New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the FutureCorbett, George, Mrs.
Science
New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future
Corbett, George, Mrs.
Amazons -- Fiction; Fantasy fiction; Feminism -- Fiction; Women -- Fiction
There is in the museum, at Garrettville, an instrument of torture on
exhibition called a corset. Its extreme width is eighteen inches, and it
is an almost incredible fact that this instrument once spanned the waist
of a woman, who was only following one of the maddest and silliest
fashions ever instituted, when she deliberately forced her ribs out of
their proper places, and prepared an early grave for herself, in order
that she might meet with the favour of some idiot of the other sex, who
preferred fashion and doctor’s bills to health and happiness.
The children who came with their mothers to New Amazonia were housed in
existing large buildings, until suitable erections for their reception
could be designed and built. Their supervision and education was for a
time entrusted to the mothers, subject to the directions of a trained
staff of teachers.
Physical education was all that was aimed at until the child’s tenth
birthday had been passed. The most careful attention was paid to diet,
the necessary proportions of heat, flesh, and starch-formers being
supplied to them, all cooked in such palatably scientific methods as
conduced to build up a perfect system.
Swimming, running, dancing, drill, gymnastics, and every physical
health-giving game in vogue constituted the curriculum of youngsters
under ten. In the old country, thousands of little ones were pining from
bodily lassitude and decay engendered by the brain work necessitated by
a senseless system of cramming and examining. In New Amazonia the
children entering school at the age of ten were splendidly robust; had a
healthy, strong mind in a healthy, strong body, and were capable,
without fatigue, of learning more in two years than their Teuto-Scottish
contemporaries learned in all the seven years they had been compelled to
attend school.
For six years the school course had to be pursued, then a choice of
trade or profession adapted to the abilities of the student was made.
The next four years were devoted to the learning of this trade, and the
earnings of the next five years were appropriated by the State, which
thus remunerated itself for the heavy expense of maintaining and
educating each of its subjects under twenty years of age.
At the age of twenty-five each subject was at liberty to appropriate her
earnings as she liked, but was also expected to provide her own board
and residence henceforth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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