The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

Girls Again.

Time, we insist, is the very first indispensable condition for a better preparation for life than our girls obtain at present. And how are we to get time? By not wasting it. The time that is wasted is sufficient for all our purposes--for the most perfect building up of the body, for the development of womanly arts and graces, for the natural spontaneous growth of the faculties, for the acquisition of such knowledge as is possible to the immature mind. For all these the time that is wasted, only too frequently, in our so-called girls' education, in their years of school-life is more than sufficient. And how is time wasted? (1) By not fitting the subjects taught to the capacity, or to speak more strictly, to the stage of mental development of the girl; (2) by adopting artificial methods of teaching, instead of those that are natural or as nearly natural as possible; (3) by not allowing leisure for any spontaneous growth of intelligence and making it impossible for girls to assimilate the knowledge given them; 4) by omitting to invest the subject taught with any charm or interest, and (5) by teaching a vast number of things which, owing to their nature and the limitation of human faculty must be forgotten. Let us take the first of these. It has been long ago determined by experience that a child can learn certain things much more easily than an adult, amongst these are spoken languages, swimming, dancing, skating, drawing, singing, handicraft, &c. They are not all matters of physique as is seen, neither do they include all bodily exercises, for where muscular strength and endurance are concerned, we know it is extremely dangerous to urge a growing girl to exert herself to the utmost. Of many matters it has become a household word to say that it is badly done because it was not begun early enough. I know myself the disappointment of attempting to learn to swim too late--with the greatest ambition to be a swimmer and the advantage of natural activity and suppleness, I did not succeed at twenty-five. A good opportunity and excellent instruction were at my disposal, and at twelve or thirteen I have no doubt, in the time allowed, I should have learned to swim. This is easily accounted for. Imitation is the characteristic of childhood. The muscular habits set up by our ordinary method of locomotion are not as fixed in a child as in an adult--children climb and crawl and lie and roll about and turn somersaults, and otherwise disport themselves in ways which are not agreeable even, later on. The muscles needed in swimming are not so completely out of use as when, losing our activity and conscious of our dignity, we scorn any position but the perpendicular, and are only horizontal when at rest. If any mother then is anxious that her girl should acquire this most healthful, graceful, and valuable art of swimming, she must save time by beginning early. It will take twice as long when the girl is older. And by doing this a daughter will not only learn something which may be of unspeakable benefit to her in an emergency but she will be growing hardy, fearless and strong, she is bracing her nerves and gaining a new resource, one of Ruskin's "kind and costless" pleasures. You are preparing her to withstand the great strain upon her endurance that years may bring. She will some day take her little brood into the water herself, and who can tell what inherited facility for swimming may be the result in time. Now, in subjects which concern the intelligence, the same principle holds good. It is admitted that a child can pick up a spoken language more easily than an adult. A French girl coming to England at nine will speak English in a short time like an English girl, exactly, it will be impossible to tell that she is not a native. A Frenchman coming to England at twenty-nine will never speak English like a native, if he ever manages to speak it fluently. Why? Because a child of nine is very imitative, because its organs of speech have not been exercised for so many years in one special direction, it can reproduce any articulate sound almost that it hears. A language, therefore, that a child may want to understand and speak should be taught early, to save a vast amount of time and trouble, yet in most of our boys' schools the exact reverse of this is done. A dead language never to be heard or spoken is taken first, and a living language is the honed until the power to imitate is partly lost, and until the habit of speaking English is too firmly established, and has had too long an influence on the organs of articulation to be disturbed without immense effort. The result of this is that English boys never know any language but their own, and even that they know, as a rule, badly.

If languages were taken in their right order and taught by rational methods a child would learn French, German and Latin in the time now wasted on the Latin Grammar alone. And this statement has been borne out by experience and experiment. It is not mere theory.

There are some amusing traditions in English education. One of them is this. It quite startled me when I heard it first. I looked at the speaker doubting his sanity. "Begin with the most difficult first, in order that what comes after may be easy." I have watched the result of that principle in practice. The most difficult is so difficult that it does not come at all, neither does anything follow. That is one reason why English boys know no language; they begin Latin at seven, go on till seventeen and then how much Latin have they at command?

What would you think of a man who proposed to harness a young horse to a load of coals and urge him with blows up a steep hill, in order that when he is older he should go easily along a level road with a light cart of hay at his back. You would think that man an escaped lunatic. But the exponents of this tradition are not so foolish as they appear at first sight. That French may be easy when the child is big is not the real reason why they teach so much Latin Grammar. Oh no; neither is it because of the "mental drill" contained in that sacred book. We have seen and learned enough of it to discover its effect on the mind. There are hundreds of young University men teaching the Latin Grammar all over England at the present day, because it is the only thing they can teach.

But to return to the economy of time and faculty in the strict adaptation of subjects to the stage of mental development of the child. How do the teaching of reading and writing, usually begun at six, fit in with the child's stage of development? Perfectly well. We learn to read by observation and imitation, accompanied by more or less conscious efforts of memory, and the fact. that this is no call, as a rule, upon faculties not yet ripe for their work is shown in this, that some children teach themselves to read. (Did you ever know a child who voluntarily taught himself the Latin Grammar?) Our little ones wonder what the big letters over a shop-door mean, and a sharp little girl gets early lessons in reading as she runs about the streets. And it may be useful to remark here that a child learns to read if her curiosity is aroused, if she wants to know what happened and how something ended infinitely sooner than if, attempting to make the reading easy, she practises on words of two or three letters, as: "Go on an ox or go in," "Buy a pig or the cat will run out." In reading aloud French or German to a girl or a class of girls, it is amusing to see how the excitement of a catastrophe will sharpen their wits, and how dull they will become immediately over a bit of moralizing. For which reason it is sometimes quite worth while to skip the bit of moralizing. And writing is more imitative even than reading, can be taught simultaneously and as soon as possible should be put to real use. A child will learn to write by writing notes and letters sooner than by copying platitudes in a copy book. Arithmetic, however, is not imitative. Nevertheless, no girl comes to school without having spontaneously picked up some arithmetic. She has counted her birth-days and her dolls; she knows how many brothers and sisters she has, and the number of her father's house; she can tell you the hour struck by the clock, and has found out how many sweets can be bought for a penny; she has added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. Poor children who do their mothers' shopping when they are quite tiny girls, learn a good deal of compound arithmetic before they are six, and if the teacher would go on from the point they have reached and interest herself and them in their small wants and purchases, there would never arise that hatred of arithmetic so common among our girls.

But this early stage is one of tremendous bodily activity; let us teach everything that belongs to physical development, and give these activities scope and encouragement; swimming instead of grammar, dancing and drill instead of Latin. Let the girl climb and row and swing and run races, and play cricket and hockey with her brothers. Do not be afraid that she will grow unmaidenly. All too soon for our girls years will "bring the inevitable yoke."

E. M.

Typed by JoanP., Sep. 2024