A SELF-MADE WOMAN.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20232, 16 February 1934, Page 9

A SELF-MADE WOMAN.

Countess of Oxford and Asquith. The Counters of Oxford and Asquith gave some piquant revelations of her girlhood when speaking on education at the annual meeting of the London branch of the Independent Schools Association, Incorporated, writes the “ Daily Mail.” “ You may think I am an educated woman,” she said. “You never made a greater mistake in your life. I am what they call a self-made woman. I have had no education. I was so backward and stupid as a girl that my mother said, ‘ You had better learn arithmetic.’ “So I went to the village schoolmaster to learn arithmetic. After a brief period he said, ‘ Miss Maggie (as he called me, my name being Margot) is so ignorant and so foolish and makes so much. tomfoolery in the class that we would rather have her go. That was the end of the arithmetic, and I never had any other lessons. Later I went abroad and learnt a little, mostly in Germany. “ The home is the foundation of all education,” continued Lady Oxford. “ However well-educated a bov or girl may be, later in life he may be permanently handicapped morally by seeing his parents quarrel, or by having a divorced father and mother when his holidays are divided among two houses, neither of which is his home. It is also in the home that reftgoin is first taught, and that is more important than Latin. Greek or algebra.”