232 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
because she is often ignorant of the very rudiments of a thorough educa- 
tion. Intelligent and ambitious, she tries to make up by undue exerticn 
for previous neglect. Her mind has not been trained by long habit to 
steady, methodical work. Everything is new to her, even the form in 
which her work has to be put on paper. . She sits up at night, unknown 
to her teachers. When an examination comes which the children who 
have been at schools six or eight years take as an everyday affair, she 
gets anxious, worried, flustered; cannot eat; will not play or take exercise 
for fear of losing precious time; breaks down; and the high-school system 
is blamed. 
Very close and constant observation for many years of more than one 
aigh-school has convinced us that if children are sent quite young, they 
;ake to the system like ducklings to water. Hence the great value of the 
kindergartens and preparatory classes, which now form a very successful 
feature in most of our best schools to which they are attached. Insensibly 
the little creatures assimilate habits of neatness, method, industry, which 
are of infinite service to them in after life. The delightful object lesson 
'n the first form, for which a bright young mistress has been off to the great 
manufacturing town, and brought back steel pens, or glass, or cotton, in 
all stages of their manufacture ; the natural history lesson, with a live 
kitten, or guinea-pig, or hen, or jackdaw, brought by its proud possessor 
and kept in school all the morning ; the botany lesson, for which the 
seacher has ransacked every flower shop within reach to find illustrations, 
when the small girls make their little drawings of simple, cleft, and 
dentate leaves, and are told to bring a living specimen next time to 
show they understand what they have learned—such lessons give the 
little opening minds an appetite for learning, without undue strain. The 
regular hours and occupations are found—so the parents tell us—to keep 
she children in usually good health. They are early accustomed to kindly 
authority, to intelligent teaching, to pleasant faces succeeding each other 
every hour ; and grow up in an atmosphere of cheerful, earnest, pleasant 
work. And that curse of modern days, hysteria, is almost unknown 
among high-school girls. They are interested. they are satisfied. There- 
fore they are well and happy. 
We now come to the most important factors in the success of our high- 
schools—the teachers. 
The mere existence of such a class of women as the teachers in our high- 
schools is one of the most notable results of that great and peaceful revo- 
‘ution, which has been going on so quietly in England, and which we 
venture to think has shaken the old condition of things to its very 
foundations. 
When the first high-schools were opened, the difficulty of finding highly 
trained women, willing to work and capable of working on the lines laid 
down for them, was considerable. The Girls’ Public Day School Com- 
4 
— 
y 
u 
0 
| f