T'HE SECONDARY EDUCATION OF GIRLS IN FRANCE. 211 
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Miss CORDELIA KIRKLAND, of San Francisco : I would like, as no woman has spoken, 
:0 put in one word. And that is, that we are Americans, in the first place; that our 
anguage is English ; and, far more than the language of Sweden, our language comes 
from the Greek and the Latin. I don’t believe we can ever leave them out of a first- 
class English course. I think in our methods of study we are trying to keep one 
foot on the new steam-engine and the other back on the old apple-cart. Any one who 
nas had Latin and Greek feels it to be an immense importance to his English to have 
Greek as well as Latin. But how do we study the Latin and Greek ? By grinding 
away at the old grammars that, I think, Erasmus left us. Why not change the pro- 
nunciation, instead of grinding away on the old Greek grammars, and make Greek a 
ive language ? I am told that you can go with your knowledge of ancient Greek to 
Athens to-day and read the daily newspaper perfectly well, but that you cannot speak 
with the modern Greek, because your pronunciation is so different. Is it not very 
oossible to study Greek as they speak it in Athens to-day ? 
THE SECONDARY EDUCATION OF GIRLS IN FRANCE. 
BY MLLE. MARIE DUGARD, PROFESSOR AT THE LYCEE MOLIERE, PARIS, 
AND MEMBER OF THE FRENCH COMMISSION ON SECONDARY EDUCA- 
TION. 
I was honored with the request to give some account of the secondary 
education of girls in France. This is a very large subject, so large that 
it is impossible to give a complete idea of it in a short discourse ; all that 
[ can do is to present a general idea of the question. 
The secondary education of girls is quite new in France, though it has 
been desired for a long time ; it was formed in 1880. Before this year 
we had for our girls only primary schools, public and private. Some per- 
sons, feeling that girls have the right, as well as boys, to receive a higher 
education, and also that the best way of expanding civilization is to in- 
crease instruction among women, tried to remedy this state of things, and 
opened private schools where the education, if not quite secondary, was 
sertainly above the primary teaching. In 1867 Mr. Duruy, Minister of 
Public Instruction, went further in introducing public lectures for the 
secondary education of girls. These lectures met with a strong opposi- 
tion on the part of a certain class of people who hold to traditions and 
think that learning is not good for women, because it prevents them from 
fulfilling their duties as wives and mothers. In spite of this, the lectures 
succeeded ; but they did not prove to be sufficient to comply with the 
wants of the time, and their best result was to show that we were ready 
for a more thorough system of secondary education for girls. Another 
and decisive step was taken some time after, in 1880 ; the Parliament 
passed the Law Camille Sée—so called after the name of its promoter—to 
have lycées for girls; and almost immediately after the first lycée was 
opened in Montpellier. Now we have about fifty lycées or colleges, and 
fifty ‘‘ cours secondaires ”” which are to be turned into lycées in a short