The Education of American Girls | Page 3

that we
"have seen all winter long the thorn First show itself intractable and
fierce, And after, bear the rose upon its top."

We, however, are chiefly concerned with the education of our own girls,
of girls in America. Born and bred in a continent separated by miles of
ocean from the traditions of Europe, they may not unnaturally be
expected to be of a peculiar type. They live under peculiar conditions of
descent, of climate, of government, and are hence very different from
their European sisters. No testimony is more concurrent than that of
observant foreigners on this point. More nervous, more sensitive, more
rapidly developed in thinking power, they scarcely need to be
stimulated so much as restrained; while, born of mixed races, and
reared in this grand meeting-ground of all nations, they gain at home, in
some degree, that breadth which can be attained in other countries only
by travel. Our girls are more frank in their manners, but we nowhere
find girls so capable of teaching intrusion and impertinence their proper
places, and they combine the French nerve and force with the Teutonic
simplicity and truthfulness. Less accustomed to leading-strings, they
walk more firmly on their own feet, and, breathing in the universal
spirit of free inquiry, they are less in danger of becoming unreasonable
and capricious.
Such is the material, physical and mental, which we have to fashion
into womanhood by means of education. But is it not manifest in the
outset, that no system based on European life can be adequate to the
solution of such a problem? Our American girls, if treated as it is
perfectly correct to treat French or German girls, are thwarted and
perverted into something which has all the faults of the German and
French girl, without her excellencies. Our girls will not blindly obey
what seem to them arbitrary rules, and we can rule them only by
winning their conviction. In other words, they will rule themselves, and
it therefore behooves us to see that they are so educated that they shall
do this wisely. They are not continually under the eye of a guardian.
They are left to themselves to a degree which would be deemed in other
countries impracticable and dangerous. We cannot follow them
everywhere, and therefore, more than in any other country must we
educate them, so that they will follow and rule themselves. But no
platform of premise and conclusion, however logical and exact, is
broad enough to place under an uneducated mind. Nothing deserving
the name of conviction can have a place in such. Prejudices, notions,

prescriptive rules, may exist there, but these are not sufficient as guides
of conduct.
Education, of course, signifies, as a glance at the etymology of the
word shows us, a development--an unfolding of innate capacities. In its
process it is the gradual transition from a state of entire dependence, as
at birth, to a state of independence, as in adult life. Being a general term,
it includes all the faculties of the human being, those of his mortal, and
of his immortal part. It is a training, as well of the continually changing
body, which he only borrows for temporary use from material nature,
and whose final separation is its destruction, as of the changeless
essence in which consists his identity, and which, from its very nature,
is necessarily immortal. The education of a girl is properly said to be
finished when the pupil has attained a completely fashioned will, which
will know how to control and direct her among the exigencies of life,
mental power to judge and care for herself in every way, and a
perfectly developed body. However true it may be, that life itself, by
means of daily exigencies, will shape the Will into habits, will develop
to some extent the intelligence, and that the forces of nature will
fashion the body into maturity; we apply the term Education only to the
voluntary training of one human being who is undeveloped, by another
who is developed, and it is in this sense alone that the process can
concern us. For convenience, then, the subject will be considered under
three main heads, corresponding to the triple statement made above.
Especially is it desirable to place all that one may have to say of the
education of girls in America on some proved, rational basis, for in no
country is the work of education carried on in so purely empirical a
way. We are deeply impressed with its necessity; we are eager in our
efforts, but we are always in the condition of one "whom too great
eagerness bewilders." We are ready to drift in any direction on the
subject. We adopt every new idea that presents itself. We recognize our
errors in one direction, and