Dorothea Beale: Principal of the Cheltenham Ladies' College, 1858-1906Shillito, Elizabeth Helen
History
Dorothea Beale: Principal of the Cheltenham Ladies' College, 1858-1906
Shillito, Elizabeth Helen
Beale, Dorothea, 1831-1906; Cheltenham Ladies' College
It is only thirteen years since Dorothea Beale passed over to the other
side to enter on the greater service which we believe is granted to all
who toil here in singleness of heart. In her theories of education, in
her outlook on life, she was of our day. Her methods of teaching are
still employed in our best schools, and the teacher can still find her
essays on teaching suggestive and helpful.
Yet we live in another world. Since August 1914, we have passed through
experiences that have changed for ever the values of things. Nothing
can ever be the same again. We of our generation are faced not with
one little difficulty or another but with the building of a new world.
The old civilisation lies in dust at our feet. With it have gone many
things that were very dear to us, our security, our comfort, our
national serenity, our happy-go-lucky individualism. With it, too, have
gone the best of our young manhood, those on whom much of the work of
the immediate future was to rest.
Nor is it without significance that to women at this hour have come for
the first time direct power in politics and opportunity to do any work
of which they are capable. On them must fall the work that the dead and
disabled would have done. To the men of England and of other countries
came the call to give their lives: to the women no less comes the same
call.
Perhaps the greatest need of the world just now is work: not only
for the production of material necessities, but for its steadying,
sanity-restoring power. After four years of the passions and sorrows of
war, mankind has not yet regained its mental balance; and in honest,
steady work, it will perhaps most surely win again the gift it has lost.
In the building of a new world there is no force so great as that of
education in its many aspects, the most important of which is that of
the home. Teachers realise that what is done at school is as nothing
compared with the enormous power of home education, composed as it is
of all the influences of early childhood. Parents must always be the
chief educators, and for this reason parenthood must be one of the most
sacred of human relationships and one of the highest callings. It is
at home a child learns to look at the great things of life from the
right or the wrong angle: it is at home he learns to reverence the good
and the true or to hold them in contempt. Parenthood requires a great
preparation of heart and soul, for it brings with it the greatest
of all responsibilities, that of guiding human souls into the right
pathway.
Of late years the need for teachers has been great, the supply being
less than the demand. Many teachers are still needed, and to the girl
of intellectual interests and power who is seeking a profession, the
question may well arise, whether she should adopt that of a teacher.
There are many matters to be faced in considering this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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