1885: Sussex to Simla
I have been reading the latest anthology of “morally improving tales”, which, like so many of its kind, manages to speak endlessly of obedience but scarcely a word of imagination. It set me thinking—perhaps too freely for propriety—about what we call education in England and what it truly means to instruct the young.
It appears to me that the status of a Count is now the count of status; in other words, it is not virtue or intellect that determines one’s place but the inherited arithmetic of birth. Our educational system, rather than correcting this imbalance, only rehearses it. The little boys are taught to see the world as theirs to command, the little girls to see the home as theirs to maintain and all are told that such divisions are ordained by wisdom, not convenience. I begin to suspect it is not wisdom at all but habit.
The curriculum, as sanctioned for our schools by men of learning, seems less devoted to cultivating the mind than to shaping a form of social obedience. We teach our children of wars and victories as though aggression were the highest virtue. They can recite, with perfect decorum, every year of Marlborough’s campaigns yet have never heard the name of Hypatia or Sappho or indeed of a single woman whose thought shaped civilisation. Are children being raised as servants to the Empire, I wonder, rather than as citizens of the world?
I have lately examined the prescribed reading in several of the girls’ academies and find it narrow in the extreme. Books on science and philosophy remain the preserve of the masculine syllabus, while the “female” course concerns itself with decorum, needlework and that ever-elastic notion of “character”. Foreign histories are omitted altogether, as if one should only need to know the English narrative of triumph and possession. What wisdom can arise from such smallness? To understand England without understanding the world is to know the shell but not the creature.
It troubles me, too, that nearly every book we place in the hands of our daughters has been written by a man. One may hardly find a single page in their texts through which a woman’s mind has spoken in her own right. It is little wonder that girls grow to see the world only as something described for them rather than by them. There are reformers—Miss Dorothea Beale at Cheltenham, whom I admire deeply—who would offer a broader education: mathematics, literature beyond the moral tale, the serious study of history and art as quest rather than ornament. Yet these remain rare exceptions.
I sometimes think we are educating our daughters for an Empire already fading, rather than for the century to come. If our children must learn loyalty, let it be loyalty to truth, not to form; if pride, let it be pride of understanding, not pedigree. For I fear that we are raising minds trained to obey rather than to think, to accept rather than to see.
Were I to design a curriculum, it would balance Homer with Kalidasa, Milton with Christine de Pisan, Newton with Mary Somerville. Perhaps then, the next generation might grow not as servants to the Empire but as heirs to the world.
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