Читать книгу The Renaissance of Girls' Education in England: A Record of Fifty Years' Progress - Alice Zimmern - Страница 5

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Yes, strange though it may sound, it was in truth a Renaissance—a revival of the past, and no new experiment. Or perhaps we should more fitly describe it as the realisation of an old dream, one that has been dreamed many times in the course of the ages, but has waited till the nineteenth century for its complete fulfilment. Two thousand years ago it was seen by Plato, that most practical of idealists, who maintained that it was for the best interests of the state that its men and women should be as good as possible. Therefore the education of both was a matter of public concern. In these latter days this doctrine has won acceptance, with an even wider significance, due to our democratic development. The treasures of learning are no longer the property of an exclusive few, and the privileges of class and sex are breaking down simultaneously. Education for all, boys and girls, rich and poor, is the modern demand, which no party dare now refuse to consider. We must cater not only for the ‘wives of the governors,’ but also for the children of the slums. All the daughters of all the households of all civilised countries are to enter into their heritage. The much-discussed ‘ladder’ from the elementary school to the University is becoming a fact; and its rungs are being widened, that the girls may ascend it side by side with their brothers. La carrière ouverte aux talents, with no distinction of class, sex, or creed, is the demand of the nineteenth century.

From Plato’s Utopian ‘Republic’ to London of the County Council is a far cry. Between the two, this question of girls’ education has many times been raised and temporarily solved. Socrates’ half-jesting dictum, that women are capable of learning anything which men are willing they should know, might stand as the motto for nearly every attempt to improve female education. The instruction given to women at different epochs has varied directly with the estimation in which they were held. When they were regarded as slaves or toys it was expedient to keep them in ignorance; when they were treated honourably as equals, the best gifts of learning were not thought too good for them.

It is not our place here to dwell on the bright examples of antiquity, the Neo-Platonist women and Hypatia, the beautiful mathematician of Alexandria, but rather, turning to our own country, to see how Christianity has touched the lives of women. Here, as elsewhere, it was the Church alone that kept alive the flame of knowledge during the Middle Ages. In the seventh and eighth centuries, that ‘nadir of learning,’ monks and nuns alike were occupied with literary studies. They read theology and classics, copied manuscripts, and corresponded in Latin. Their activity was in accordance with their social position. ‘The heads of the great religious houses were necessarily persons of importance, with privileges and great responsibilities. They had considerable wealth at their disposal, and in authority and influence they ranked among the nobles of the land, to whom they were often allied by birth.’^[1] The name that naturally occurs first to our minds is that of the Abbess Hilda, ‘whose counsel was sought even by kings,’ and who ruled over a double monastery, which became a seminary of bishops and priests. Hers is no solitary instance. ‘In Anglo-Saxon England,’ writes Miss Eckenstein, ‘men who attained to distinction received their training in settlements governed by women. Histories and a chronicle of unique value were inspired by and drafted under the auspices of Saxon abbesses.’ And ‘the curriculum of study in the nunnery was as liberal as that accepted by the monks, and embraced all available writings, whether by Christian or profane authors.’ The convents were the colleges of Anglo-Saxon times. The nuns, who lived a life of seclusion and study, might be compared with the fellows; the students were the successive groups of girls who came there for education.

Among the many social changes brought about by the Norman Conquest, the most far-reaching, the introduction of feudalism, established a new centre of education, which henceforth flourished side by side with the cloister. The monks still taught the Trivium and Quadrivium—Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy—though the instruction given deserved these high-sounding names little better than the so-called sciences taught in girls’ schools at the beginning of our own century. The castle could offer boys a more attractive programme. The seven knightly accomplishments were to ride, sing, shoot with the bow, box, hawk, play chess, and write verses. It had something for girls as well. While the young squires gained their training by service done to their lord, the châtelaine would gather about her a troop of gentle maidens, who learned to weave, spin, brew, and distil, and do various kinds of needlework. They learned a little reading and writing, and in these arts were somewhat in advance of their brothers, who were trained to look on books as monkish and womanish, and not quite suited to a knight and gentleman. The châtelaine herself held an honourable position. In her lord’s absence she must even take command of the castle, and the damoiselles must be prepared for their own coming responsibilities.

The thirteenth century brought a change. The political influence of the Church, which had been lessened by the Conquest, was revived by the preaching friars. They introduced a new ideal of monastic life; the spirit of devotion and asceticism drove out the old love of learning. New priories sprang up throughout England, but their aims were different. As the monasteries were more and more becoming centres of devotion, learning was being driven into the new universities, where the philosophy of the schoolmen now reigned supreme. Already some colleges with endowments for poor scholars had been founded at Oxford and Cambridge, and it was becoming the custom for the monasteries to send their most promising pupils there. Why did the nuns not follow this example? Probably the metaphysical disputations then in vogue had few attractions for them; and the presence of large numbers of men would be a sufficient reason for keeping aloof, for though the studies of both sexes might be the same, they were not pursued side by side. Whatever the cause, it is certain that while masculine learning showed an ever-growing tendency to leave the cloister, female scholarship was still closely confined to the convent. But it was degenerating for want of new life; the nunneries were a survival, not a living growth; their learning had become ‘poor in substance, cramped in method, and insufficient in application.’^[2] The old order was changing, but somehow the nuns failed to perceive it. In Erasmus’ day, we are told, the really learned woman was to be found outside the convent walls, and he adds the significant remark that her husband approved of her studies. The wrong done to women by the dissolution was not so much the closing of the convents as the transference to men of their endowments. The most flagrant instance is the transformation of St. Radegund’s nunnery at Cambridge into Jesus College. That this and other instances of spoliation were possible shows how low the status of women had sunk, and it is not strange, therefore, that a period of neglected education should have ensued.

Whatever the cause, the Reformation does not seem to have assisted the development of women. Perhaps this was partly due to the removal of the one career that had been open to them, thus forcing all, married and unmarried, into a dependent position in the household. Luther’s views on women were not very elevated, and probably a good many of the Reformers shared them. It may be due to this Protestant influence that in England women profited less intellectually by the Renaissance than men, or at any rate in far smaller numbers. Thanks to the new grammar schools, learning was being made accessible to boys of all classes. When Sir Thomas More’s dream was realised, and the middle classes, from the squire to the petty tradesman, were brought into contact with ancient literature, the daughters were not as well provided as the sons. Some authorities are of opinion that the original foundations were meant for both sexes alike, but if so, very few girls of the middle class profited by their advantages, though some sort of education evidently came to all. Among the upper classes large numbers of women were carried away by the enthusiasm of the Renaissance, and learned to read Latin and Greek. The sixteenth century has always been celebrated for its learned ladies, as witness Wotton’s oft quoted remark thereon and his comment: ‘One would think by the effects that it was a proper way of educating them, since there are no accounts in history of so many great women in any age as are to be found between the years 1500 and 1600.’ Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey are sometimes called exceptions, but this is clearly an error. Learning was an expensive luxury for women, since it involved the services of a private tutor, but it had fashion and opinion on its side. To be learned was accounted a privilege, which called for neither arrogant boasting nor blushing concealment. Those who did study, would naturally turn to the best their age could offer them, i.e. the new editions of the classics and the fashionable modern literature. They set the fashion too as well as followed it. The success of Euphues was established by its lady readers, and in the domain of polite literature it was generally acknowledged that they created the standard. When Lyly wrote ‘Euphues had rather lie shut in a lady’s casket than open in a scholar’s study,’ he knew well enough that it was not the ladies who would neglect his book. He confessed as much in its dedication to the ‘Ladies and Gentlewomen of England.’ Nor was there anything new in this. The lady sat in her bower to read Sidney’s Arcadia as in olden times she had listened in the hall to the lay of the minstrel. It was still her part to assign the prize of romance as of valour. The leisure which made the enjoyment of tale and song possible was essentially the lot of the rich and noble lady, who neither toiled nor span, but did a more useful work as guardian of art and literature. The amazing discovery that ‘Books are a part of man’s prerogative’^[3] had not yet been made; there is certainly not a hint of it in Shakespeare. Nor could such a doctrine possibly originate under a queen, who, whatever her faults, cultivated learning herself and honoured it in others. Our thoughts linger lovingly over that noblest age of English story, when romanticism and classicism joined their glories for a brief space; when the courtier was both knight and scholar, and the noble dame’s epitaph praised her as ‘wise and fair and good.’ Seen through the haze of the past, its splendours stand out in even greater dimension, while all that was small and weak is obscured to dimness. The very age that followed served as a foil to throw into yet brighter relief ‘the spacious days of great Elizabeth.’

It is significant of the rapid degeneration that ensued, that though between the accession of Henry VIII. and the death of James I., 353 grammar schools were founded in England, not one was added to the number after 1625. The seventeenth century was a gloomy period for England. If Elizabeth had given her country peace and glory, the Stuarts were not long in reversing the position. Disastrous civil wars, political and theological quarrels, absorbed the best energies of the nation. The Cavaliers were too frivolous, the Roundheads too grimly earnest to spare much leisure for learning. In times of war and national peril woman’s influence is apt to wane, and such power as they had at the Stuart court was not of the kind to encourage intellectual pursuits. When a scholar was hardly accounted a gentleman, a lady might be pardoned for neglecting her intellectual charms. It became the fashion among men to decry female students, to bid them put away their books and learn to wash and cook instead. ‘I like not a female poetess at any hand,’ says one of these self-appointed critics. This attitude was characteristic of the decline of chivalry and the degradation of woman’s position. ‘There is not so much as a Don Quixote of the quill left,’ writes Mary Astell in 1694, ‘to succour the distressed damsels.’ The age of courtesy being over, women must help themselves, and she takes up the cudgels for her sex. ‘A man ought no more to value himself on being wiser than a woman,’ she remarks pertinently, ‘if he owes his advantage to a better education and greater means of information, than he ought to boast of courage for beating a man when his hands were bound.’^[4] Hers is the old thesis, that women are quite capable of learning if only men will not put hindrances in their way. Even so the girls’ curriculum of her day does not seem to have been as meagre as is often assumed. She tells us that when the boys go to grammar schools the girls are sent ‘to boarding-schools or other places to learn needlework, dancing, singing, music, drawing, painting, and other accomplishments... and French, which is now very fashionable.’ This description which would almost have served at the beginning of our own century, is not as gloomy as Defoe’s, written at about the same time. Girls, he tells us, learned ‘to stitch and sew and make baubles. They are taught to read indeed, and perhaps to write their names or so, and this is the height of a woman’s education.’^[5] Both agree in condemning its narrowness. Defoe cannot believe that ‘God Almighty ever made them such glorious creatures, and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and delightful to mankind, with souls capable of the same accomplishment with men, and all to be only stewards of our houses, cooks, and slaves.’ Mary Astell maintains that ‘according to the rate that young women are educated, according to the way their time is spent, they are destined to folly and impertinence, to say no worse.’ She protests, as Mrs. Makins had done before her,^[6] against the new fashion of ignorant women, and implores her sisters to help bring back the good old times, and take a lesson from the ladies of the previous century. Both Defoe and Mary Astell recommend the same project, the establishment of women’s colleges, thus anticipating our own times by more than a century and a half. Defoe’s colleges would have been superior boarding-schools, one in every county and about ten for the city of London; Mary Astell’s plan was to combine religious and intellectual aims. She contemplated ‘a seminary to stock the kingdom with pious and prudent ladies, whose good example, it is to be hoped, will so influence the rest of their sex, that women may no longer pass for those little, useless, and impertinent animals which the ill conduct of too many has caused them to be mistaken for.’^[7] But it must also try to ‘expel that cloud of ignorance which custom has involved us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge, that the souls of women may no longer be the only unadorned and neglected things.’ Nothing came of either project; they belong to the domain of unfulfilled dreams.

The new century brought little improvement. Anne was not of a sufficiently independent character to influence greatly the lives and pursuits of her subjects. As was natural in the reign of a Queen, the position and dignity of women were somewhat raised; and in that ‘Augustan age’ there was one class of literature specially addressed to the ladies, the newly invented essay. Addison really wanted to elevate their position and social influence, but his success was literary rather than moral. If we may trust the novelists of the last century, public morality was never at a lower ebb. The men of that day worshipped idleness, and it was not surprising that they did not care to see their wives and mistresses at work. Show was the aim throughout, and the ‘accomplishment’ reigned supreme. The second half of the century witnessed a great increase in the boarding-school system. Hitherto it had been confined to the fashionable world; now tradesmen and farmers who had made some money began to emulate their ‘betters.’ Imitations of the fashionable schools sprang up everywhere. ‘We have,’ says the heroine of General Burgoyne’s play, The Heiress, “Young ladies boarded and educated” upon blue boards in gold letters in every village; with a strolling player for a dancing-master, and a deserter from Dunkirk to teach the French language.’

The eighteenth century, too, had its distinguished women; indeed, the Blue-Stocking Club, so called, it seems, from the dress of one of its masculine habitués, is regarded as the representative group of learned ladies. But Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Chapone, and Hannah More were exceptions, and themselves only too conscious of their opposition to the rest of their sex. There was a touch of the précieuse about some of them which exposed them to a good deal of cheap satire, and they were keenly alive to the antagonism with which the other sex regarded them. Mrs. Chapone even advises her niece to avoid the study of classics and science, for fear of ‘exciting envy in one sex and jealousy in the other.’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complains bitterly that ‘there is hardly a creature in the world more despicable and more liable to universal ridicule than that of a learned woman,’ while ‘folly is reckoned so much our proper sphere, we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that than the least pretensions to reading and good sense.’

Some of these last century women were practical reformers, who realised the pernicious results of this false opinion about their sex. Among these was Hannah More, who entered a most earnest protest against the excessive accomplishment craze. The lower middle class were emulating the upper in their endeavour to make their daughters ‘accomplished young ladies,’ while they quite forgot that ‘the profession of ladies to which the best of their education should be turned is that of daughters, wives, mothers, and mistresses of families.’^[8] She even ventured to fly in the face of public opinion by asserting that ‘a young lady may excel in speaking French and Italian, may repeat a few passages from a volume of extracts, play like a professor, and sing like a siren,’ and yet be very badly educated, if her mind remains untrained. ‘The kind of knowledge that they commonly do acquire is easily attained,’ they learn everything in a superficial question-and-answer way, or through abridgments, beauties, and compendiums, instead of reading books that require thought and attention. As we read her Strictures on Female Education we rub our eyes and look at the date once more. Is this, indeed, Hannah More writing a hundred years ago, or have we stumbled upon a stray extract from Mr. Bryce’s report to the Schools’ Inquiry Commission in 1867? ‘She should pursue every kind of study which will teach her to elicit truth, which will lead her to be intent upon realities; will give precision to her ideas; will make an exact mind.’ She quotes Dr. Johnson’s opinion that ‘a woman cannot have too much arithmetic.’ Had the worthy doctor a prevision of a High School time-table?

Hannah More’s influence does not seem to have been very lasting. Her contemptuous remark, that we might as well talk about the rights of children as the rights of women, shows that she had not much real grasp of the educational problem. Both should, in her opinion, be relegated to their proper subordinate places. She was right in despising the frivolity of her day, and condemning the constant round of pleasure in which fashionable women spent their lives, but she was almost too severe to be helpful. Far more valuable was Miss Edgeworth’s work, which was constructive as well as critical. Her educational romances, in which she contrasts the good and bad governess, the sensible and frivolous girl, are thoroughly readable even at the present day, and must have proved useful to many readers who lighted unawares on the powder in the jam. Practical Education, written in conjunction with her father, throws valuable light on contemporary conditions, and advances theories that are still worthy of our notice. The ‘practical toy shop,’ provided with all manner of carpenter’s tools, with wood properly prepared for the young workman, and with screws, nails, glue, emery-paper, etc., is still to seek; her remarks on the two schools, the one teaching ‘by dint of reiterated pain and terror,’ the other ‘with the help of counters and coaxing and gingerbread,’ are not altogether out of date. Nor have we yet learned to pay a good governess £300 a year, on the ground that her working days are few, and she ought to lay by for a comfortable old age. Her severest strictures, like Hannah More’s, are reserved for ‘female accomplishments.’ Their chief use is that ‘they are supposed to increase a young lady’s chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery.’ Hence, when the end is achieved, they are thrown aside. ‘As soon as a young lady is married, does she not frequently discover that she really has no leisure to cultivate talents which take up so much time?’ Nor is it quite certain that they are as efficacious as is generally supposed. The market is becoming overstocked, for ‘every young lady, and every young woman is now a young lady, has some pretension to accomplishments. She draws a little; or she plays a little; or she speaks French a little.’ Accomplishments are becoming so general ‘that they cannot be considered as the distinguishing characteristics of even a gentlewoman’s education.’ Since they are no longer ‘exclusive,’ she hopes they may be cast aside for something better. Her indictment against the female education of her day is that ‘sentiment and ridicule have conspired to represent reason, knowledge, and science as unsuitable and dangerous to women; yet, at the same time, wit and superficial acquirements in literature have been the object of admiration in society; so that this dangerous inference has been drawn, almost without our perceiving its fallacy, that superficial knowledge is more desirable in women than accurate knowledge.’ It is interesting to find this complaint repeated in 1826 by an anonymous writer,^[9] who maintains the old dictum that ‘females are not behind males in capacity, and excel them in diligence and docility,’ but they are handicapped by ‘an education of mere externals and of show.’ There is a want of stamina in girls’ education, and as for their school-books, they are mere combinations of words used as ‘substitutes or apologies for ideas.’

Maria Edgeworth’s influence should have been considerable, but turning from her works to her contemporaries and immediate successors, it seems doubtful whether they even understood her. Her stories, whose most useful lessons were addressed to parents, were turned into children’s books; and the demand for a more solid education simply led to an increase of the memory and book-work in schools. In spite of her strictures on the uselessness of a knowledge of isolated facts, and the attempts of Mrs. Barbauld and others to supply something better, the catechism system continued to grow and flourish. Large amounts of memory work were added to the piano and drawing, which still held their own, and the results were not merely negative as regards intellectual value, but positive in their injurious effects on health. Miss Frances Power Cobbe in her description of the fashionable boarding-school to which she was sent in 1836, speaks of the pages of prose the girls were expected to learn by heart, amid the din of constant practising. ‘Not that which was good in itself or useful to the community, or even that which would be delightful to ourselves, but that which would make us admired in society was the raison-d’être of each requirement. Everything was taught in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and Dancing, miserably poor music too, of the Italian school then in vogue, and generally performed in a showy and tasteless manner on harp or piano.’^[10] Miss Cobbe thinks this education far worse than that received by her mother in 1790, when much less was attempted, and there was no ‘packing the brains of girls with facts.’ Besides ‘grammar and geography, and a very fair share of history’ (ancient from Rollin, and sacred from Mrs. Trimmer), they ‘learned to speak and read French with a very good accent, and to play the harpsichord with taste.’ Clearly things were on the downward course, and in the first half of this century the education of both sexes was in some respects in a worse condition in England than at any time before or since. Mere ignorance would have been comparatively harmless, but there never was a time when educational theories were more fashionable or more perverse. Miss Catherine Sinclair, who wrote in the forties and fifties, lifted up her voice, in Modern Accomplishments, against the system of cram and display then prevailing. ‘Lady Howard’s utmost ingenuity was exercised in devising plans of study for her daughter, each of which required to be tried under the dynasty of a different governess, so that by the time Matilda Howard attained the age of sixteen, she had been successively taught by eight, all of whom were instructed in the last method that had been invented for making young ladies accomplished on the newest pattern.’ All these governesses were foreign, according to the fashion of the day; at last an English lady of Edgworthian type was discovered, who trained the mind instead of overloading the memory, and all ended happily. Precocity and display were what parents demanded, and schools and governesses contrived to supply the requirements. Miss Sinclair’s accounts of premature death and lifelong ill-health may have been overdrawn, but doubtless she put her finger on the weak spot when she wrote: ‘Nothing is popular now that requires thought in young people, who are constantly devouring books, but never digesting them, and are allowed no time to think.’

The better the school, in the acceptation of that day, the worse probably the result; and those girls whose parents could not afford the expensive governess or the ‘finishing-school,’ often had the best of it, so long as they were not sent to one of the cheap and inefficient imitations. By a curious irony the one attempt made early in the century to give a good education at a small expense, was that which through Charlotte Brontë’s genius has been held up to everlasting contumely. The Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowen Bridge undertook, for the small sum of £14 a year, to clothe, feed, lodge, and educate the daughters of clergymen. In 1825, the year when Charlotte Brontë was there, the Rev. W. Carus Wilson (too well known as Mr. Brocklehurst), appealing for additional funds, stated that an annual income of £250, together with the fees, would be sufficient to meet current expenses. A comparison of this modest demand with the sums raised in our own day for women’s colleges, helps us to realise the revolution that has taken place in public opinion. Even so most of the subscribers seem to have been Mr. Wilson’s relations, and it was only as a charity for the poor clergy, with a side-thought of getting better governesses at low terms, that it awakened any interest at all. Still it was considered a remarkable achievement. In 1833, Mr. Venn Elliott, who had visited the school in its new premises at Casterton, and been present at the consecration of the church built in its neighbourhood, wrote: ‘I would rather have built this school and church than Blenheim and Burleigh. So Dr. Watts said he would rather have written Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted than Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ The result of this visit was the foundation of St. Mary’s Hall at Brighton. It still exists, and gives a really first-class education at a low fee. Other schools were founded in imitation; and in spite of the sordid economy of those early days, and the suffering it entailed on the weakly, they deserve full recognition as almost the only institutions which attempted in the early part of the century to provide a good and cheap education for girls. The tradition of sound study survived, and in 1867 the Casterton institution came in for a word of praise from the Royal Commissioners, amid their almost universal condemnation of existing girls’ schools.

The benefits which a woman’s reign always confers on women have been experienced to the full during the long and peaceful reign of our present Queen. The interest taken by her and the Prince Consort in arts and letters, and in the general improvement of the people, set an example that was readily followed. Ladies of the upper and middle classes began to take a keener interest in the lives of the poor, and in dealing with the problems they thus encountered were often brought to realise their own want of education. There was a stir and a movement towards something better. The views of men were gradually changing, as the ideal of womanhood set by a purer Court became more elevated. Sixty years of a woman’s wise and beneficent rule have done much to restore the glories of Elizabeth’s day. Like the revival of letters, which communicated to the whole world the learning which had once belonged to one small people, this other renaissance brought knowledge, not only to the convent pupil and the lady of leisure, but to all the daughters of the nation. This widening has helped to fix the roots more firmly, and we may hope and believe that the gains of this century are not to be lost, but, enriched by all the wealth of the future, to continue for many a generation to come.