The Education of Girls.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1032, 11 December 1891, Page 4

The Education of Girls.

What constitutes a girl’s oducation is a question I have been asked more than once. Quaker like, I have often answered by asking another question; ‘ What do you intend her to do.’ Parents as a rule have but a vague idea of what a girl’s education should be. They send their daughter to a primary school until she passes the sixth standard. They ‘ finish ’ her at one of the higher schools or colleges. She learns a small smattering of French, less Latin. She dabbles in astronomy, she wearies herself over the rules of syntax. She gets bewildered with vulgar fractions, she skips through the rudiments of political anl social economy, she briefly touches the verge of physiology and hovers over hygiene. She is then qualified to enter upon her social and domestic duties according to the ethics of modern education. By her own reasoning she is primed with knowledge from the rule of three to conic sections ; but she cannot read poetry or prose in public with credit. By and by this finished girl falls in love and marries, and enjoys connubial bliss in a cottage minus a servant. She can quote Horace and Ovid, but cannot cook an omelette. She can tell the length of an Irish mile, but for the life of her cannot cut out the lining for her house gown. She can talk glibly of Helen of Troy, but she cannot iron her husband’s collars so that he looks presentable in the street. From the schoolmistress’ point of view she is a grand scholar, but from the husband’s point of view she is a very bad cook and her housekeeping ideas are very vague. Girls want educating—not so much mere book lore, but education of a technical nature. Bookworms are useful members of society, but it is surprising how very few are needed, about two in a million is quite sufficient for all practical purposes, The men, and more especially the women, of the present day are not required to be walking dictionaries, but rather practical encycloptedias. Women will soon occupy a more prominent position in the world than they have done in the past, and they will require more knowledge than the boarding school schedule of blackboard, genteel handwriting, with the forty-five angle slope and curly flourishes; the use of the globes and Magnall’s questions. For the serious positions of wife, mother, and citizeness, and possibly breadwinner, technical education will be required. At the Womens’. Liberal Federation Annual Conference, lately held in New-castle-upon-Tyne, Professor Garnett, (principal of the Durham College of Science) delivered a most instructive and suggestive lecture upon technical education for girls. He said that technical education could be summed up in one word —‘ Truth.’ He pointed out the need for greater scientific accuracy in the arts most commonly practised by women. Cookery should lie treated as a branch of chemistry, and the use of the thermometer and the weights and measures taught with rigorous exactitude in connection with it, to secure the uniformity of result which was now so often lacking Id the work of even the best cooks; and how, indeed, could it be otherwise when such lamentably inaccurate expressions as ‘ some,’ 1 a little,’ ‘ a pinch,’ could be found scattered throughout every cookery book ? The kitchen, too, should be designed and ventilated as carefully as the laboratory. Chemistry should also be applied to the laundry, with reference to the effects of of soda, various soaps, and cleansing materials, &c. Prof. Garnett dignified dressmaking as a branch of geometry ; in its noblest form, he said, it was the art of constructing a developing surface to correspond to a geometrically undevelopable surface. He reviewed all the arts and trades hitherto practised by women, and those which it is possible and desirable to open to them in the future, showing how technical schools and colleges could aid in fitting them for most of these various employments, amongst which he included, besides cookery, laundry work and dressmaking, dairy work, rearing of poultry, bee-culture, horticulture, manufactures of paper, glass, earthenware, stained glass, textile fabrics, the construction and testing of instruments for electrical, mechanical, and photographic purposes, and photography, telgraphy and clerical work.’ ■ Professor Oarnett lias struck tlie true keynote of our misfortunes. We cram our girls up to the age of sixteen or perhaps over, with knowledge, dry and unprofitable. The sole object of the teachers seems to be to produce the greatest number of possible future schoolmistresses ; but for, girls who may have to go into the battle field of life, and fight for their own fortunes, nothing short of technical education is required. Dora.