The Physical Training of ChildrenChavasse, Pye Henry
Science
The Physical Training of Children
Chavasse, Pye Henry
Child care; Children -- Health and hygiene
Home education, where it be practicable, is far preferable to sending a
girl to school; as _at_ home, her health, her morals, and her household
duties can be attended to much more effectually than _from_ home.
Moreover, it is a serious injury to a girl, in more ways than one, to
separate her from her own brothers; they very much lose their affection
for each other, and mutual companionship (so delightful and beneficial
between brothers and sisters) is severed.
If home education be not practicable, great care must be taken in making
choice of a school. Boarding-school education requires great
reformation. Accomplishments, superficial acquirements, and brain-work
are the order of the day; health is very little studied. You ought, in
the education of your daughters, to remember that they, in a few years,
will be the wives and the mothers of England; and if they have not
health and strength, and a proper knowledge of household duties to
sustain their characters, what useless, listless wives and mothers they
will make!
Remember, then, the body and not the mind ought in early life to be
principally cultivated and strengthened, and that the growing brain will
not bear, with impunity, much book learning. The brain of a school-girl
is frequently injured by getting up voluminous questions by rote, that
are not of the slightest use or benefit to her or to any one else.
Instead of this ridiculous system, educate a girl to be useful and
self-reliant. “From babyhood they are given to understand that
helplessness is feminine and beautiful; helpfulness, except in certain
received forms of manifestation, unwomanly and ugly. The boys may do a
thousand things which are ‘not proper for little girls.’”
From her twelfth to her seventeenth year is the most important epoch of
a girl’s existence, as regards her future health, and consequently, in a
great measure, her future happiness; and one in which, more than at any
other period of her life, she requires a plentiful supply of fresh air,
exercise, recreation, a variety of innocent amusements, and an abundance
of good nourishment, more especially fresh meat; if therefore you have
determined on sending your girl to school, you must ascertain that the
pupils have as much plain, wholesome, nourishing food as they can eat,
that the school be situated in a healthy spot, that it be well drained,
that there be a large play-ground attached to it, that the young people
are allowed plenty of exercise in the open air—indeed, that at least
one-third of the day is spent there in croquet, archery, skipping,
battle-dore and shuttlecock, gardening, walking, running, etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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