Men Teachers in Girls’ Schools
I am inclined to think, with all due deference to the powers that be, that male teachers are not best for young girls. It takes a woman, who understands all the witcheries of the sex, and off whom they glance harmless, like water off a turtle’s back, to deal with these young kittens; they have more fun than geography can absorb, and are not to be feruled like a great cub of a boy, whose whole future life will be license after jacketdom, as decreed by society and the laws; while a severe woman-discipline surely awaits the most frolicsome girl, beginning from the moment when she first learns what her heart is made of, till death stills its yearnings.
And yet I pity a male teacher of girls, whose studied dignity is in a second dethroned by a single pantomimic gesture of some bright-eyed young flirt, who feels her power without yet being old enough to understand it, and with an instinctive coquetry gets on his blind side, turning all his foreordained frowns into ill-suppressed smiles. How can he box those little round ears? How can he disfigure those soft, white palms? How can he—sending all the other pupils home—trust himself, after school, alone with those bright eyes, to put them through a subduing tear process? Ten to one the “subduing” is on the other side!
Said I to a little girl, not many mornings since, who was getting ready for school, “Why do you put on that bright new dress to go, when your old brown one would do as well?” “Oh,” was her reply, “I haven’t got my lesson to-day, and of course I must look pretty.” There’s fourteen-year-old female knowledge of human nature for you! Imagine a boy putting on his best jacket for such a purpose.
There must be discipline, that’s certain; but, in my opinion, a man’s head must be gray, not brown or black, if he would enforce it; his blood must be cold and sluggish, and his ear deaf to the charmer, charm she never so cunningly, or, certes, his magisterial chair will be set at naught. Don’t I know! Answer me, thou now “Reverend” gentleman, who once kept me after school for a reprimand, and spent the precious moments rolling my curls over your fingers, while my comrade was bursting off her hooks and eyes as she peeped through the key-hole. Not that I uphold it, but every animal naturally fights with the weapons a good Providence has given it—and somehow or other I had found that out; though whether France was bounded south by Rhode Island or not was still a mystery that I was not in a hurry to solve.
Still, for all that, I pity a male teacher who is set to the impossible task of making girls “behave.” I should pity them more, did I not know that they keep them in school about four or five hours longer than they ought. Did I not know what they know, but will persist practically in ignoring, that the fun has got to come out somehow, or turn to poison in the blood, and that if teachers won’t give it whizzing time out of school, they must needs have it fly in their faces in school. I should pity them more, did I not, every day, see their pupils staggering home under a pile of stupidly written school-books, fit only to kindle the kitchen fire—thank goodness their little beaux sometimes save their arms from dislocation, by gallantly carrying them home for them. Do I approve of boy-beaux? Why not? Don’t every rosebud draw its humming-bird? Did not God make them both for this harmless, innocent delight? You had your boy-beaux, madam; I had mine, by the score. Only teach your daughter to love you well enough to conceal nothing, however minute, from you; only show her that you have a heart, and don’t want her to pluck out her’s, and my word for it, no harm will come of her “boy-beaux.” It is your repression that does the mischief—your ignoring your own youth and hers. The child who has leave to pluck the apple often leaves it untouched, undesired, on the tree.
Meantime our male teacher stands there, with his hands in his pockets, waiting to see what is to be done with him. Well, his pockets are the best place for his hands when he is keeping a girls’ school; and with this advice I leave him, until he is sixty or so, when, if he chooses to open a girls’ school, I promise him at least, that he will not go to sleep during the services.
Now let no conservative accuse me of upholding school rebellion. It is because I do not do this that I express my preference for women teachers, both principals and assistants, for girls; having an understanding of, and impervious to, girl witcheries, whom the little rogues know, having been girls themselves, can see through them, and for whom pretty looks or dresses will never answer instead of well-digested lessons.
A Safe Amusement.—All children are fond of animal pets, but it is so difficult to manage such pets in a city that no family can indulge its children’s tastes in that respect to any great extent. No one can have watched the children in the Central Park, as they gaze at and linger over the bears and tigers and strange birds, without wishing that the little zoologists had a wider field and better opportunities for pursuing the study of natural history. There ought to be a permanent collection of animals and birds in New York, in some good situation, where children and young people could have ample opportunity, under proper restrictions, to indulge their natural taste for natural history. Every hour thus employed would be a safeguard against the myriad temptations to vice and idleness which pervade the city.