The state authorities in Massachusetts have recently placed a woman
at the head of one of our principal Normal schools. It is safe to
prophesy that, within fifty years, teaching, in the common schools,
High schools, and in the Normal schools, will be almost exclusively
in the hands of women. I think, within that time, a considerable
proportion of the professors in our colleges will be women. Already
several are doing themselves, and their sex, great honor, as
professors in colleges.
The only dark spot in this bright picture is, that women are starved
while performing this valuable labor.
I know a beautiful, bright young woman, in this city, who is
regarded as one of the best teachers in the city, who presides in
one of the most beautiful rooms in one of the grandest buildings in
Boston, but who, when out of the school palace, is obliged to crawl
away with her mother into a dingy, miserable garret, where they
spend their time in contriving how to make their pennies last
through the year.
The schools known as Kindergarten have already become quite
numerous. They will rapidly multiply. Within a few years, children
three years old will be sent to these beautiful Kindergarten
schools, where, in each others society, and under the management of
bright, cheery, loving teachers, they will engage in a great variety
of pleasant games and infantile studies.
The physical exercises which constitute a prominent feature of these
baby schools, are very fascinating and profitable to these little
ones.
In these schools children of from three to five years of age will
not only be brighter and happier, but they will be much healthier,
than when left to the chances of the average home, without system,
times or seasons.
It need hardly be said that such schools will fall into the hands of
women, and will, within a quarter of a century, employ a great
number of them. The hours will be short, the occupation perfectly
adapted to the finest girls, and, as these little ones are objects
of the tenderest love, the compensation for such persons as can
successfully manage them, will always be large.
Lord Brougham gave it as his opinion, that a child learns more
during the first eighteen months of its life, than at any other
period, and that it settles, in fact, at this early age, its mental
capacity, and future well-being.
TEACHERS OF GYMNASTICS AND DANCING.
Here is a field, at once healthful, respectable and immense. In this
field women have already displayed a remarkable capacity, and I have
no doubt, as in the progress of civilization special physical
training and amusements come to occupy a larger place in our life,
that women will find in this service employment for a large number
of the intelligent and ambitious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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