individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be no special
training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim should be to develop
critical and discriminative appreciation and the good taste that sees the vast
superiority of all that is good and classic over what is cheap and fustian.
In literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps lead, and the knowledge of
the great authors in the vernacular be fostered. Greek, Hebrew, and perhaps
Latin languages should be entirely excluded, not but that they are of great value
and have their place, but because a smattering knowledge is bought at too high a
price of ignorance of more valuable things. German, French, and Italian should
be allowed and provided for by native teachers and by conversational methods if
desired, and in their proper season.
In the studies of the soul of man, generally called the philosophic branches,
metaphysics and epistemology should have the smallest, and logic the next least
place. Psychology should be taught on the genetic basis of animals and children,
and one of its tap-roots should be developed from the love of infancy and youth,
than which nothing in all the world is more worthy. If a woman Descartes ever
arises, she will put life before theory, and her watchword will be not cogito, ergo
sum, [I think, therefore I am] but sum, ergo cogito [I am, therefore I think]. The
psychology of sentiments and feelings and intuitions will take precedence of that
of pure intellect; ethics will be taught on the basis of the whole series of practical
duties and problems, and the theories of the ultimate nature of right or the
constitution of conscience will have small place.
Domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal home building by a kind of
laboratory method. A nursery with all carefully selected appliances and adjuncts,
a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets, cellars, outhouses, building, its
material, the grounds, lawn, shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other
adjuncts of the hearth will be both exemplified and taught. A general course in
pedagogy, especially its history and ideals, another in child study, and finally a
course in maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without practical details
of nursing, should be comprehensive and culminating. In its largest sense
maternity might be the heart of all the higher training of young women.
Applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in a department of teaching
as one of the specialties of motherhood and not as a vocation apart. The training
should aim to develop power of maternity in soul as well as in body, so that
home influence may extend on and up through the plastic years of pubescence,