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Show THE EDUCATION OF ENGLISH GIRLS English girls are taught - or were in my time - by a kind of system which tends to multiply ??? accomplishments" rather than useful knowledge. A certain [unreadable] is gone through, and young[unreadable line] school room with a society varnish intended to do duty until marriage, at which period custom allows you to dispense with surface accomplishments, and devote yourself to all the realities of life, mitigated as they are for the well-to-do. On the other hand, the moral atmosphere of the English home education is superior to that of American education in general. Girls are less forward and more respected; they grow into women more slowly and ripen better; they are physically stronger and therefore have simpler tastes; and as to society, they do not know what it means before at least the age of 17 or 18. American girls have certain advantages, however, which custom denies young Englishwomen of good position; they are not forced by an unwritten law to go into society and play their part in it, while the English girl has no choice. The "upper ten thousand" must marry or become "blue-stockings" before yhe world agrees to let them alone. A young married woman may, if she choose, plead home duties as an excuse for a quiet, useful, pleasant and studious life, uninterrupted by any but the necessary "county" civilities, which are not very burdensome; but young girls are not supposed to have such duties. Parents, even when sick themselves, are loth to let the chances of the London season pass by their daughters, and depute any safe chaperon, the nearest female relation, if possible, to take their girls to all the balls and parties. The rudimentary education furnished to women of the higher classes has perhaps something to do with the prevalence of "fastness" among a part of them, while to others it becomes the base of a real, later self-education, the growth of reading, observation and thought. -The Atlantic. |