girls" schools are one, and that the one is the boys" school, the
female schools have copied the methods which have grown out of the
requirements of the male organization
Obedient to the American educational maxim, that boys" schools and
girls" schools are one, and that the one is the boys" school, the
female schools have copied the methods which have grown out of the
requirements of the male organization. Schools for girls have been
modelled after schools for boys. Were it not for differences of dress
and figure, it would be impossible, even for an expert, after visiting
a high school for boys and one for girls, to tell which was arranged
for the male and which for the female organization. Our girls"
schools, whether public or private, have imposed upon their pupils a
boy"s regimen; and it is now proposed, in some quarters, to carry this
principle still farther, by burdening girls, after they leave school,
with a quadrennium of masculine college regimen. And so girls are to
learn the alphabet in college, as they have learned it in the
grammar-school, just as boys do. This is grounded upon the supposition
that sustained regularity of action and attendance may be as safely
required of a girl as of a boy; that there is no physical necessity
for periodically relieving her from walking, standing, reciting, or
studying; that the chapel-bell may call her, as well as him, to a
daily morning walk, with a standing prayer at the end of it,
regardless of the danger that such exercises, by deranging the tides
of her organization, may add to her piety at the expense of her
blood; that she may work her brain over mathematics, botany,
chemistry, German, and the like, with equal and sustained force on
every day of the month, and so safely divert blood from the
reproductive apparatus to the head; in short, that she, like her
brother, develops health and strength, blood and nerve, intellect and
life, by a regular, uninterrupted, and sustained course of work. All
this is not justified, either by experience or physiology. The
gardener may plant, if he choose, the lily and the rose, the oak and
the vine, within the same enclosure; let the same soil nourish them,
the same air visit them, and the same sunshine warm and cheer them;
still, he trains each of them with a separate art, warding from each
its peculiar dangers, developing within each its peculiar powers, and
teaching each to put forth to the utmost its divine and peculiar gifts
of strength and beauty. Girls lose health, strength, blood, and nerve,
by a regimen that ignores the periodical tides and reproductive
apparatus of their organization. The mothers and instructors, the
homes and schools, of our country"s daughters, would profit by
occasionally reading the old Levitical law. The race has not yet quite
outgrown the physiology of Moses.
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