A Practical Education : Part 1

Girls and Women
by Harriet E. Paine

(Page 3 of 17)

What is a practical education for a girl? Whatever will fit her for life. The question and answer are trite. What will best fit a girl for life? First of all a well-balanced character. I knew a girl who was a good cook before she was ten years old; she had a genius for sewing; she was an excellent scholar in school, and had musical talent, and yet because of her capriciousness she never filled any place she was called upon to fill in life, and her home was a place of discomfort to her husband and children. Another girl, one of the most noble I ever knew, also found the practical details of life easy, but she was always tossed about from one occupation to another, and from one home to another, because when she found every reality fall short of her ideal she had not the good sense to work quietly to improve the matter, but went about proclaiming her disgust. The first thing we all need is to have our wills so trained that when we see the right, we may instantly do it, and after that we need to be taught to see clearly what is right.

But as character may be formed in many ways why not form it by teaching practical things? What, then, does a girl most need to learn?

To read, to cook, and to sew.

I put reading first, for though no civilized beings can live without cooking and sewing, and we occasionally find good and gentle women who cannot read, yet a woman of real character who can read can teach herself any branch of housekeeping which she is convinced she should to know, while a cook cannot teach herself to read in any broad sense; for by reading I do not mean pronouncing words. I want a girl to have a taste for good reading. She may study the whole circle of the sciences without reaching this end, or she may not have more than half a dozen books in her library and yet learn the lesson.

The practical advantage of most of her studies in school depends on whether or no they lead to this result. How many girls ever use chemistry, or physics, or geology, or zoology in any practical way? Yet what a difference the study of all these things makes in the kind of reading women enjoy! Who can learn enough history in school to be equipped even to teach history? Every teacher knows that to be impossible. But a girl who has studied history properly in school, who has been taught to think about the influence of men on nations and of nations on men, has open to her a vast treasure-house of books which will add both to her usefulness and happiness.

Some of you may think it is artful in me to propose this broad education under the pretense of requiring that one learn to read, but it is not so. I do believe in a very broad education for girls; but if I had to choose between a broad education which had crammed a girl with knowledge, yet left her without a love for good reading, and a very narrow one which had awakened that thirst, I should choose the second.

But why do I call this a practical education? Before I answer the question, I must say more on the subject of reading. A girl may enjoy biography, history, travels, and science and yet not have a taste for the best reading, that is, for true literature. She needs essays, novels, and especially poetry. She needs to be able to decide what is best and what is not; she must learn to respond to beauty and truth, and to repel what is false and ugly. This is the practical education, because it bears upon both happiness and character. It is practical as it makes the most of life not only for the woman herself, but for those about her. Bear in mind always that we have supposed her to have a high character and a perfectly trained will. Such reading will develop her judgment as to what is right.

But some women like to read too well. Their will is not perfectly trained, and they would rather think out a domestic problem than act it out. The education of books alone is so one-sided that we cannot consider it practical; it must be supplemented by cooking and sewing.

At our present stage of progress cooking is more important than sewing. Sewing can be more easily put out of the house than cooking; and in any emergency sewing may be neglected from week to week without serious consequences, while cooking must go on every day. Moreover, cooking is by far the more healthful occupation, and one of the aims of a practical education is to make healthy women.

I do not glorify cooking. I do not think a good cook is the highest type of woman. I do not even think it is the duty of every woman to cook. But cooking is certainly practical, ninety-nine women in a hundred have occasion some time in their lives for this accomplishment, and if they are married it is nearly indispensable for them to have a knowledge of it for the comfort of their families.

Few women are born to be cooks, but most intelligent women can learn to cook. It saves immense labor, however, if as girls they learn the art. It is singular that so many who fancy they want to be chemists hate the idea of going into their own kitchens to work. It is possibly because they cannot choose their own hours for cooking. Cooking certainly develops the mind as much as chemical experiments, and at the end of the process you have something of direct service to mankind, which may or may not be the case with work done in the laboratory.

Cooking, sewing, and housekeeping are essential for any woman, married or unmarried, who wishes to make a home, and a home is the practical goal of the majority of women. A woman who is neat and intelligent generally proves to be a good housekeeper without special instruction; but with cooking and sewing, "Who wishes to be a master must begin betimes."

Arithmetic is a science which a girl needs to understand thoroughly - not necessarily business arithmetic, which she can learn if occasion requires, but the principles of arithmetic, and she should be able to work in numbers quickly and accurately.

The tide of opinion is against me here. A boy must know arithmetic of course, or how can he fulfill his destiny and make money? But a girl! Nevertheless, no woman can manage a household properly, or even guide her own affairs as a single woman, without a good knowledge of arithmetic. Her money will be wasted, her servants will cheat her, trades people will be demoralized by her. There may be so much money at her command that she goes on serenely unaware of harm. She may perform feats of charity, but what was meant to be a blessing becomes a curse through her ignorance.

A millionaire who meant to give his daughter every advantage began as usual with a French nurse and a German maid and a music master who could command a fabulous price, while he engaged an artist of distinction to oversee her untidy attempts at drawing. At last he remembered that she should to have a teacher in English, and a lady was engaged to teach grammar and literature and history. "And arithmetic?" she asked. "A little, perhaps. Girls need very little."

The millionaire's daughter came to take her lesson - a bright, handsome girl, full of good nature. "I hate arithmetic, you know," she said confidingly, shrugging her shoulders and puckering her brows. "And then, what's the good of it for a girl?"

Copyright, 1890 by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., All rights reserved.