“While I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill,” says G. Stanley Hall in Adolescence, “and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman’s college is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support; and matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for.”  This criticism, of existing educational conditions is quite as applicable to schools for younger girls as to those which Dr. Hall has in mind.  There is no reason why both school and college may not fit girls for a broad and general usefulness, for “independence and self-support,” and at the same time give them the training for that which, with the majority already mentioned, comes to be the great work of their lives.

Through all the lower grades of school life, and to a certain extent through the whole course, the methods of instruction used will be largely indirect.  The child will-seldom be told, “This is to teach you how to keep house.”  I can think of no field in which this indirect method will produce greater results than the one we are considering.

[Illustration:  Montavilla School garden, Portland, Oregon, where boys and girls raise vegetables for serving in the lunchroom.  Here the science of growing things is taught as part of the “training for citizenship”]

[Illustration:  Lunchroom where vegetables grown in the Montavilla School garden are prepared and eaten]

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  A model school home.  One way of teaching children how to “keep house” is by means of the model home where they are given instruction in all the duties of the homemaker]

The teacher, in most cases, must begin her homemaking training by realizing that her own example is by the very nature of things opposed to the homemaking principle, the unmarried teacher being the rule in most of our schools.  Her first care, then, must be to counteract her own example.  Her references to home life must be always of the most appreciative and even reverent sort.  If, as is quite possible, she comes from unsatisfactory conditions in her own home, she must be doubly careful lest her prejudices be passed on to her pupils.  She will find ways in which to let it be understood that her ideals of home life are not wanting, although she has not as yet—­perhaps for some reason never will—­become a homemaker.  I have sometimes thought that teachers, in their effort to impress children in more direct ways, lose sight of the great effect of their unconscious influence.  After all, it is what the teacher does, rather than what she says, that impresses; and what she is, regulates what she does.  The teacher must, therefore, have the right attitude toward homemaking and domestic