health and happiness, the prime condition and creator of euphoria; and the
appetite should be, as it always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic
conscience steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs.
Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on plain beds in
rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it with every precaution for
quiet, and, if possible, with windows more or less open the year round, and, like
other rooms, never overheated. Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and
toilet should be almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion.
Each student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study, respectively,
and be responsible for their care, with every encouragement for expressing
individual tastes; but will, an all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience,
refinement, and elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a
good part of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of
parents and to learn self-reliance; and a family dormitory system, with but few,
twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous wear and distraction, to
secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or more matrons or teachers and to
ensure the most pedagogic dietetics, is suggested.
Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. Swedish
gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points,
because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little stress upon the
rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games should have precedence over all
else. The principle sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training
should apply to both boys and girls without regard to sex, and with all the
ordinary appliances found in the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed
and every possible adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always
have precedence over indoor or uniform commando exercises. Boating and
basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element sedulously
reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most prominent of
indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the stately minuet gives poise;
the figure dances train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features should be
introduced and even specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions.
The history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school of
morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the best of all
exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole educational system,
should be exploited, and the dancing school and class rescued from its present
degradation. No girl is educated who can not dance, although she need not know
the ballroom in its modern form.[10]