"GIRL GRADUATES."
THE advocates of what are called Woman's Rights have hit upon an exceedingly clever and somewhat crafty scheme. They want to have the system of middle-class examinations extended to English women. Oxford they know will not consent, and so they appeal to the University of London, partly as composed of liberal men, and partly, we suspect, as a body always desirous to appear a step or two in advance of the older universities. They back their request, too, by an argument which appeals very strongly to the wealthier Eng- lish middle class, and which is in itself undoubtedly sound. The certificate, they say, is wanted as a protection. Education is be- coming more and more valuable for girls, while schools are not be- comine•° more popular, or private education more satisfactory. Masters, indeed, are attainable in any numbers and of any degree of merit, but papas look rather askance at masters unless very old or very well intro- duced. It may be a foolish prejudice, but we all know how great is the influence of a really able professor even upon boys, how apt they are to elevate him into a hero, how ceaselessly he colours the current of their thoughts. Girls are still more impressionable, and men of the world—and who among U3 now-a-days is not a man of the world? '—are not quite willing that their daughters should gain their first impressions of something greater and stronger than themselves from men of whom they know little, and who are just as little able to resist the tenderness which all men feel towards those who look up to them as any other section of mankind. A mastery of German or music does not make the blood run slower. Parents are driven back upon governesses, and of all classes in the world the governess is the one it is most difficult and most necessary to gauge. The broad points of character can be tested indifferently well, for English society keeps up an espionage on governesses, inammas watching them from house to house, and discussing them in that sweet half-hour when the gentle- men are below and confidences are practicable, in a style from which a Paris detective might sometimes learn many valuable hints. Their fol- lowers, their families, their dress, their tendency to flirt with grown- up sons, all these important moral points can be pretty clearly ascer- tained. There remain their attainments, and upon this subject the careful mother finds herself, to her infinite perplexity, quite at sea. She cannot test them herself, for the last generation was indifferently educated, and the candidate may know more than the employer, and that would be grievously unpleasant. Papa will not be at the trouble, even if he can trust his French accent, and is not dismayed when the candidate talks of classical or romantic music. Friends are of no value, for none of them know much of the matter, except the last employer, and she is only intent on saying all the good she can with- oat straining her conscience by actual quotable perjuries.
As a rule, the mother judges the character by her eyes and by cer- tain whispers, and trusts to chance for efficiency, often to find herself wofully deceived. Very high-priced governesses are usually really competent, but it is not of them we are talking, but of the half-paid ladies who teach in households spending from four to twelve hundred a year. They are, perhaps, the most inefficient of all existing profes- sional classes. Here and there individuals may be found of high attainments, but the mass really know next to nothing, far less, for example, than national schoolmasters. They offer to teach languages, and get up the day's lesson the night before, teach history by ques- tion and answer with the indispensable book in their hands, drill their pupils up to a certain musical proficiency with which a real knowledge of music has nothing whatever to do, and teach geography worse than most ushers, and that is not saying a little. Their pupils leave them convinced that the ability to talk a few sentences in "Continental English," as Eothen once called it, to play a few "pieces," and tell the names of the chief towns of Europe, makes them accomplished women, though they cannot compose a sentence of clear English, or understand the geographical allusions in a news- paper, or think out any proposition mooted in mixed society. Gover- nesses of this class generally claim every accomplishment but one. They do not often try to teach drawing, for in drawing you cannot conceal your ignorance. Papa leaves the French lesson unexamined, but he can see that the horse looks too much like a cow, that the river could never be swum through, that all the perspective is false. But in all other departments of education middle-class England is infested with pretenders, with women who may be and often are most excellent, who are sometimes, in spite of their unreasonable sensitive- ness, much to be pitied, and who in the difficulties old age brings with it deserve more aid and obtain less than any section of the community, but who are, nevertheless, hopelessly inefficient. The certificate of the University would remedy this. It would be a guarantee at least for attainments, for that amount of positive knowledge without which the attempt to teach is a pretence, and which those who employ governesses are so seldom able to test. It would be one, too, of very singular fairness. The "college certificate," now so valuable, is given only to those who have graduated at those colleges, and the host of governesses self-instructed, instructed at home, or instructed at private schools, are pro tank thrown out in the race. The middle-
class certificate is given to anybody, however taught, or wherem trained, provided he comes honestly up to the standard of the examiners. Even those who have no need to teach, who can live at home in peace, or who are sure of their true position as future wives and mothers, may be glad to test their own knowledge, and the exact value of what they have gained, by passing an examination which might still leave them two years of leisure to rectify proved deficiencies.
So far the scheme has our cordial support, but we rather suspect these ladies and their allies have another object in view. They want the examination for women to embrace the same subjects as the one established for men, to bring the sexes into open competition, and to prove, as they think they will, that there is no inequality between them. They might succeed, though the old objection is still unan- swered, that while all women study music and talk religion, no female composer or theologian has ever had the most shadowy influence in the world; hut if they did we should still object to so senseless a waste of time. We need not even discuss whether classics and mathematics, with the severe thought they require, arc the best training for beings whose power lies in their acuteness, perception, and subtle sympathies, and not in inductive reasoning or the arrange- ment of masses of fact. We simply protest against the dull uniformity of instruction such a system would introduce. Woman is man's complement, not rival, and it is better that he should be fully com- petent in one branch and she in another than that she should be a little less competent than he in his own special studies. Some studies they must have in common. There is no difference of sex possible in geography, and not much in history, though women might know modern history best, but let us keep up what difference is possible, let modern languages take with women the place of the classics among men and music and painting the time occupied by mathematical study. They may be made just as good instruments for training, if they are only learned thoroughly, instead of being taught in the super- ficial way in which men who cannot reason usually learn arithmetic. German, in particular, constructed as it is on a principle different from that of the English tongue, will task the attention as fully as any dead language, while it yields at once a result only granted in the classics to minute and exhaustive reading. Women, too, being essen- tially imitative, can learn these languages much quicker—a point of no slight importance, when it is remembered that most girls must leave off study just when men go to college. As to mathematics, we can but repeat an argument which the excellent philanthropists who start these schemes hold inospecial abhorrence. The world does not want female mathematicians. I severe scientific training may be a most excellent preparation for the combat of life; but if really severe it produces qualities which in women, whom God and man alike mean for wives, are of all others the least desired. We cannot have home happiness endangered for any conceivable improvement to the minds or powers of either sex, and a woman trained deliberately to argue, to dispute, to see flaws, and to trust reason instead of feeling, would most seriously endanger it. Let us have female examinations, and female certificates by all means, but let them be based on the curri- culum which reason and experience alike select as the one best fitted to fill up the void in the knowledge of the second half of mankind.
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