Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1875 — Then and Now at Boarding Schools. [ARTICLE]

Then and Now at Boarding Schools.

The Baltimore American says: Twenty or thirty years ago the proprietors of seminaries for young ladies affected to believe that plain food was essential to the mental and bodily health of the pupils under their care, and that the less they ate the more rapidly would they improve in their studies. The table fare was simply wretched; meat and butter once a day, bread and molasses for breakfast, and the nearest approach to nothing at all for tea that the ceremony of sitting down to the table would permit of. In order that the evening meal might not be an absolute blank there were a few very hard biscuits handed around, which the young ladies nibbled while they thought of “home” and the luxurious abundance of “ mother’s table.” The robust girls from the country, the daughters of opulent farmers,, pever were convinced that this compulsory fasting was beneficial to the intellectual or physical constitution. In fact, they always believed that the whole starvation theory was invented for the pecuniary benefitof the owners of the seminaries, ana that the arguments by which it was sustained had no better foundation than the selfish greed of those who made money by defrauding their pupils of tneir daily bread. As boarding schools multiplied the starvation theory began to give way. The common sense of the country people rescued their hungry children from the dominion of the hygienic philosophers, and they refused to send their children to school where meanness was firacticed under the guise of science. A ew institutions found it profitable to give good boarding, and the sharp competition obliged all the rest to improve their fare. It is a rare circumstance now to hear a young lady complain of the hoarding at the seminary which she attends, whereas, thirty years ago, the dry bread, the perennial molasses, the hard biscuit and weak tea were proverbial.