ew, also
found the practical details of life easy, but she was always tossed
about from one occupation to another, and from one home to another,
because when she found every reality fall short of her ideal she had not
the good sense to work quietly to improve the matter, but went about
proclaiming her disgust. The first thing we all need is to have our
wills so trained that when we see the right, we may instantly do it, and
after that we need to be taught to see clearly what is right.

But as character may be formed in many ways why not form it by teaching
practical things? What, then, does a girl most need to learn?

To read, to cook, and to sew.

I put reading first, for though no civilized beings can live without
cooking and sewing, and we occasionally find good and gentle women who
cannot read, yet a woman of real character who can read can teach
herself any branch of housekeeping which she is convinced she ought to
know, while a cook cannot teach herself to read in any broad sense; for
by reading I do not mean pronouncing words. I want a girl to have a
taste for good reading. She may study the whole circle of the sciences
without reaching this end, or she may not have more than half a dozen
books in her library and yet learn the lesson. The practical advantage
of most of her studies in school depends on whether or no they lead to
this result. How many girls ever use chemistry, or physics, or geology,
or zooelogy in any practical way? Yet what a difference the study of all
these things makes in the kind of reading women enjoy! Who can learn
enough history in school to be equipped even to teach history? Every
teacher knows that to be impossible. But a girl who has studied history
properly in school, who has been taught to think about the influence of
men on nations and of nations on men, has open to her a vast
treasure-house of books which will add both to her usefulness and
happiness.

Some of you may think it is artful in me to propose this broad education
under the pretense of requiring that one learn to read, but it is not
so. I do believe in a very broad education for girls; but if I had to
choose between a broad education which had crammed a girl with
knowledge, yet left her without a love for good reading, and a very
narrow one which had awakened that thirst, I should choose the second.

But why do I call this a practical education? Before I answer the
question, I must say more on the subject of reading.