Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 November 1890 — Women as Educators. [ARTICLE]

Women as Educators.

It is pleasant to see women coming more and more to the front in educational affairs, as teachers, as school committees, as supervisors of schools, and as originators of methods arjd advisers in tho execution of those methods. It is strange that this has not come about earlier; for it would seem as If nature herself had intimated an opinion in this regard, since it is the mother to whom the first formative processes of the child's mind are intrusted, and whoever gives the subject any thought will confess that these first processes are the most important of all, that they are the beginning of development. It is in them that the memory sets about laying in its stores, that the tendency to good or evil is received, that all tho growth is given its bent, that health of body or of mind is secured or hopelessly impaired. Bacon remarked three centuries since that a gardener takes more pains with the young than with the full grown plant, and Comenius said that tho great boughs which a tree is to have sprout from its stem in the first years of its growth. It is evident to all that the mother, the aunt, the sister, the people who are always at home and at hand, and who make it their business, have the control of all the first impressions of the child. That great thinker, Frobel, declared that the unfolding and feeding of the higher life of emotion was the moßt difficult part of the rearing of children, and that from springs all that is best in the race; and that, we all know, is almost exclusively in the hands of women—of mothers and grandmothers, aunts and elder sisters. If. then, women are the ones to whom, both by nature and the customs of society, is given! the care of children in the most crucial period of their lives, lLcortainly follows that they are capable of taking care of them in periods less vitally important, to say nothing of the fitness they acquire through their previous work in training during the earliest and confessedly most important periods, The thought -that says otherwise is hardly to be called thought, it is a habit of prejudice, and ranks with the barbarian wisdom of the Turk, who leaves the boy in the harem during his first seven years, as years of no account. It is but a few years, comparatively speaking, since women were allowed to take the work of the higher education in hand; but, so fur, not only the apparent fact that nature designed them for the work speaks for them, but the vast measure

of success that has followed them, and the reforms that have already been instituted through their means, in the constant decrease of corporal punishment, in the gentleness of method inspired by them among teachers, and in the loftiness of aim among students.