"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