4. It is impossible that in these schools such systems should be adopted and enforced as are requisite for properly classing the pupils. Institutions for young gentlemen are founded by public authority, and are permanent; they are endowed with funds, and their instructors and overseers are invested with authority to make such laws as they shall deem most salutary. From their permanency their laws and rules are well known. With their funds they procure libraries, philosophical apparatus, and other advantages superior to what can elsewhere be found; and to enjoy these, individuals are placed under their discipline who would not else be subjected to it. Hence the directors of these institutions can enforce among other regulations those which enable them to make a perfect classification of their students. They regulate their qualifications for entrance, the kind and order of their studies, and the period of their remaining at the seminary. Female schools present the reverse of this. Wanting permanency and dependent on individual patronage, had they the wisdom to make salutary regulations, they could neither enforce nor purchase compliance. The pupils are irregular in their times of entering and leaving school, and they are of various and dissimilar acquirements. Each scholar of mature age thinks she has a right to judge for herself respecting what she is to be taught; and the parents of those who are not, consider that they have the same right to judge for them. Under such disadvantages a school cannot be classed, except in a very imperfect manner.

5. It is for the interest of instructresses of boarding-schools to teach their pupils showy accomplishments rather than those which are solid and useful. Their object in teaching is generally present profit. In order to realize this, they must contrive to give immediate celebrity to their schools. If they attend chiefly to the cultivation of the mind, their work may not be manifest at the first glance; but let the pupil return home laden with fashionable toys, and her young companions, filled with envy and astonishment, are never satisfied till they are permitted to share the precious instruction. It is true, with the turn of the fashion the toys which they are taught to make will become obsolete, and no benefit remain to them of perhaps the only money that will ever be expended on their education; but the object of the instructress may be accomplished, notwithstanding, if that is directed to her own rather than her pupil’s advantage.

6. As these schools are private establishments, their preceptresses are not accountable to any particular persons. Any woman has a right to open a school in any place, and no one, either from law or custom, can prevent her. Hence the public are liable to be imposed upon, both with respect to the character and acquirements of preceptresses; I am far, however, from asserting that this is always the case. It has been before observed that in the present state of things the ordinary motives which actuate the human mind would not induce ladies of the best and most cultivated talents to engage in the business of instructing from choice. But some have done it from necessity, and occasionally an extraordinary female has occupied herself in instructing because she felt that impulse to be active and useful which is the characteristic of a vigorous and noble mind, and because she found few avenues to extensive usefulness open to her sex. But if such has been the fact, it has not been the consequence of any system from which a similar result can be expected to recur with regularity, and it remains true that the public are liable to imposition both with regard to the character and acquirements of preceptresses.

Instances have lately occurred in which women of bad reputation, at a distance from scenes of their former life, have been intrusted by our unsuspecting citizens with the instruction of their daughters.

But the moral reputation of individuals is more a matter of public notoriety than their literary attainments; hence society is more liable to be deceived with regard to the acquirements of instructresses than with respect to their characters.

Those women, however, who deceive society as to the advantages which they give their pupils are not charged with any ill intention. They teach as they were taught, and believe that the public are benefited by their labors. Acquiring in their youth a high value for their own superficial accomplishments, they regard all others as supernumerary if not unbecoming. Although these considerations exculpate individuals, yet they do not diminish the injury which society receives; for they show that the worst which is to be expected from such instruction is not that the pupils will remain ignorant, but that by adopting the views of their teachers they will have their minds barred against future improvement by acquiring a disrelish, if not a contempt, for useful knowledge.

7. Although, from a want of public support, preceptresses of boarding-schools have not the means of enforcing such a system as would lead to a perfect classification of their pupils, and although they are confined in other respects within narrow limits, yet because these establishments are not dependent on any public body within those limits, they have a power far more arbitrary and uncontrolled than is allowed the learned and judicious instructors of our male seminaries.

They can at their option omit their own duties, and excuse their pupils from theirs.

They can make absurd and ridiculous regulations.

They can make improper and even wicked exactions of their pupils.

Thus the writer has endeavored to point out the defects of the present mode of female education, chiefly in order to show that the great cause of these defects consists in a state of things in which legislatures, undervaluing the importance of women in society, neglect to provide for their education, and suffer it to become the sport of adventurers of fortune who may be both ignorant and vicious.

OF THE PRINCIPLES BY WHICH EDUCATION SHOULD BE REGULATED.

To contemplate the principles which should regulate systems of instruction, and consider how little those principles have been regarded in educating our sex, will show the defects of female education in a still stronger point of light, and will also afford a standard by which any plan for its improvement may be measured.

Education should seek to bring its subjects to the perfection of their moral, intellectual, and physical nature, in order that they may be of the greatest possible use to themselves and others; or, to use a different expression, that they may be the means of the greatest possible happiness of which they are capable, both as to what they enjoy and what they communicate.

Those youth have the surest chance of enjoying and communicating happiness who are best qualified, both by internal disposition and external habits, to perform with readiness those duties which their future life will most probably give them occasion to practise.

Studies and employments should therefore be selected from one or both of the following considerations: either because they are peculiarly fitted to improve the faculties, or because they are such as the pupil will most probably have occasion to practise in future life.

These are the principles on which systems of male education are founded; but female education has not yet been systematized. Chance and confusion reign here. Not even is youth considered in our sex, as in the other, a season which should be wholly devoted to improvement. Among families so rich as to be entirely above labor, the daughters are hurried through the routine of boarding-school instruction, and at an early period introduced into the gay world; and thenceforth their only object is amusement. Mark the different treatment which the sons of these families receive. While their sisters are gliding through the mazes of the midnight dance, they employ the lamp to treasure up for future use the riches of ancient wisdom, or to gather strength and expansion of mind in exploring the wonderful paths of philosophy. When the youth of the two sexes has been spent so differently, is it strange, or is nature in fault, if more mature age has brought such a difference of character that our sex have been considered by the other as the pampered, wayward babies of society, who must have some rattle put into our hands to keep us from doing mischief to ourselves or others?

Another difference in the treatment of sexes is made in our country which, though not equally pernicious to society, is more pathetically unjust to our sex. How often have we seen a student who, returning from his literary pursuits, finds a sister, who was his equal in acquirements while their advantages were equal, of whom he is now ashamed. While his youth was devoted to study and he was furnished with the means, she, without any object of improvement, drudged at home to assist in the support of the father’s family, and perhaps to contribute to her brother’s subsistence abroad; and now, a being of a lower order, the rustic innocent wonders and weeps at his neglect.