GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOLS.
WE do not often mention the reports of Companies which declare a dividend, not caring either to praise or blame concerns which are mercantile speculations, but we have one before us to-day which is of great social interest. One Associa- tion, at least, which owes its origin to the cry for giving women more freedom and better education, has done nothing but pure good. Till a very recent period, say 1870, the parents of girls in the professional or trading classes who wished to give them a good education had just three courses before them. They could send them to boarding-schools, which were sometimes ruinously dear— there are such schools now, where every girl costs as much as a boy at Eton—were often hopelessly inefficient, and occasionally, if we may deduce the fact from the strength of the prejudice existing on the subject, were distinctly bad. They could send them to day-schools, which, with occasional exceptions, gave a very insufficient amount of instruction, a mere veneer of educa- tion, the first object being to save salaries; and they could em- ploy private governesses, who at that time were, as a body, probably the most incompetent class living by their abilities in the whole community. Governessing was the only occupa- tion open to " ladies " without means ; there were no trustworthy certificates ; there was no regular system of training ; and there was no test, except experience, which mothers could apply. The profession was, therefore, over- run with incompetent women, who either knew nothing, or were incompetent to teach what they knew, and who succeeded or failed, not according to their educating powers, but according to their address in conciliating parents and " managing " often refractory pupils. The " parent's eye," so often ruinous to education, was never absent, and therefore the tendency to teach showy accomplishments, to compel girls without ear to play music, and girls with mathematical minds to colour bad sketches, was always present. Under none of these three plans was the result satisfactory, and the more sensible friends of the " women's rights" movement determined to try whether it was or was not possible to establish public schools for girls. After some diffi- culties, the "Girls' Public Day School Company (Limited)" was started, to pursue an organised plan, and from the first suc- ceeded in doing good work. It has now established in provincial towns and in some divisions of London twenty -three High Schools, at which girls are as thoroughly educated as boys in public schools, at a price which varies with the locality and the num- bers of the school, but is rarely above 224, and we believe never exceeds £30 a year. For this, the girls get a thoroughly good and oven severe education, managed by carefully-picked masters and mistresses—who in many cases have shown an unexpectedly high degree not only of teaching, but of organising power, who use modern methods, and who insist that knowledge which will not stand examination is no knowledge at all—and tested by most experienced examiners. That parents like the system is proved by the fact that although the class of girls who attend is a good one, and though there are therefore some diffi- culties about the daily four journeys to and from school, the average attendance nearly reaches 200. It is highest, of course, in the divisions of London where girls able to pay £25 for education swarm endlessly ; but the Gates- head High School has 226 scholars ; the Oxford High School, 214 ; the Norwich High School, 168; and the Ipswich High School, 181. On the other hand, the girls themselves entirely approve the schools, grow as proud of them as public schoolboys, and would not return, as they say, to the private schools "for anything." Whether it is due to the better venti- lation, or the greater variety of method, or the improvement in the teachers, we do not know; but if we were asked to point out the most conspicuous difference of result between the old and the new systems, we should point to the difference in the girls' tem- pers. The old dislike of school has vanished, and with it the old irritability and semi-reluctance to learn. The scholars are, no doubt, to a certain extent picked, slow or stupid girls avoiding the High Schools by instinct, while frivolous mothers thirst for more power of interference ; but still the progress made, and allowed on all hands, has been extraordinary. Some 4,336 girls are getting well taught instead of badly taught, and that with- out subscriptions or charitable aids in any way. The Company, though it finds it necessary, in most places, to build its own buildings, and is heavily mortgaged in consequence, and some- times encounters in new places some serious losses, is still able this year to declare a dividend of five per cent., and has already written off a fifth of the cost of its schools for depreciation.
We hardly know a more thoroughly successful social experi- ment, or one which bids more fair for the future, if only the Managers will extend their plan a little, by creating one Normal School, and passing their " Ushers " through it for six months, not to learn anything except how to teach; and we have inquired with some care as to the points of alleged failure. These, so far as we can learn, resolve themselves into three,—one of which is trivial, a second unavoidable, and a third extremely curious and interesting. A great many mothers still think that it would be possible, especially in London, to arrange some better system of escort for their girls; but this is, in the main, only a mothers' loving " fad." The girls never come to any harm, that anybody ever heard of, and in the majority of cases form a quite sufficient escort for each other. If not, the mothers must provide one, as a large school could not be so worked as to meet fully a requirement of that kind. The second objection often raised is to the mixture of classes, involved of necessity in the scheme. It is not alleged that any moral harm of any serious kind arises from this, but only that there is a certain risk of an unintended education in vulgarity. We are by no means inclined to make light of this objection. Difference of grade sometimes involves difference of civilisation upon points essential to manners, if not to morals, and we had rather a girl did not learn Latin than that she did learn to giggle, to whisper, or—an abomination partly confined to London—to call a road a " reaoud." But we fancy, from all we can learn, that this difficulty is not serious; that girls have quite as much caste-feeling as boys, and split quite as readily into coteries ; and that, as a matter of fact, caste divisions, so far as they are effaced at all, are effaced bene- ficially. At all events, the objection, if it be one, must be set. against the advantages of the schools, for it is irremediable. The necessary mechanism cannot be obtained for a High School, if it is to be based on the principle of exclusion, for numbers are not only essential to pecuniary success, but to the disci- pline, the competition, and the whole vitality of the school. You cannot have a breeze in a cupboard, or a high and permanent public opinion in a little school, sure to be ruled either by the cleverest, or the most audacious, or the worst.
The last remaining difficulty, or, rather, cause of depressiOn to the Managers of these schools, is the curious one that the regular " silly girl," who makes up a definite proportion of the whole army of girlhood, seems to derive nothing from the High School at all. She certainly takes no harm, but, except it may be in some imperceptible way, she takes no good whatever. She is wholly unaffected, and a decided loss, not only to the average powers of the school, but to its reputation. It may be said that precisely the same class exists in boys' public schools, and so it may—though the " silly girl" is in some respects a genus by herself, with no counterpart in the other sex—but that is just the oddity of the thing. The public school does affect the foolish boys visibly and decidedly. They gain very often most of all. A sort of atmosphere presses on them ; they are kicked, and punched, and laughed at, and, as a rule, with rare exceptions, gradually become, if not wiser, at least more ordinary. They are regimented, so to speak, the number of boys unable or unwilling to be, at all events, privates in the regiment being singularly small. The silly girls, on the contrary, can never be regimented, never brought under any influence from the collective school, visible in after-life. They do not grow ordinary enough to pass master, do not catch even the appearance of thinking, much less the power of it. This is a disappointment to the teachers, and, we fancy, leads some- times to a kind of unconscious neglect from hopelessness, which produces the:very few expressions of contempt one ever hears about the High Schools. " My girls," says the disappointed mother, "got nothing there ; they want individual attention." That is true ; but individual attention will probably do little for them. The loutish boy is a bad subject in his own way, but there is more hope of his becoming a man than of the silly girl becoming anything but what she is. We suppose the absence of the severe social discipline of a public school, the fightings, and thrashings, and punchings, has something to do with the matter, and the want of the sense that a livelihood must be earned a good deal more, but there is something beyond that. Either parents, from the very first, pardon emptiness, shallowness, frivolity, call it what you like, in a girl, as not being a quality likely to worry them in after-life, while in a boy they know it means failure, or there is at this point an original difference of capacity in the two sexes. If we were not afraid of Miss Becker, we should say the ultimate reason was the latter ; but at all events, the fact remains that while in a boys' publio school all, except an occasional lad of the Cowper type, get some stamp from the school, all in a girls' high school get it, except a distinct and not very small class of shallow-brains. They gain or lose from the new education, and from the immense improvement it has forced upon private schools—an improve- ment almost incalculable, and extending from better masters to free ventilation and scientifically-made desks—absolutely nothing.
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