elief of over-pressure and false stimulus is
to discard the pernicious idea that it is the function of the normal
school to offer to every girl in the community the opportunity for
becoming a teacher. This unwholesome feature is the one distinctive
strain which must be removed from the system. It can be done provided
public and political sentiment approve. The normal school should be only
a device for securing the best possible body of teachers. It should be
technical.

"Every teacher knows that the average girl of seventeen has not reached
the physical, mental, or moral development necessary to enter upon this
severe and high professional course of studies, and that one year is
insufficient for such a course.

"Lengthen the time given to normal instruction,--make it two years; give
in this school instruction purely in the science of education; relegate
all general instruction to a good high school covering a term of four
years. In this as in all other progressive formative periods the way out
is ahead.

"It will be time enough to talk of doing away with a portion of the
girls' school year when the schools have fulfilled their high mission,
when they have sent out a large body of American women prepared, not for
a single profession, even the high feminine vocation of pedagogy, but
equipped for her highest, most general and congenial functions as the
source and centre of the home."

I am unwilling to leave this subject without a few words as to our
remedy, especially as concerns our public schools and normal schools for
girls. What seems to me to be needed most is what the woman would bring
into our school boards. Surely it is also possible for female teachers
to talk frankly to that class of girls who learn little of the demands
of health from uneducated or busy or careless mothers, and it would be
as easy, if school boards were what they should be, to insist on such
instruction, and to make sure that the claims of maturing womanhood are
considered and attended to. Should I be told that this is impracticable,
I reply that as high an authority as Samuel Eliot, of Massachusetts, has
shown in large schools that it is both possible and valuable. As
concerns the home life, it is also easy to get at the parents by annual
circulars enforcing good counsel as to some of the simplest hygienic
needs in the way of sleep, hours of study, light, and meals.

It were better not to educate girls at all between the ages of fourteen