"OUTLOOK OF HOUSEMAID"

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 86, 11 April 1935, Page 21

"OUTLOOK OF HOUSEMAID"

IS CRITICISM JUSTIFIED?

An attack on what she termed the "staggering ignorance" of the modern girl, .who "had the outlook of an under-housemaid but without the efficiency to exercise it," was made by Miss Marguerite, Steen, the authoress, at a conference in London of the Parents' • National Education Union, states the "Daily Telegraph."

"England," she said, "is the most educated and, with the possible exception of Soviet Russia, the least cultured country in Europe, thanks to the mass production, ten-cent store type of education, which reaches its scholastic climax in matriculation.

"I believe the two obstructions we are facing in dealing with the young are lack of interest and lack of initiative. Instead of ambition, we encounter too often a petrifying apathy.

"I must confess I am getting very tired of the criticisms levelled at young people of today, although I admit their justice.

VICTIMS OF SYSTEM.

"I admit to finding the young girl who has just left school wholly maddening with her lack of concentration, her indistinct intellectual values, her bad taste not, only in actions and manners, but in all matters bearing upon art, literature, or music, and her quite staggering ignorance of everything that is not connected with herself personally, her school,1, or the home life of movie stars.

"Many girls are leaving school wijh the outlook of an ' under-housemaid, but they have not nearly the uriderhousemaid's efficiency to excuse it.

"At the same time I feel it is illogical to get angry or to blame girls who are simply the victims of the system which produces them. I have never come across this type in any of the girls who have just left one of the Union's schools." %

Miss Ishbel Mac Donald spoke of the value of some sort of preschool education for children. She said that when her younger sister went to school at the age of five she was able to read and write. . ...■■'

"She had; had no instruction except that of playing at schools with me in my free time," added Miss Mac Donald. "So I am, I suppose, a sort of authority upon pre-school education." (Laughter.) ' , ' ./■ ♦

v It would be: interesting to know how wide an experience of. girls. Miss Steen had before her severe remarks. Another thing to be considered is that? life develops most girls ; into, quite different people in the course of a few years. .