HOME TRAINING | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 12, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 19.

HOME TRAINING.

Of first importance in the education of a young lady is proper home training. The young woman who has acquired all the culture and accomplishments which can be secured in the schools, but has no knowledge of the simple arts so necessary to the making of a home and the proper training of the family, has neglected the most important part of her education. The general prevalence of this defect is becoming alarming. The girls of the present generation are as a rule far less skillful in bread making, house cleaning, and other household arts, than in piano playing, elocution, and similar accomplishments. This condition of affairs is becoming more and more common in this country. The poor mother who has become worn out with arduous toil in the rearing of her family and in providing them with comforts and luxuries, seldom has a daughter who is able to take her place in the kitchen, at the washtub, or at the ironing table.

Unfortunate as is this state of things for the broken-down mother, as well as for the imperfectly educated daughter, mothers are themselves generally responsible for it. Mothers who have been brought up to a life of usefulness and labor, often become infected with the popular notion that physical labor is ungenteel and unladylike, and determine that their daughters shall be brought up differently from what they were. Imagining they are going to make their daughters something more than women, and prepare them for a sphere something above that of true womanhood, these silly mothers toil and slave in the kitchen, while their daughters sing and thrum the piano in the parlor, or simper and drawl nonsense in the parlor with some shallow-pated fop. The mother rises at early dawn to prepare the breakfast, while her useless daughters are sleeping off the effects of their

midnight dissipation in the ballroom. Reared in idleness to habits of uselessness, the hard earnings of father and mother are spent in lavishing upon them accomplishments which can be of no service to them in after life. Such daughters are unfit to meet the realities of life, and are utterly devoid of the real accomplishments which go to make up womanly character, and which would fit them for performing the duties of wife and mother in mature years.

The fact is that the average young woman is accomplished to the point of actual uselessness. What women need is more solid education. We do not object to accomplishments if they are not acquired at the expense of that thorough training which lies at the very foundation of real refinement and usefulness. How many young women fritter away their time and waste away their lives in devotion to nothings. A young lady who is able to sing and play the piano skillfully, to dance gracefully, to talk "small talk" fluently, to dress "to kill," to sketch a landscape passably, to embroider, to knit lace collars, to jabber a little French and German, may be able to satisfy the demands of society, but may be utterly wanting in that kind of culture which contributes to the real happiness of life. Such a person, as a quaint writer once said, is "all ruffle and no garment." Nothing contributes more to the formation of a sound character than a knowledge of the humble industries which go so far to make a happy home.

A mother cannot do her daughter greater injury than to allow her to grow up ignorant of household duties and unaccustomed to useful labor, yet mothers are so utterly blind to their duties in this respect that it is not to be wondered at that the rising generation of girls are vastly inferior to their predecessors. An omen for good is the establishment in many large cities of cooking schools and schools for training nurses, in which girls can learn a variety of useful employments and receive training in domestic duties.—Good Health.