Practical Education for Women.
By Students' Workshop
THE world is so full of genuine women, guided by the noblest principles, and evincing an almost desperate eagerness to earn an honorable living for themselves, parents, or little ones, that the necessity for an education different in this respect from that usually given to girls, must be apparent to all. If viewed from the standpoint of real instead of ideal life, the course of study followed in the actual "female seminary," will logically appear as a standing wonder. It has been so long in use that the principle upon which it was built, and the end it was designed to attain, may be justly inferred from the results actually produced. Apart from an effort to discipline the mind, which can be as well done by the acquisition of useful as of useless knowledge, its chief purpose seems to be that of furnishing intelligent playthings for men possessing exhaustless wealth. Judging by its fruits, it evidently assumes that a woman's work mainly consists in discussing literature, smattering French, executing operettas, and attempting to copy paintings without a knowledge of drawing. It assumes that the girl will not marry; or, if she does, that the strain of maternity will not test her constitution; that her children will never be sick; that her family will be oblivious to bad bread, and household confusion; that a flowerless garden will fill her husband with bliss, and a buttonless shirt with ecstasy; and, above all, that she will never, through any adversity, or under any conceivable circumstances, be required to perform any possible kind of work. The world for which it prepares her is dreamland, where the poetic Clarence Mortimer awaits her arrival, that they may sail in a fairy ship over a placid ocean to his castle in Spain, and spend a perpetual youth in delicious wooing, while the ceaseless moonlight sifts through the overhanging leaves, and exotic flowers perfume the air. Clarence Mortimer is a fraud. His true name is Tom Jones. He lives in California, and earns every cent by hard labor. He tears his clothes, snores, and eats unlimited quantities of beef and cabbage, which Mrs. Tom Jones may have to cook, and, at the same time, preserve order among an assorted lot of little Joneses, energetic with mischief, and having capacious lungs and elastic stomachs. It is not strange that the seminaries provide the usual course of study; for, like other merchants, they only supply the article demanded by the market. But it is strange that a mother who was herself so educated, and who, as a wife and housekeeper, has keenly felt her own ignorance of subjects that should have been taught, and her want of skill that might have been acquired, can be content to give her daughter the same unreal preparation for that which she knows to be real life. And it is exceedingly strange that fathers, long familiar with the distress suddenly wrought by financial changes, should religiously exclude from the daughter's education all knowledge of business, and every possibility of earning a woman's living except by the wash-tub, needle, or piano.—Students' Workshop.