782 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 



management of the home should be learned in the home, because it perpetuates 

 a severance between the work of school and the real business of life. We 

 are living in a period of educational revolution, and, so far as I can see, nothing is 

 more prominent in it than the determination that school studies shall take what 

 is called a more practical turn. This is often regarded as a philistine movement, 

 and the pedants are sore afraid. But the engineers determined to dethrone 

 Euclid, and they have done it. Rule, compasses, set-square, and protractor — with 

 these base mechanic tools does the young pupil now enter upon bis study of 

 geometry, even in the precincts of our great public schools. The power to speak 

 the French and German languages, too, is now hardly less esteemed than the 

 learned dumbness formerly induced by a surfeit of their irregular verbs. 



I wish to see some like changes made in the teaching of things which are 

 specially important to women. I would go a long way and make such changes 

 extend right through the course of education to the end of the university career. 



The management of the home and the training of children — these are briefly the 

 topics. The subject is much too vast to discuss as a whole, and I will only take 

 part of it ; but of the whole I may say that I shall not be content until I see these 

 matters given at least as important a position in our educational system as the 

 training of doctors or engineers. 



The part of the subject to which I have given serious attention, and on which 

 I feel any claim to speak, relates to the teaching of science. For many years past 

 I have endeavoured to further the teaching to girls and women of something in 

 the nature of science which shall be of real value in relation to affairs of the house- 

 hold. My object is not merely utilitarian. I start with this fundamental con- 

 viction, that no man's and no woman's work is what it should be unless it engages 

 and exercises as fully as possible his or her powers of understanding, unless it 

 acquires an intellectual interest and gives that pleasure which is only possible to 

 one who is worlring in the light of knowledge. I need hardly insist that the 

 household is truly a realm of applied science which our educational system has 

 allowed to remain a realm of rule-of-thuuib and drudgery. I do not see the 

 complete remedy for this in the teaching of unqualified science. One may acknow- 

 ledge gratefully that excellent progi-ess has been made in the teaching of science 

 in girls' schools. When this is well done one great thing is achieved, which may 

 indeed be considered the greatest thing that science can achieve — a scientific habit 

 of mind is imparted. If this is done, if the experimental method has been faith- 

 fully taught, we have the emancipation from rule- of- thumb, the mind is set free, 

 and all we want now is its application to a field of useful knowledge. 



I know of no sphere of human activity that more abundantly illustrates the 

 unscientific attitude of mind than the household. Think of the common phrases — 

 * It has gone wrong ; it won't work ; the oven won't heat ; the jelly won't set ; 

 the meat won't keep ; it has gone bad ; the fire won't draw.' This is the language 

 of superstition, for the thoughts behind are usually those of superstition. A demon 

 of perversity — a mere chance hnppening — is implied behind it all. In how many 

 houses will you not see a poker at times laid across the fire-bars to make the fire 

 draw ! This is certainly most interesting, for it is a survival from the days when 

 people honestly believed that the sign of the Cross made by the poker across the 

 bars exorcised the demon in the chimney. Think of the mismanagement of gas- 

 heating and gas-lighting appliances, of the waste of money in patent nostrums of 

 every kind, thrust upon us by much adverti.sing, of the suffering that arises from 

 crass ignorance of sanitation. Surely there is room for improvement ; surely it is 

 worth considering whether we might not do more to let a little additional intellec- 

 tual light into the domestic laboratory. 



As I have said, I do not think unqualified science will suffice. The science 

 that is taught in our schools still remains for the most part formal and academic 

 in its scope, and it is sui-prising to find how absolutely detached this science usually 

 is from the concerns of the household and of common life. Schoolmistresses may 

 be found in any number who have taken high degrees in science, yet can give you 

 no intelligible account of the hot-water system of an ordinary hou=-e, cannot tell 

 you what it is that yeast acts upon when it is mixed with dough, and have no opinion 



