ONE OF THE DAY'S PROBLEMS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 119, 23 May 1925, Page 15

ONE OF THE DAY'S PROBLEMS

WHAT IS THE BEST THING TO DO!

Josephine Bartlett, writing in an exchange, quotes from a recently published book by an eminent club-woman and writer, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, which is entitled "What Shall We Do With Our Girls?"

''Since the war," she writes, -"the public has been displeased with its young girls. There has been a chorus of criticism directed against their appaarance, manners, and morals. I have read volumes on this subject, with growing wonder that the whole of it is apparently so misdirected. With their inheritance of good, clean blood and their hygienic and decent homes, the material of which our girls are made is as good as any in existence . Therefore, if things are amiss, the fault lies in the soil, not in the plants. Girls am m no sense responsible for their environment; that is our affair. Physicians, we must heal ourselves."

Mrs. Hale then proceeds to diagnose the disease and offer a remedy. Remedy, she thinks, is right environment, which the women of the country can, if they will, provide. Her book takes into consideration the city home, the city's voice, physical training, dress, dancing precocity,, country life, child study, handicraft, amusements, careers.

NO CURE-ALL EXISTS, There is no single panacea for thp conundrum of the modern girl, slip points out, showing that the individual problem goes back to the individual mother, and hers to her own conscience. "The more we explore the by-roads and high-roads of our too complexduties the more surely we must return to first principles; to the conviction that the life of the spirit is in the home and that the life of the spirit is the beginning and the end. So for mothers the answer to their problems is what it has_ ever been. She must find her work beside her, and do it with all her heart, aud bo must we, putting all elsa aside if need be."

SHOULD CO-EDUCATION GO? 13ut even this is not enough, as many mothers who have done all that Mrs. Hale recommends—and more—can attest. Even bo, the outside handicap against decency, restraint, clean thought, and influences are too great. _ Lurid posters, lurid books, magazines whose cheap meretriciousness screams, from every stand, pom- over the adolescent girl a stream 'of • contamination that the vulnerable armour of adolescence can scarcely resist. Does this mean that we mothers who grew up a decade ago, proud of the coeducational schools and high schools from which we graduated, cherishing the youthful friendships that .we made with boys and girls alike, does this mean that we should, in justice to our daughters of to-day, begin to clamour for separata schools for them? .

TIMES CHANGE. j It does seem at times that co-educa-tion is only adding another element of risk to this already too risky business of rearing girls. Youthful "crushes" we all had; anyway it's to be hopod that all of us did. They were harmless enough., but how they embellished those early springtimes ! But our minds and the minds of tho young boys with whom we went to the school dances and debates were not tinged with images and words that conveyed passions carried to the limits of the bagnio, and sweetly justified in the end by a wedding ring and perambulator !

It is not to be wondered that our most boasted institution to-day, the American publican public school is beginning, to be looked at askance, and in direct proportion to its improvement in equipment and teaching methods more's the pity.