Frances Mary Buss and her work for educationRidley, Annie E.
History
Frances Mary Buss and her work for education
Ridley, Annie E.
Buss, Frances Mary, 1827-1894
“Defects of eyesight are also discovered in many cases, and the parents
informed that there is need to consult an oculist. Other physical
weaknesses, as they thus come to light, can be dealt with similarly if
need be, and the knowledge of them is most valuable in dealing with the
girls in their work. The experiment of medical inspection, as Miss Buss
tried it in her school, has proved an immense benefit, and the idea lay
very near her heart that all schools—especially all girls’
schools—should do likewise. It is one of my regrets that she never knew,
she was too ill, that three memoranda on the subject were given in
evidence to the Royal Commission on Secondary Education, one of the
three being by our medical inspector, Miss Cock, founded on the
experience of the North London Collegiate School.
“As regards intellectual education, it was characteristic of her that
she had not the slightest tendency to attach more importance to her own
than to other subjects. This was not simply—it was partly—the
consequence of an all-round logical view; it went with her elasticity of
imagination and extraordinary power of entering into and sympathizing
with things outside her experience in the ordinary sense. This is the
ideal Prime-Minister quality, and it was hers. She was not a musician,
she did not know mathematics; but I suppose she has not left the
impression more strongly on any two people of understanding their ideals
and supporting them with enthusiasm and sympathy than upon Mr. John
Farmer, of Balliol College, with reference to music, and upon myself in
mathematics. And in itself it is a noteworthy fact that she struck from
the very beginning on the idea that science should be an essential part
of the school curriculum, and elaborated it to so high a pitch that her
school was early described by others as _par excellence_ ‘the science
school.’ Her own scholarship was great in History and in French—genuine
fine scholarship, with the unrivalled power of graphic description and
interesting memory of events which make history-teaching and is so rare,
and with delightful freshness and power in handling a language with a
class. On this side of her work she was herself the perfect artist. For
the study of science there had been little opportunity in her girlhood,
but just what had been denied her was just what she most energetically
supplied. I think she would have been great in science: her mind was
scientific in its ways of work, and she had the practical constructive
talent that, added to thinking power, makes the physicist. The concrete
sciences would have attracted her intellectually more than the abstract.
“But in her ideal of education she came quite naturally and easily
outside her own intellectual tastes and acquirements. So natural was
this to her that she has doubtless left the impression on many of the
younger generation that she was mainly a great administrator rather than
also a great teacher with special tastes and powers of her own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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