Creed and Deed: A Series of DiscoursesAdler, Felix
Religion
Creed and Deed: A Series of Discourses
Adler, Felix
Ethical culture movement; Ethics; Religion
But aside from those who are destined to remain single, and considering
the seven millions of women, or more, who will become wives and mothers
of families; is not the demand for higher education equally imperative
in their case? Young girls are but too often educated to be the
agreeable companions, rather than the partners of their future husbands.
They receive sufficient instruction to give them a general acquaintance
with the surface of things, but not sufficient to develop what ought to
be the chief end of every scheme of education--a permanent intellectual
interest in any one direction. Much time is wasted on minor
accomplishments. At an age when the young girl is still totally
immature, she is often withdrawn from the influence of her preceptors,
and hurried from dissipation to dissipation, to tread the round of
society's gayeties, and to inhale the poisonous atmosphere of flattery
and conventional falsehoods. She enters a new world. The contrast
between the restraints of school life, and her novel sense of
consequence intoxicates her; the desire for pleasure becomes a passion;
the books of useful information, that never possessed a real charm for
her, are cast aside, and the literature of the sentiments alone retains
its attractions during the remainder of life. It is not astonishing
that those whose minds are thus left barren, should employ their leisure
hours in frivolous or vicious occupations; that an exorbitant luxury,
the sign at all times, of deficient culture, should have infected the
community. It is not wonderful that when the trials of life approach,
these women grasp wildly at the nearest superstition, and prostrate
themselves before any idol of the vulgar, in their blind ignorance and
credulity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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