much of the sanctit of marriage, of the happiness of domestic life. Is the best way to preserve them to make the worldly and pecuniary motives for entering upon marriage so strong as to overpower all others? if the girl who sells herself for the comforts or luxuries of life turns out to be a wife who thinks more of the things she bargained for than the duties she accepted in return, they, at least, have no right to throw a stone at her whose customs reduce her to the alternative of marrying for a provision, or leading a life of poverty, so dull, so narrow, so colourless, so exiled from all she has been taught to value, that only the highest strain of moral courage is equal to accepting it voluntarily. It is easy to laugh at old maids, it is easy to praise them as the sisters of mercy of life, it is not easy to measure the amount of silent suffering, of slow wasting away of hope, of energy, of faculty, as the woman sees her youth passing away, the boundless horizon of earlier years narrowing more and more, middle age finding her as helplessly dependent in her father’s house, as unable to gratify a single taste, to follow a single pursuit, which does not chime in with his fancies, as she was at 18, or left alone to struggle, untrained and unarmed, in the fierce battle of life for the very means of living. In the last report of the Society for the Employment of Women, it is stated that, according to the census of 1861, there were upwards of three millions of Englishwomen maintaining themselves by their own exertions, a number on which the census of 1871 will probably rather show an increase than a diminution; and allowing that a large per-centage of these belong to the wage-earning classes, there still remains a great proportion who belong to the classes above these. Difficult as it is to find remunerative employment for the daughters of barristers, lawyers, clergyment, and naval and military officers, it is even more difficult to find women in that class fit to do the work when found.

Miss King, the secretary to the society, writes to me: — “I cannot state too strongly my conviction of the necessity of more systematic and methodical training for girls . . . . By far the greater number of those who apply to me for work are over 25 years of age. Many have never held any responsible position at home or elsewhere, nor have had training for anything at all. The saddest cases we have to deal with are those of widows or deserted wives, who are left, with children dependent on them, utterly unprovided for.” It may be seen from the last sentence that marriage is not always the provision it is supposed to be.

But it is not even on such grounds as these I ask for a higher education for women. I claim it, as the Bishop of Peterborough did the other day, at the meeting for Hitchin College, on the ground that they are human beings. I wish it were as certain as the bishop held it to be, that however men might differ about other points, on this, that women are human beings, there could be no difference of opinion. I am afraid that, on the contrary, there is a very widely diffused belief, especially among average men, that women belong to a different species. If, indeed, the fact were seen and recognised that women are human beings, with precisely the same kind of faculties, affections, desires, wants as men, though there may be variations in degree, that their minds are governed by the same laws, and their characters susceptible of being moulded by the same influences, a great many obstacles in the way of their improvement woudl be at once removed. There would no longer be any need to consider what education was necessary for women, but, having ascertained what education is best for human beings, to develop them to the full measure of the stature of perfect humanity, it would floows that the same education that is best for men is best for women also. The only special function allotted by nature to women is motherhood; but, as Miss Davies says in her excellent little book, Higher Education of Women, the education which produced the best wives and mothers, is likely to be the best possible education. . .  Having made this admission, it is necessary to point out that an education of which the aim is thus limited is likely fail in that aim;” and she goes on to show this by transferring the case to the education of men, “an education which produces the best husbands and fathers is likely to be in all respects the best, because the best man in any capacity must be the man who can measure most accurately the proportion of all his duties and claims, giving to each its due share of his time and energy. A man will not be the better husband and father for neglecting his obligations as a citizen, or as a man of business; nor will a woman be the better wife or mother through ignorance or disregard of other responsibilities.” Let men and women, then, be educated as human beings. But let me guard here against the fatal confusion, so common in this country, between education and instruction or preparation for the special profession or work of life. It is owing to this confusion we hear of elementary education, consisting of the “three R’s,” of the necessity of techincal education superseding classical, &c., &c., of women, or of the working classes being enough educated already, and being thus unfitted for the duties of their position.

But the true meaning of the word education is not instruction, technical or otherwise. It is intellectual, moral, and physical develoment, the development of a sound mind in a sound body, the training of reason to form just judgments, the discipline of the will and the affections to obey the supreme law of duty, the kindling and strengthening of the love of knowledge, of beauty, of goodness, till they become governing motives of action. This alone is truly educaiton, to be begun in the first twenty years of life, to be carried on through time, and as I trust, through eternity; and this is the education which should be given, or at any rate aimed at, in the case of every human being. Once accept this view of education, and there is an end of all the distracting talk about this education being good for a man, that for a woman, this for working men, that for tradesmen or professional men, or men of fortune. The technical education may be different for all these, but the education of reason, and conscience, and will, and affections, must be the same for all; and the test to be applied to every proposed system will be this: — Does it tend to form a sound judgement, an enlightened conscience, a disciplined will, a heart loving whatever things are true, honest, just, pure, and lovely?

It would seem scarcely necessary that I should dwell on the social and national importance of the education of women, but the neglect of it would not be so general if that importance were fully recognised. If it be an indisputable axiom that as is the mother so will be the home training, and as is the home training so, in the vast majoirty of cases, will be the tone of mind and habits which the children take out with them into th world as men and women, then the opinion of Mr. Hare, quoted in the General Report of the Schools Inquiry Commission, to the effect that “an educated mother is of even more importance to the family than an educated father,” is fully justified. I could quote passage after passage from these reports, shewing that it is to a higher tone of mind, a wider and more refined culture among the women of the middle class, that we must look to rescue the men from the narrowness of mind, the vulgarity, the absorption of energy and intelligence in money making alone, which threatens to lower the tone of national character, and to make us really what the First Napoleon accused us of being, “a nation of shopkeepers.” In the higher classes, if, as doubtless is the case, the preference of idle and frivolous men for idle and frivolous women tends to keep down the tone of women’s education, it is equally certain that the women re-act on the men, and the latter will do well to remember Mr. Stuart Mill’s eloquent warning to them, that, in the present state of society, if they will not raise women to their level, the women will infallibly drag them down to theirs. Let me, finally, quote the testimony of a man of another country and another form of faith, Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, who, some years ago, struck with the evils arising from the deficient education of his countrywomen, wrote a little book entitled Les Femmes Studieuses. In that book, after having shown what the education of Christian women, destined to be the companions and helpmates of men in earthly as in heavenly things, ought to be, he proceeds to describe what it is, and paints a picture of women’s ingorance, idleness, and frivolity; of their corrupting influence on society, on their husbands, and their homes, not through vice, but through their narrowmindedness, their incapacity to comprehend any higher aims or feel any large sympahty, their intolerance of any life less idle than their own, which woudle be painful to read at any time, but is terrible painful now, when read by the light of the last year’s events. When that book was written, France stood foremost among the nations, to all appearance great, strong, skilled in all the arts of peace and war. What is she now? In the hour of trial everything failed her — her manhood, her genius, above all her long boasted military organisation; and when civil war broke out to complete the ruin begun by foreign invation, the upper and middle classes in Paris, armed and organised though they were, made but one senseless attempt to meet the insurgents, and then fled from the city, — from the homes they should have defended, — or silently submitted to the tyranny of the the minority they hated and despised. Looking back to the history of French society for many generations as painted both in the lighter and more serious literature of France, I hold it not too much to say that one and not the least powerful cause which led to a national collapse, so unprecedented in its swiftness and completeness, may be found in the lowering influence incessantly exercised by the women on the men. What high sense of duty, — that salt of society without which it grows corrupt and worthless, — what noble ideal of patirotism and self-sacrifice, what comprehension even of the issues at stake, could be expected from the sons of such mothers, the husbands of such wives, as are pourtrayed with the intimate knowledge of a father confessor and a man of the world by Bishop Dupanloup?

I think I have not made good my assertions repecting the low state of women’s education in this country. I turn now to the means of raising it from this condition, and to the main object which I had in view in bringing thse subject before you, i.e., the hope that this Society, which has already done so much for education, will take the matter up, and lend its powerful aid to the scheme I have to propose. There is, fortunately, almost complete unanimity fo opinion amongst those who have most fully considered the subject, as to the remedies required. They are: —

1. The creation fo a sounder public poinion respecting the need and obligation of education women.

2. The re-distribution of educational endowments, so as to give a fair share of them to girls.

3. The improvement of the female teachers by their examination and registration according to fixed standards.

Allow me to say a few words on each of these points, and, first, as to the creation of a louder public opinion respecting the education of girls.

I have already laid before you a mass of evidence to prove that the great hindrance to improvement in girls’ education is the total indifference to it of parents; an indifference bred by the tone of society which neither requires nor values in women the resutls of a good education; and the more than indifference, the very common dislike among men, young men especially, to a high standard of education for women. So long as parents look to marriage as the one provision for their daughters, the summum bonum to be obtained for them, so long will women’s education be adapted solely to please what are called marrying men. No woman can be more convinced than I am that a happy marriage is the summum bonum of a woman’s life, but so it seems to me it is equally of a man’s, and surely to the woman as the man it should not be an object to be striven for, but received as the supreme grace of fate when the right time and the right person come.

The reform of public opinion on this point would ensure every other reform. If ever it be possible to make cultivation, knowledge, and serious work the fashion for women, the battle would be virtually won. I remember at the time when all the feminie world walked in gigantic crinolines, that an examination of a National girls’ school, in a somewhat remote country district, showed 40 of the girls to have crinolines and only one a pocket-handkerchief. That is about the proportion now between the girls who have a smattering of accomplishments and those who are really educated. Is it too Utopian to hope that a day may come when the proportion shall be reversed, and when ti will be considered as disgraceful for a woman to be without preparation for the serious work of life as it would be now for any one above the gutter to be without a pocket-handkerchief.

With regard to the second remedy, the extension of endowments to girls, opinion is equally unanimous among all the authorities I have consulted. The necessity of institutions for girls, holding the same place in their education, as grammar schools, public schools, and the universities do in that of boys, is strongly insisted upon by the assistant commissioners in these reports.

Mr. Green says: — “The education of boys in England has only been saved from the abyss of triviality and vulgarity by the application, however clumsy, of endowments. For girls the same salvation can only be obtained in the same way.” And Mr. Bryce places first among the remedies from the application of which an improvement in the education of girls may be hoped for, the establishment of schools for girls under public authority and supervision. Hitherto, however, the claims of girls have been almost entirely disregarded; the Schools Inquiry Commissioners state that it is evident that the endowments for the secondary education of girls bear but an infinitesimal proportion to the similar endowments for boys. They go on to say, “It is certainly a singular fact, and one not by any means admitting of easy explanation, that, with these few exceptions, no part of the large funds arising from endowments, and applicable to educational objects for the upper and middle clases, is now, or has been for a long time past, devoted to so important a purpose as the education of girls and young women.” The fact seems scarcely so singular to women, to whom the difficult of obtaining funds for any scheme destined to benefit them is but too familar. The same difficulty of obtaining money for the better education of women stands in the way of the Hitchin College, the only institution yet offering to women the greatly needed and greatly desired advantages of a university education, and also of the North London Collegiate Schools, founded by the public spirit and self-sacrificing generosity of the principal, Miss Buss, whose noble act in endowing the schools has met with no adequate response. “It is a noteworthy fact,” says Mr. Fitch, in a note appended to his report, “that in the City of London a new trust fund, of more than £60,000, has just been created for improving the education of boys, notwithstanding the existnce of enormous unused endowments for precisely the same purpose. No part of this is available for girls. Merchants and bankers subscribe freely; even a join-stock company contributes, £1,000, on the express ground that a better race of clerks and “commercial” men is wanted to do the work of the City. But for those who are to be the wives of these men, whose influence will determine the characters which they form, and the lives they lead, no provision is even contemplated.”

The last of these words are no longer true. Mr. Rogers is contemplating making a provision for the middle class girls of London; but as I understand that he can only get shillings for the girls where he got pounds for the boys, and has been unable yet to raise for them one-twentieth of the sum which was subscribed at once for their brothers, the scheme has not yet been carried into effect.

It is some comfort to find this matter thus strongly sumed up in the Commissioners’ Report: — “We conceive that, even were the bearing of the old deeds far more manifest than it is, the exclusion of girls from the benefit of educational endowments would be in the highest degree inexpedient and unjust; and we cannot believe that, in any comprehensive adjustment of these great questions, it will be defended or maintained.”

It is cheering also to find that there is a disposition among the more enlightened of the community, including the Endowed Schools Commissioners themeslves, to redress this grievance. Lord Lyttleton, in ihs speech at the Hitchin College meeting, invited presure from without, as being the best help that could be given to the Commissioners towards carrying into practical effect their good intentions in this respect. It is such a pressure that I hope to see exercised by the Educational League I want your help to form; a pressure, which, I trust, will not be relaxed till we have obtianed for girls as well as boys Professor Huxley’s ladder from the gutter to the Universities, the steps of the ladder being precisely the same for both. There is much and very weighty evidence to show that it would be an advantage to both sexes, morally and intellectually, as well as an immense saving of money ane teaching power, that they should climb it together from the infant school to college inclusive, learning by this common work for common aims to recognise their common human nature, to complement what in each is deficient, and thus to become the true helpmates which God created them to be. The time, however, may not be ripe for this yet. More experience of the working of mixed education may be required before any decisive steps can be taken towards promoting it. But the quesiton of giving to girls their fair share of endowments is ripe for decision, and not a moment should be lost in bringing to bear upon it the utmost available force.

The third remedy I would urge will perhaps meet with readier acceptance than the former, i.e., a system for the examination and registration of teachers according to fixed standards, which should create a body of teachers for secondary schools analogous to the certificated mistresses of elementary schools. I have not time to place before you the evidence I have collected form this book and other sources respecting the miserable incompetency of women teachers as a class, and it appears to me that the results of the teaching in girls’ schools, as exhibited in these reports, are sufficient to establish the fact. Here, again, the larger portion of the blame should be laid on the system, not on the individuals. So long as public opinion decrees that the only genteel occupation for women shall be that of a governess, while it decrees also that it is ungenteel to take it up as a rofession and prepare for it by thorough training, so long will its ranks be overcrowded with utterly incompetent persons, and the social status and emoluments of female teahers remain at their present low ebb. But with the growing demand for a better education for women there must be necessarily a growing demand for better teachers, and for some means of distinguishing the competent from the incompetent. This would be secured by the registration of teachers according to qualifications, tested either by the local examinations of the Universities or by the College of Preceptors, whose examinations are open to female as to male teachers, or by any other body duly appointed for the purpose. An association has been formed in London to carry this out, as far as practicable, by private enterprise. It may be that public opinion is not prepared to follow in this country to its full extent the system of Prussia, where no person can teach anything professionally without a certificate of competency from the authorites established under government for that purpose, but the nearer approach that can be made to it, by enlightening the public mind on the necessity of requiring some test of teaching capabilities, and by inducing those who intend to teach to qualify themselves to pass such a test, the better chance there will be of weeding out the present incompetent race of governesses, and replacing them by others trained to do their work.

In this, as in the other directions I have indicated, much has been and is being done by associations both in London as also in the provinces, especially the north and west of England. The University Local Examinations have done much to raise the quality of female education, by giving schools and teachers a standard to work up to. The Hitchin College carries the standard up to the point of a Cambridge degree. The courses of lectures for women provided in Lond and in the North of England, though they are, as Mr. Fitch said the other day, to be looked upon rather as stimulants than food, and can by no means take the place of thorough teaching, have stirred up an interest and created a desire for knowledge unknown before. Good and zealous work is going on, and beginning to bear fruit. But these efforts are little known or felt by the general public, and what I believe is still wanted, is some general organisation that should draw into union and co-operation all these separate movements, and give to them the strength which belongs to combined and systematic action.

This, then, is the scheme to which I trust this Society will lend its aid, i.e., to form an Educational League, embracing all those who are actively interested in the cause, and having for its object to cartry what I may call the three oints of the educational charter of women: —

1. The equal right of women to the education recognised as the best for human beings.

2. The equal right of women to share in the existing educational endowments of the counry, and to be considered, no less than boys, in the creation of any new endowments.

3. The registration of teachers, with such other measures as may raise teaching to a profession as honourable and honoured for women as for men.

Such a League might be represented in Lond by a central committee, connected with local committees formed in every considerable countrytown. By common action from all these different centres, a body of evidence might be collected on every point connected with the better education of women of all classes, which woule be of invaluable service in guiding the action both of school boards, and of the Endowed Schools Commissioners, as of all other bodies and individuals concerned in the education fo girls; and by means of lectures, meetings, journalism, and social influence, an agitation might be set on foot and kept up active enough and penetrating enough to reach even the subsoil of the British mind, and to force upon it, not only the reconition of the fact which it now, according to Mr. Bryce, holds to be an obnoxious and revolutionary paradox, “That the minds of women are as cultivable, and as well worth cultivating as those of men,” but that it is of vital national importance that the minds of those who now exercise an enormous indirect influence, and will, in all probability, soon exercise a large direct influence, on the destinies of the nation, should be cultivated to the full measure of their capabilities.

Since I first conceived this scheme, I have received assurances of sympathy and co-operation from many who may be considered as representative men and women, and whose names woiuld be a sufficient pledge to the public for the character of the undertaking. I believe that I could have obtained many more if I had not been so heavily pressed for time; and I have no doubt that, should such a league as I have proposed be formed, it would soon number among its members most of those whose co-operation would be of any value.

I now leave the matter in your hands, and have only to thank you very earnestly for giving me this opportunity of laying it before you.

 

 

Source: Journal of the Society of Arts, No. 967, Vol. XIX. pp. 515-561.