Nothing is more neglected than the education of girls. Fashion and the caprices of the mothers often decide nearly everything. The education of boys is considered of eminent importance because of its bearing upon the public welfare; and while as many errors are committed in the education of boys as in the education of girls, at least it is an accepted idea that a great deal of enlightenment is required for the successful education of a boy.
It was supposed that contact with society would be sufficient to form the mind and to polish the wit of woman. In this fact lay the cause of the inequality then noticeable in women of the same class. They were more or less superior from various points of view, as they had been more or less advantageously placed to profit by their worldly lessons, by the spectacle of life, and by the conversation of honest people.
The privileged ones were women who, like Mademoiselle and her associates, had been accustomed to the social circles where the history of their times was made by the daily acts of life. Their best teachers were the men of their own class, who intrigued, conspired, fought, and died before their eyes,--often for their pleasure. The agitated and peril-fraught lives of those men, their chimeras, and their romanticism put into daily practice, were admirable lessons for the future heroines of the Fronde. To understand the pupils, we must know something of their teachers. What was the process of formation of those professors of energy; in what mould was run that race of venturesome and restless cavaliers who evoked a whole generation of Amazons made in their own image? The system of the education of France of that epoch is in question, and it is worthy of a close and detailed examination.
From their infancy, boys were prepared for the ardent life of their times. They were raised according to a clearly defined and fixed idea common to rich and poor, to noble and to plebeian. The object of a boy's education was to make him a man while he was still very young. The only difference in the opinions of the gentleman and of the bourgeois was this:
The gentleman believed that action was the best stimulant to action. The bourgeois thought that the finer human sentiments, the so-called "humanities," were the only sound foundations for a virile and practical education. But whatever the method used, in that day, a man entered upon life at the age when our sons are but just beginning interminable studies preliminary to their "examinations." At the age of eighteen, sixteen--even fifteen years,--the De Gassions, the La Rochefoucaulds, the Omer Talons, and the Arnauld d'Andillys had become officers, lawyers, or men of business, and in their day affairs bore little resemblance to modern affairs. In our day men do not enter active life until they have been aged and fatigued by the march of years. The time of entrance upon the career of life ought not to be a matter of indifference to a people. At the age of thirty years a man no longer thinks and feels as he thought and felt at the age of twenty. His manner of making war is different; and there is even more difference in his political action. He has different ambitions. His inclinations lead him into different adventures. The moments of history, when the agitators of the nation were young men, glow with the light of no other epoch. There was then an indefinable quality in life,--an active principle, more ardent and more vital. Under Louis XIII. there were scholars to make the unhappy students of our own emasculated times die of envy. Certain examples of our modern school become bald before they rise from the benches of their college.
