SCHOOLBOOK TEACHING.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13953, 13 July 1909, Page 3

SCHOOLBOOK TEACHING.

AND BAD HUSBANDS. At a meeting of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children at Dunedin recently, Dr SeicleIjerg expressed herself as being in entire agreement with the opinions uttered, on the necessity of domestic knowledge on the part of wives; but at the same tune she did not think a chair at the University would help very much. In the first place no amount of theory would teach clean housekeeping, nor woujd University training reach the right class or girl. The class who would go to such lectures would be composed of those whose hrains were already sufciently developed to make housekeeping easy. It was the girls from the homes of the poor and the ignorant that they must reach. " The ' most pitiable cases which come before us," continued the doctor, "are those where a husband has died and left his wife and children to be supported by the State; or has spent his money in drink and gambling instead of providing food and clothing and education-for his children; or has deserted his wife; or (whether married or single) has brought a family into the world through one single girl after another, the children being thrown on the State or following their parents' footsteps." "I believe," she continued, "that a great deal, can be done by a widespread system of giving enlightenment to girls in their early and most impressionable years. The State has done a great deal by making general education compulsory for both sexes, and by opening up avenues of work for women. A further improvement could be effected by introducing into tho curriculum a course on the effects of alcohol, and by means of simple stories in the school books teaching girls to reflect on the lives of others who have . been ruined through drunken or immoral husbands and fathers. This would teach the young intellects to instinctively shun" those boys and men who showed coarseness in their language, and whose faces bore the stamp of riotous living. There is no use in girls being allowed to imagine that they can ever reform a drunkard. They must be taught to shun him, and to look for better qualities in husbands. . . . By means of such teaching the shiftless drunkard would soon find himself left without a mate, more especially if every woman was trained to support herself independent of marriage. It is tUe dependence of woman which often compels her to marry a man she would not otherwise choose. How often when women come before the Benevolent Trustees they iriust exclaim : 'Why are women so helpless? Why were they not taught some occupation before marriage so that thev could earn a living-' Certainly such a thing might reduce the birthrate, but is it not better that a race should have good quality rather than good quantitvl' Of what use. except to fill the giii'ils, are the ten or twelve starved children of a drunken father and an ignorant mother:* Mow much better for the State and for the woman would it be if she had been educated, and had chosen a nsnectable mate, even if, by marrying later, the family was .smaller."