HORTICULTURAL EDUCATION FOR WOMEN. 93 



From all over the land we hear rising a cry for some different, 

 some more healthful training, physical and moral, than many of 

 our girls are receiving — than that given in our higher public 

 schools. Still no one as yet seems to know what this new educa- 

 cation must be. 



More and more is being crowded into the curriculum of study ; 

 nothing is taken out. Children are gathered earlier and earlier 

 into the school fold — a fact telling plainly that there are mothers 

 who feel themselves unequal to meet the demand of the times. 

 Young girls graduating with the classes of boys prepared for Har- 

 vard and Yale are hurried into Vassar or Wellesley, or some other 

 college for girls, for the so-called higher learning, and then too 

 many of them are launched, with overtaxed minds and bodies, into 

 society. 



Is not this one cause of the " nervous prostration," so baffling 

 to physicians, so ruinous to all home comfort, so disastrous to the 

 future of husband and children ; and of which we hear so frequently 

 as an excuse for the inefficiency of the mothers — the fashionable 

 mothers — of our times ? 



Here, in Boston, where there is no lack of interest in all that 

 pertains to knowledge and culture, and where the public schools 

 lead the schools of our country, it hardly seems worth while for 

 one coming from outside of the State to speak of education ; but 

 perhaps this is the reflecting of the light you have thrown upon us, 

 and we would still learn of you, that we may throw this light yet 

 further on. 



We all know of the kindergartens, and of the sewing, the cooking, 

 and the night schools ; also of the demand for trades schools. These 

 are ostensibly for the poor, whom we shall always have with us, 

 and more especially for a class of poor whose hours of school 

 instruction are few, whose brains are not overtaxed with out-of- 

 school stud^^ whose bodies are strengthened b}' coarse food and 

 work, and whose hands are put to use for support at an age when 

 the pressure upon the brain begins with those whom they consider 

 their more fortunate brothers and sisters. 



" The kindergarten is a part of the whole public school system 

 now, and works well for the poor and rich alike. We have become 

 almost Spartan in giving our children to the public for training. 

 But schools of housekeeping or schools of horticulture cannot be 

 grafted upon our public system to any advantage. The}' would 

 prove but expensive and superficial appendages if they were. 



