OUR GIRLS: AN OLD TROUBLE AND A NEW DEPARTURE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 38, 21 January 1898, Page 3

OUR GIRLS: AN OLD TROUBLE AND A NEW DEPARTURE.

One of the noblest of the many-sided activities of the Catholic Church is the work done by the convent secondary schools. Their progress has been one of unbroken success from the days of De Lestonac and the Marchioness Julia Colbert of Barolo down to the present hour, when untold numbers of such institutions dot the surface af the earth from China to Peru. With the Church's Godspeed and blessing, they carry out a work which is Catholic in every sense of the word. Gladstone once said to the boys at Hawarden Grammar School that the true business of such institutions is " man-making." Convent day and boarding-schools exercise a similar function for a large class of our girls. They aim at doing something more than merely dipping into Livy, or Uhland, or Chateaubriand, or feeding the brain-cells of their pupils with boluses of figures, formulas, and facts. The will, heart, and feelings, as well as the intellect, are put into harness, disciplined, and trained. This is what makes true women as we need them. Given good home influences, the convent girl should, in due course, go out into the world well-bred, simple yet refined in tastes, and grounded in good principles which rest upon the rock foundation of an enlightened faith. This is education. And this is what Catholic convent schools supply.

But there are in practice severe working limits to the secondary education of our Catholic girls. The limitation arises in part from the hurry of the age. The range of subjects of instruction has increased ; and, though " art is long and time is fleeting," time is too often set before art. All too frequently the golden days of true education are reduced to one or two years of " finishing " — a process akin to putting a thin veneer of mahogany over your kitchen table of common deal. The relative shortness of the period of study, the imperious demands of the times, plus the keenness of competition, have, in a measure, forced secondary schools generally into a vicious system of hurry. Fragments of a dozen subjects are forced, against time, into the minds of pupils. Sufficient time cannot, under existing conditions, be devoted to the allimportant factor of intellectual work — assimilation. The process is, in fact, akin to that which produces in the Strasbourg goose the monstrous diseased liver which, under the name oipate defoiegras, finds such favour with the gourmets of Paris. With a big section of parents and of pupils the goal of education is to matriculate — if in record time so much the better. In these colonies we seldom dream of " sweet girl graduates," such as are turned out at Vassar and Girton. Our matriculces are, in this matter, content to remain like chrysalides that never turn into butterflies.

Yet another difficulty is created for our educationalists. Social standards and the fashion of the time require that an undue prominence be given to the ornamental over the useful in the training of our girls. The " isms " are favoured ; the " ologies " are patted encouragingly on the back ; but the accomplishments are set in the forefront. The social circle in which she moves will dance and sing around your brilliant executant or your smart saver of airy nothings, while, in her presence, her less showy companion must be content with relative neglect, even though she may have in her mind the grace and refinement of a Margaret Roper. The remedy for this condition of things lies, in its last resource, with parents. Unfortunately, as a clacs, they have acquiesced in the puzzle-headed system which savours faintly of the methods of the Circassian, who devotes his undivided energy to the cultivation of those physical qualities of his favoured daughter, which win most attention on the marriage market. *****

Miss Crawford tells how Cardinal Vaughan had the courage to tell the girls of a London school that he would very much rather they could cook a good dinner than play on the violin. Nobody has been more slow to follow or more quick to deplore the turn which secondary education has taken than our conventual institutions. They have been the first to take serious and systematic steps towards restoring the balance between the useful and the ornamental in the education of our girls. Many of them (including those of New Zealand) have steadily insisted on their pupils learning the useful arts of cookery, housewifery, etc. From an article by Miss Crawford in the last number of the Month to hand, it would appear that our religious communities in Catholic Belgium have been quietly solving the problem. They have dotted

the oountry over here and there with Ecoles Menageres, or Schools of Housewifery. The initiative, or at least the biggest impulse) was given to the work by Father Temmerman. The schools are inaugurated by private enterprise ; they are aided by the State, and, gays Miss Crawford, supplement the education of the primary, and, to a certain extent, of the secondary, schools. "In their simpler form," continues the writer, " whether as adjuncts to primary schools or as independent foundations, they give instruction according to the most modern and practical methods in sewing and darning, cooking and laundry- work. In their wider development, they further include professional, commercial, or agricultural training 1 , and pupils who successfully pass through their course can earn a Government diploma, and leave the school fully equipped for the battle of life."

The Ecoles Menageres are intended to meet the needs of a large class : for the children of farmers and well-to-do trades-people. Children are received into them at as early an age as five or six ; but it has been found by experience that the maximum of useful work is done by the pupils from their thirteenth or fourteenth to their eighteenth or nineteenth year. There is no place in these schools for mere butterflies — for the ornamental creatures who would fritter away their lives is fashionable loafing, elegant idling, or playing at work. Father Temmerman acts on the principle that "it is necessary not only to teach the girls how to work, but to train them in the habit of working." " A few rebel at first," says Miss Crawford, " but after some months' practise they all enter with zest into their active duties, and find them a pleasant relief from the tedium of class-work." The largest of these institutions is conducted by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and is pleasantly Bituated on rising ground close by the old university town of Louvain. The building is of vast size, and well it needs to be, for it contains 750 pupils and GO nuns, besides a staff of sturdy Flemish servant girls, and of workingmen who look after the extensive farm, gardens and orchards, which provide most of the viands used in the four daily meals of over eight hundred busy people. The course of instruction is comprehensive to a degree. The ornamental is not excluded, but the useful is set in the very forefront. A good general education is imparted ; but " miss in her teens " at Haverle is also initiated into the mysteries of dressmaking, washing, ironing, cleaning, mending, cooking, and needlework in all its branches. If she has a bent for a commercial career, she will be amply provided with a due outfit of special knowledge for the desk or working-room. But perhaps the most heroic protest made against the ornamentalism of our school systems is reached when we find the certificated teachers of Haverle grounding the young womanhood of Belgium in a thorough theoretical and practical knowledge of dairy-work, poultry-rearing, bee-keeping — even the feeding of the prosaic but profitable pig receives its meed of grave attention. The daughters of the Flemish farmers are, moreover, taught to keep farm accounts, and instructed by experts in every branch of Bcientific agriculture. Verily, this is the glorification of the useful. And all this, be it noted, with board and lodging thrown in, for the surprisingly small sum of -£lO a year ' Itisdifficult forusAntipodeans to realise how this can be done. "It indicates" says Miss Crawford, "a veritable triumph in good management and domestic economy, which should have an admirable effect on the pupils. Nor, indeed, would the feat be possible save for the large number to cater for, and for the important fact that, as regards both farm and garden produce, the establishment is self-supporting. But even so, and bearing in mind the Government grant of £120 a year, judging merely from external appearances, I should unhesitatingly have placed the school fees at £40 or £.jO a year."

The Belgian Schools of Housewifery ai*e an object lesson in educational methods. In the first place, they have dealt a serious blow to the one-sided system which looked merely to the intellectual and ornamental side of a girl's education. They fit their pupil, not merely for the drawing-room, and the social circle, but for the sterner work of life — for the due performance of the plain domestic duties which add a charm to the poorest cottage home. But there is another aspect in this comparatively new departure. The practical curriculum of the Belgian Ecoloi Mhunjercs has opened up a new and vast field for woman's industry. They are sending 1 back into the farm-houses of that thriving little State an army of highly trained and economical worker*, who must be counted with in the already keen competition for the world's markets. The London School Board is already adopting, on a modest scale, the methods that have met with such phenomenal success in Catholic Belgium. When will these colonies fall into line with a movement which is evidently destined to effect a much needed reform in the educational methods now in vogue throughout the world ?

Two quarrymen were charged at Aberdeen lately with having persuaded a fellow-workman to smoke a pipe filled with gunpowder and tobacco. The powder exploded and injured the man terribly, destroying both eyes. Prisoners were remanded.