elderly and wise. It has
really scarcely anything in the world to do with my trying to make you
pay for the teaching to my children of dogmas which I believe, and you
deny. It neither begins nor ends with the three R's; and it does not
isolate, from that whole which we call a human being, the one attribute
which may be defined as the intellectual faculty. It is the provision of
an environment, physical, mental, and moral, for the whole child,
physical, mental, and moral. That is my _definition_ of education. Now,
what are we to say of the _object_ of education? In providing the
environment--from its mother's milk to moral maxims--for our child, what
do we seek? Some may say, to make him a worthy citizen, to make him able
to support himself; some may say, to make him fit to bear arms for his
king and country; but I will give you the object of education as defined
by the author of the most profound and wisest treatise which has ever
been written upon the subject--Plato, Locke, and Milton not forgotten.
'To prepare us for complete living,' says Herbert Spencer, 'is the
function which education has to discharge.' The great thing needed for
us to learn is how to live, how rightly to rule conduct in all
directions under all circumstances; and it is to that end that we must
direct ourselves in providing an environment for the child. _Education
is the provision of an environment, the function of which is to prepare
for complete living._"

Perhaps the only necessary qualification of the foregoing is that,
though it refers specially to the child, yet the need of education does
not end with childhood, becoming indeed pre-eminent when childhood ends.
So we may apply what has been said in the case of the girl, and we shall
find it a sure guide to the highest education of women.

First, education being the provision of an environment in the widest
sense of that very wide word, always misused when it is used less
widely, we must be sure that in our scheme we avoid the errors of past
or passing schemes which concern themselves only with some aspect of the
environment, and so in effect prepare for something much less than
complete living. It is not sufficient to provide an environment which
regards the girl as simply a muscular machine, as is the tendency, if
not actually the case, in some of the "best" girls' schools to-day; it
is not sufficient to provide an environment which looks upon the girl as
merely an intellectual machine, as