Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with windows more or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated. Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet should be almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. Each student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study, respectively, and be responsible for their care, with every encouragement for expressing individual tastes; but will, an all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good part of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of parents and to learn self-reliance; and a family dormitory system, with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics, is suggested.
Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. Swedish gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points, because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little stress upon the rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games should have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always have precedence over indoor or uniform _commando_ exercises. Boating and basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and class rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern form.[10]