Just as the headmaster of a public school often seeks for a cricketer rather than a classical scholar for his staff, so the headmistress thinks not only of academic attainments but seeks for an assistant who can keep going a school society or a magazine (while leaving it in the hands of the girls), who enjoys acting and stage management, who can take responsibility for a dozen girls on a week’s school journey (the nearest approach to camping out—­and experience of this would perhaps be a recommendation!).  She wants some one not merely to teach or manage or discipline girls, but a woman who can share the life of the girls, or at least understand it well enough to let them live it.

Not that the intellectual side is unimportant.  A University degree is normally required in an assistant and this involves a three or four years’ course of considerable expense (see p. 7).  An honours degree is often essential—­always, nowadays, in the case of a headmistress.  Whilst well-trained foreigners hold an important place in some schools, modern languages are more frequently taught by an Englishwoman who has lived abroad rather than by a foreign governess; even English, happily, is no longer entrusted to any one not specially qualified.  As will be seen from the article on domestic work, the graduate in chemistry has in this a promising field, while the botanist or zoologist and the geologist have the basis on which to specialise in nature-study or geography.  This, however, usually comes after the preliminary general academic training.  It is well to keep up a many-sided interest apart from bread-and-butter subjects, not only in view of demands that may be made on one, but because the intellectual woman will best qualify by developing her own powers as far as possible.  If of the right calibre, she can afterwards readily take up even a new subject and make it her own.  A good secondary school needs that some of its mistresses should have the habits and tastes of the scholar who loves work for its own sake, or rather for the sake of truth.  A woman with strong well-trained intellectual power need not fear the competition of even the capable woman of action indicated in the preceding paragraph.  Both qualifications may, in fact, exist in the same person.

The woman with brains is indeed needed in the schools.  The work of women’s education was but begun by the illustrious pioneers to whom reference has already been made.  There are to-day many new problems to solve, new difficulties caused by the very success of the older generation.  On the one hand it was necessary that women should at first, by following the same lines as men, prove their powers on common ground; now they must find whether there are special fields for them, and how, if these exist, they may best be occupied.  They need no longer be afraid to emphasise what was good in the old-fashioned education