Chapter VI: Part 6

All teaching in the modern school-room must be comparative, and it cannot be so if we have nothing to compare. The unity of the school must never be destroyed by dividing it into departments, for in so doing we sacrifice the opportunity for comparison in a higher sense. And always it is the class that must be looked out for more than the individual, always the whole school more than the class. It is only in this way that the individual can be cared for. Human society must be content to work on the individual not immediately but mediately, and the teacher is not freed from this necessity in the small society to which she must be a minor providence.

I can do no more here than to point out some of the conditions of the girls’ private school in our large cities, and briefly to hint at its possibilities. It must always hold fast to the principle that the development of moral character is its highest, and indeed we might say its only aim. But to secure this, it must always cultivate inner freedom—“the agreement of the will with its own law-giving judgment.” The school which puts such a motived force into the characters of its girls that they cannot lose it in all their after lives—the school, the memory of which they can never escape, and whose stamp they can never efface, whose aid is sure to come up strongest whenever need is sorest—that school, the thought of which is always followed by “a great wave of gratitude and love,” is the only one that has done its work.

1892.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] William F. Denning, F.R.A.S., in _Telescopic Work for Starlight Evenings_.

[5] “Both Latin and German are at a stage in which structure is more exposed to view than it is in the maturer languages of Greek and French.”—_Earle’s English Prose, p. 508._

THE END.