These girls
are not being educated for governesses, or to be exported, with other
manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a surplus of
males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born husband is a
possible President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be a
four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity so exalted that she
may not be called upon to fill it.
But there is another consideration of far higher interest. The education of
our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through its
women, and that to a considerable extent by the aid of these large
establishments, the least perfect of which do something to stimulate the
higher tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes there is, perhaps,
reason to fear that girls will be too highly educated for their own
happiness, if they are lifted by their culture out of the range of the
practical and every-day working youth by whom they are surrounded. But this
is a risk we must take. Our young men come into active life so early, that,
if our girls were not educated to something beyond mere practical duties,
our material prosperity would outstrip our culture; as it often does in
large places where money is made too rapidly. This is the meaning,
therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to most of these
large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps unwisely or
uncharitably.
We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on at the
Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the same
class.
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