Boarding School

( Originally Published 1892 )

The girl who has a wise, broad-minded, sympathetic mother had better remain away from boarding school. But there are more good schools than good mothers in the land, I fear.

I do not think a more unwise action can be made by parents than sending a young girl from the country to a city school. Yet it is done every year by thousands of devoted parents, who make painful sacrifices to enable them to carry out this cherished desire.

The young girl who goes through the first year of such a school and is not rendered restless, uneasy and unfitted for the practical duties of life which usually lie before country-bred girls, is a model of good sense, or a born philosopher.

The very sights and sounds of city life are distracting and exciting to the girl who is not accustomed to them ; the crunching of carriage wheels on a gravel driveway, the fashionably attired women, the gossip in the air about balls and theaters, which the day scholars bring, is not at all conducive of good scholarship.

If a boarding school is to be selected, as necessity frequently demands that it must be, let it be as remote as possible from fashionable life. I wish we might have Protestant schools conducted in the manner of convent school's. Some of the most charming girls I have known and some of the best educated, have been taught in convents. There is greater surveillance over the pupils, and greater system, and more thoroughness than is to be found in most boarding schools. And yet a convent educated lady to whom I once made this remark, assured me that she learned more mischief in the convent than she ever had learned out of it. "The girls were either very stupid or very bad," she said, "and the bad girls delighted in bringing pernicious books into the convent secretly and distributing them about. These books were hidden under mattresses and rugs, and the good, watchful-eyed sisters never discovered them. The very piety of these sisters was a dare to the vicious-minded girls to do shocking things."

One young girl entered the convent when a mere child. She graduated at seventeen, and was married three months afterward, but eloped with a stranger whom she met on her bridal tour during the honeymoon. The pernicious books which had been smuggled into the convent were the cause of her disordered mind and final disastrous conduct.

It strikes me that too many of our boarding school mistresses take it for granted that their pupils must be "perfect ladies" because they belong to families of wealth and standing.

The more a woman knows of the world the better fitted she seems to me for a teacher.

The trouble with our boarding schools is frequently in the extreme unworldliness of the instructors. Had I a daughter I would rather place her- under the care of a veteran coquette, who knew human nature and the world thoroughly, than to trust her to some woman whose brain has been educated to the exclusion of eyes, heart and understanding of her kind.

Many of the excellent women who preside over our boarding schools are as ignorant of human nature as babes. They never cared for anything in life as much as books, and they do not realize the dangers which menace the average normal natured girl. Teachers are the next most stupid beings to parents in this respect.

As for these parents, I grow every year and day more amazed and indignant with their blind ignorance regarding their daughters. I sometimes think the parents of young girls of this generation must have been either idiots or angels in their own youth. They could have had no emotions and no temptations themselves, or they would never allow their daughters to walk in such perilous paths, as scores of them do walk, unwarned and uninstructed.

A few years ago some friends of mine were preparing to send a beautiful young girl of 15 away to school.

The girl was prematurely developed in heart and body, and of the voluptuous type so attractive to men. I asked her mother if she felt perfectly secure regarding the associates of her daughter at school.

"Oh, Mary is such an innocent minded creature I can trust her anywhere," the mother replied, proudly. "She is really the most innocent child I ever saw for a girl of her age. I think she will develop very late. I want to keep her a little girl as long as possible, so I have not disturbed her mind with any premature confidences."

Now, to my absolute knowledge, gained by accident, I knew this young girl to be a woman in her emotions ; and already had she passed through embryo adventures with the opposite sex which had aroused her curiosity as to what constituted her charm over men and stirred her woman's vanity. The innocence of her mind was disturbed by her unfolding emotions and her Eve-like desire for greater knowledge. Never did a young girl so need a mother's sympathy and counsel as this one. I often wonder why God permits a woman like that to become a mother. To send such a girl away to boarding school was dangerous no doubt, yet hardly as dangerous as leaving her under the care of such a blind mother.

I know a brilliant lawyer who was a wild boy in his youth. He was forever in trouble of some kind with the fair sex and finally married a girl who ran away from school to become his wife, They are the parents of several children, the eldest a handsome, dark-eyed girl who inherits her father's love of adventure. She is only 15, but has already passed through a series of love affairs, known to all her friends and commented upon by strangers, but the criminally blind parents are ignorant of all this. No one dares tell them that almost daily on her way to and from the village school, their daughter sees and talks to and receives notes from young men, and, utterly forgetting their own hazardous past, both father and mother imagine their daughter to be an innocent child in mind.

It might prove to be a moral salvation of this girl to send her away to a good boarding school if the right woman presided over it. She is not vicious—she is merely full of animal spirits and precocious feminine instincts.

Hundreds of young American girls are like her, and hundreds of stupid American parents fail to see the necessity and duty of guarding such girls.

If by accident they do discover the truth about their daughters, they straightway shut them up, treat them harshly and denounce them as vicious minded. The father and mother I mention would no doubt do the same, forgetting their own runaway marriage and the adventures which preceded.

A girl like this ought to be treated very gently and with affection. She ought to be wisely taught and entertained. She should pass many hours in active physical exercise. The gymnasium is far better for such a girl than the boarding school. She should have no idle hours, no confidences with strange companions, no hidden books to read until she has crossed the dangerous chasm which spans girlhood and womanhood.

I have known a girl who was a mere child in mind to be forced into a premature maturity by association with older and more experienced girls at boarding school. Where a number of young girls are thrown together constantly for companionship their conversation runs largely to love affairs. This young girl who had never passed through any heart experience, hearing so much upon the subject from her companions, felt called upon to contribute her share to the entertainment. To the amazement of her parents and teachers she developed a faculty for, relating tales of love adventure wherein she:- figured as heroine. Investigation proved the stories utterly without foundation. It was one of thn abnormal developments of boarding school life.