xvi Introduction 



The function of education as a national concern should 

 be, he contended, to provide " a ladder reaching from the 

 gutter to the university, along which every child in the 

 three kingdoms should have the chance of climbing as far 

 as he was fit to go." All children, but especially town- 

 bred children, should be taught the simpler forms of 

 gymnastics. After reading, writing, and arithmetic, the 

 emphasis should be put upon one or more of the natural 

 sciences, because in these the faculties of observation and 

 inquiry are disciplined. The value of drawing, he thought, 

 could not be exaggerated, " because it gives the means of 

 training the young in attention and accuracy, the two 

 things in which all mankind are more deficient than in any 

 other mental quality whatever." 



Women are not excluded from his scheme of education 

 but expressly included. "The mind of the average girl," 

 he wrote, " is less different from that of the average boy, 

 than"*the mind of one boy is from that of another; so that 

 whatever argument justifies a given education for all boys, 

 justifies its application to girls as well. So far from im- 

 posing artificial restriction upon the acquirement of knowl- 

 edge by women, throw every facility in their way. . . . 

 They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and 

 the golden hair will not curl less gracefully outside the 

 head by reason of there being brains within. . . . Let 

 them, if they so please, become merchants, barristers, 

 politicians. Let them have a fair field, but let them 

 understand as the necessary correlative, that they are to 

 have no favor. . . . And the result? Women will 

 find their place and it will neither be that in which they 

 have been held, nor that to which some of them aspire." 



Literature should have an important place because " an 

 exclusively-scientific training will bring about a mental 

 twist as surely as an exclusively literary training. For 



