GIRLS AT SCHOOL TO-DAY

GIRLS AT SCHOOL TO-DAYAuthor(s): MARGARET MILESSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 116, No. 5148 (NOVEMBER 1968), pp. 985-998Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41370239 .

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GIRLS AT SCHOOL TO-DAY

The Caroline Haslett Memorial Lecture by MARGARET MILES , B.A.

Headmistress , Mayfield School , Putney , delivered to the Society on Wednesday 22nd May 1968, with the Countess De La Warr> D.B.E. , President , The

Electrical Association for Women , i» ¿Ač Chair

the chairman: As many of you will know, Dame Caroline Haslett was the first woman to be a Vice-President and a Member of Council of this Society, and so it is very fitting that the Trust which bears her name should maintain the association. The full, rather grand, title of the Society is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which includes all the interests of both Dame Caroline and the Trust, under which young women interested in the sciences, engineering or home economics benefit. We are already beginning to see results, with many of the beneficiaries doing splendid work as they continue working in their various fields.

This is the third lecture in the series, which was begun by Dame Mary Smieton. To-day we are extremely lucky to have somebody as interesting and able as Miss Margaret Miles. She took over as Principal of Mayfield when it was still a grammar school and has been responsible for changing it over to comprehensive. She has recently returned from Pakistan, where she spent some time lecturing and talking on comprehensive education.

The following lecture was then delivered .

THE LECTURE

It was a great honour to be asked to give this lecture, an honour I was proud to accept because it gives me the opportunity of paying tribute not only to the work of Dame Caroline, but also to the Royal Society of Arts. The Electrical Association for Women does in a lesser way the same kind of thing for the ordinary girl that the R.S.A. has done for many years. Through such organizations girls who for one reason or another have in the past been excluded from the traditional secondary schools, have found the means to get qualifications and thereby a greater confidence and dignity in employment or in the home, than they would otherwise have had.

When I was asked to suggest a title for the lecture, I examined a good many possibilities. I was indeed tempted to crib the title of one of Dame Caroline's books, 'Problems have no Sex'. I also looked at 'Women at Work', 'Girls and the Modern World', 'The World of Work for Women and Girls', and many others. I was not clever enough to think of the exciting kind of title chosen by Mrs. Kamm and Mrs. Pickthorn, 'Hope Deferred' or 'Locked-up Daughters'. I finally chose this simple one 'Girls at School To-day' because of the breadth of possibilities it offered. For example, there are more girls at school to-day than ever before, not only greater numbers of girls but also a far greater proportion of the teenage age group. Thus large numbers of the girls who are at present filling the fourth and

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1 968 fifth year classrooms of our schools would, thirty years ago, have been out at work, many in domestic service and others in factories and shops. Then it is obvious that girls at school to-day are the women who will be at work tomorrow, and by looking at the girls and their attitudes and occupations and preoccupations in school to-day we are looking ahead through a crystal to what women at work are going to be like some years hence. And girls at school to-day are, of course, taught by women who were at school yesterday, and in looking at the provision made for girls at school to-day we cannot but make some reference to the educational standards and aspirations of yesterday. Further, by talking about girls at school to-day, I do not confine myself to the United Kingdom, and if I find that my subject leads me beyond national boundaries I can justify a look at the position of girls at school in other parts of the world. Perhaps as I have introduced this possibility, I might remind you of the claim that is so often made with reference to the education of women in the developing countries; 'that when you educate a man you educate an individual but when you educate a woman you educate society'. This is as true for Britain as for any other part of the world.

The first thing that strikes one is that girls in school to-day often experience while still at school many of the strains and stresses of the life they are going to lead as adult women, as mothers, workers and citizens. For example, they may take a great deal of responsibility for looking after babies (sometimes their mothers' babies, sometimes their elder sisters' babies, very rarely, though it can happen, their own babies). They often then have the rewarding if wearing experience of being responsible for young children. They take charge when mother is in hospital or when she goes out to work in the evening, they come home from school having called for younger children on the way, and they get them their tea and put them to bed.

Then girls in school to-day find that in addition to these domestic and not unpleasurable responsibilities, they are constantly having to reconcile their rôle as a school girl with their rôle as a young woman, and with a steady boy friend too. On one hand there are school work and examinations, games, societies, and school functions which make constant demands on them, and on the other there is their own social life in which they are concerned with their dress, their hair-do's, their make-up, their money, and their relationships with other people, particularly their boy friends.

Thirdly, the girl in school to-day is frequently a paid worker; although she attends full-time school, she does paid work in a shop or office on Saturdays. She may, therefore, in addition to being a surrogate mother, a student and a girl friend, be a responsible paid worker as well. I am very impressed at the amount of responsibility which quite an ordinary schoolgirl takes in her Saturday job in big stores or in local shops and offices.

At school, therefore, girls anticipate the complicated rôles they will have to play and the choices they will have to make as mothers, as citizens and workers. So much for the girls in the title.

Now how does the school part fit in to all this? My title is 'Girls at School To-day', not 'Girls at Home' or 'Girls in Peter Jones' or 'Girls in the Coffee Bar',

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NOVEMBER 1968 GIRLS AT SCHOOL TO-DAY

it is 'Girls at School To-day ' There is no doubt, and I will develop this theme later, that school can and should play a very important part in preparing girls for family life, the world of work, and for responsible civic life. But before we spell this out in more detail I would like to remind you of the tremendous changes which have taken place since the days of the pioneers in the education of girls.

Our great forbears fought for the right of women to work, to have jobs which had dignity and for which women could earn qualifications equal to those of men. This passion for entering the world of work was inspired partly by the reaction to the terribly feeble education provided for the middle -class girl in the nineteenth century who was being educated in accomplishments simply to get a husband, and also by the actual desperate need of an unmarried woman to get employment in order to support herself. Women's work was therefore considered a very useful device for making women, who were unfortunate enough not to get husbands, independent and no longer a drag on their relatives.

Now the emphasis is very different. Husband -getting is still important but not as an alternative to or way of escape from work. Indeed, as I often remind my own pupils, the change in the sex ratio makes matrimony difficult for them to avoid, rather than hard for them to get. Even so, we must not underestimate the place of marriage in the well -laid plans of the modern young. In a recent study girls were asked to name three ambitions, what they would like to do, to be, and to have, and one girl is recorded as saying that what she wanted to do was to get married, what she wanted to be was a housewife, and what she wanted to have was a wedding ring. As I have said, however, these are no longer ambitions which it is difficult to fulfil.

Another great difference between attitudes to girls' education to-day and those of the days of the pioneers is that now we are concerned with girls from all social classes, indeed with all girls. Most of the progressive thinking and the revolutionary actions in the days of the pioneers came from women of the middle classes on behalf of girls of the middle classes. To-day we have moved out of this narrow stream into the broad river of society as a whole. The differences between the needs of middle -class women and working-class women are much less, and it is difficult to draw a dividing line. It is important that the schools recognize this fact and that they do not preserve and strengthen customs and attitudes which divide society and which perpetuate obsolete class differences.

Let me give as a very simple example the great cloud of disapproval which is shed by certain schools on such crimes as eating ice-creams in the street or not wearing berets; these activities may be unconventional but they are not criminal. Girls at school to-day share a common social experience with all young people and resent being separated from their contemporaries. As Mrs. Pickthorn has pointed out in her recent book Locked-up Daughters

' .. . . the coffee bars and youth clubs, teenage dress shops and record browseries springing up to catch the easy-going young workers have their effect on good little schoolgirls too. . . .' All these things, coffee bars, youth clubs and so on, are classless institutions, and the social round and the boy friends have become an important part of the world of all young women and therefore of girls at school ; they are often far more vital interests than

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games or school politics. These new interests are not intrinsically unhealthy or immoral, but they tend to become so when forbidden and frowned on by the schools.

Another great difference is that schools are no longer just for passing examinations and getting qualifications. This fact results from the broadening of the intake to the schools which I have referred to already. Since the introduction of secondary education for all, following the Act of 1944, secondary schools have had to try to cater for the whole range of the secondary school age group, and this means that schools have girls and boys who are of limited and average ability but who are necessarily as important members of the school community as their more academically able sisters and brothers. It is essential, then, that we recognize the fact that girls come to school to-day not simply to get 'matric' and so qualify themselves for a better paid job or to go on to some form of higher education, but in order to learn how to cope with the complicated choices and decisions they are going to have to make in adult life and indeed often have to make while still at school.

It is interesting that in countries like Pakistan, which I had the privilege of visiting recently, the secondary schools are still geared to these standards of forty years ago, and the one object of going to school is to follow an academic type of course in order to qualify to go on to higher education and so gain status in society. But in Britain we are growing out of this very narrow concept of secondary education, and we now recognize in schools that the needs of all girls have to be met, not only those of the ones who are capable of passing examinations.

Another change is the stupendous fact that for the first time for many generations there are now more men than women, and this has tremendously changed the position of women in society. We have to remind ourselves all the time that much of the work of the pioneers was inspired by the need for intelligent and unmarried women to find a place in society and to be able to use their talents with dignity and some reasonable reward to themselves. No longer is society concerned merely with the single woman and the need for her to get work because she is not married. We are now concerned with all women, and they will in the future mostly be married.

Finally in my differences, may we look at the difference in attitude and experience of the average schoolgirl now and the average schoolgirl when, for example, I myself was at school? We were very young and I would like to quote Helen Pickthorn again. 'Many women, mothers of teenagers now, who went to completely segregated schools, are amazed at how young they were in those days. Sixth-formers took it for granted that they should wear uniform and be treated in the same way as the eleven-year-olds. Dutiful home girls, they had no boy friends, no circles centering on coffee bars or record shops, though some do remember nipping off to tea dances. It was the triumph of the schoolmistress's mind over adolescent matter.' We then were young; we accepted our uniform; our lives were school -centred; boys were on the periphery; for our holidays we went away with girls from school if we were particularly daring or, of course, we went with our families. Now the girls are, at 14, 15 and 16, far more mature; they are very

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original and unselfconscious over dress; they have judgement and originality; they know what they want, and because of the comparative affluence of their parents and their own ability to earn on Saturdays and in the evenings, they are able to buy the sort of clothes they want, to frequent coffee bars, and pay for what they want; they can go on holiday with their peers, often boys as well as girls. I am reminded here of the story which tells of two young things preparing for a holiday. They planned to go on the boy's Lambretta and to take a tent. When a loving but anxious adult relative asked whether the parents were quite happy about the arrangements, she was assured that the parents need not be worried as they both had crash helmets.

Perhaps now it is time to look at girls at school in relation to the three rôles of mother and wife, worker and citizen that they are going to play in their future life. First of all as mothers in family life and marriage. One of the most encouraging developments of women's position in society during recent years has been the development of the partnership marriage. The young men and women who get married (perhaps one or the other of the partners still has the status of a student) accept their joint rôles in a rational and co-operative spirit and work out which partner will contribute which activity to the organization of the household and of their married life. I expect everybody here will remember the dramatic closing scene of Ibsen's The DolVs House when Nora admitted that she had given up hoping that the most wonderful thing of all could happen ; when asked by Helmar to say what it was she said that it was that 'their life together should be a real wedlock'. She then goes out and as Helmar tries to think what has hit him, the sound of a door slamming is heard from below; Nora has made her claim, a claim, which, fulfilled, has helped subsequent generations of men and women to know that marriage to be worth while must be a partnership. It follows then, if it is to be a partnership, that I should also be talking to you about the rôle of boys at school to-day, but I am not going to, except to restate a theme that must run through all talks and writing on the rôle of women to-day, which is that women, like men, are persons; they have gifts, talents, responsibilities, rights, as do men, and they exercise them according to the kind of individuals they are.

Perhaps the use of the word 'person', introduced into John Stuart Mill's amendment to the Reform Bill which said that the word 'man' should be replaced by the word 'person', is not without significance. In all the talk of women's education and of girls at school to-day, we must remember that we are dealing with about half the human race; though traditionally and physically different in certain obvious ways, as people or persons, women's qualities, their talents, their skills, overlap with those of men. But, of course, I accept the criticism that in talking of preparation for a partnership marriage we should concern ourselves with the position of boys at school as well as that of girls. I certainly think that household management, cooking and the domestic and aesthetic arts should be taught to boys as much as to girls. But I am the head of a girls' school and the title of my lecture is 'Girls at School To-day', so let us look at preparation for family life in a modern girls' school.

First of all there is the whole question of the teaching of the domestic arts.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1 968 I prefer the title domestic arts' to the other titles - whether domestic science, housecraft, home economics or what you will - because I like to think of the domestic arts including not only cookery and needlework, the traditional grammar school domestic science subjects, but also home management, home decoration, horticulture, design and entertaining, and I am quite convinced that all girls should learn something of these arts at some stage during their secondary school course. I remember speaking to the Fawcett Society some years ago and being pulled up, when I made this claim, by many women graduates who said they had not needed to learn to cook at school because they knew how to cook as their mothers had taught them, and anyway they were too intelligent. I consider these protests entirely irrelevant. Not all girls have the opportunity of learning good cooking at home, and there is absolutely no reason why a clever girl should be considered to be wasting her time learning cooking at school. In fact, perhaps many academic women are bored and tired and frustrated in their lives as housewives because their education led them to suppose that cooking was beneath them. Of course I do not mean that all girls should take all the household arts all through the whole of their school course. Obviously as they go through the school their curriculum differentiates and they make choices according to their abilities and interests, but they should have the household arts at some stage. Probably for the ablest girl it will be in the early stages of her secondary school course, and possibly again in the later stages when she is in the sixth or seventh year and opts to take some domestic or aesthetic subject in her minority time. That advanced cookery gives great satisfaction to the eighteen -year -old academic was brought home to me recently when I met three of our seventh -year girls looking more animated than I had seen them for a long time; they were carrying oddly shaped parcels which contained the lemon meringue pie they had just created and of which they were very proud.

Then, most importantly, in preparation for marriage and for the life of a mother and wife, there must be as much opportunity as possible to try to understand and achieve good personal relationships and to learn the arts of communication. We have found over the years that the third -year stage, that is the age of 13-14, is a very useful time in which to interject opportunities for quite adult discussion on personal relationships with parents, siblings, peers, and of course particularly with boys. Through these discussions, conducted at Mayfield by a personal counsellor, girls learn to talk freely and not to feel inhibited or shy about certain sides of their lives. Whereas the facts of human reproduction are taught in the science course in the first year, the emotional and social aspects of sex education are dealt with in these third -year group and individual discussions. The girls learn that people are ready to help them, to listen to them and to advise them if they want advice on their personal problems. Another of the differences which I have already mentioned between now and then, is that in the traditional girls' secondary school of the past these personal problems were buried and not considered suitable for discussion in the school environment.

Art, design, music will come in under other headings too, but appreciation of the arts and of music, knowing what other people like even if you don't like it

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yourself, and not feeling completely cut off from a culture which is given out on the Third Programme and at the Festival Hall, all this is a help towards social confidence.

Drama is a great educational force, and I have seen how informal and free drama encourages unselfconscious speech, and how a great many girls at school to-day seem to be able to observe and comment on the social scene with wit and compassion through dramatic improvisations. This sort of activity together with the increased use of discussion techniques generally, enables and encourages girls to speak easily to each other, to the staff, and to people they do not know. In the chapter on objectives, the Newsom report places powers of speech high in the list; 'There are, in any case, some objectives which can and ought deliberately to be pursued through every part of the curriculum. Very high in this list we should place improvement in powers of speech: not simply improvement in the quality and clearness of enunciation, although that is needed, but a general extension of vocabulary, and, with it, a surer command over the structures of spoken English and the expression of ideas. That means seizing the opportunity of every lesson, in enginèering or housecraft or science as well as in English, to provide material for discussion - genuine discussion, not mere testing by teacher's question and pupil's answer.' The teaching of modern languages by learning to speak them helps in this essential development of the powers of communication. In the sort of school in which I work, every girl has the experience of learning one modern language, and enormous satisfaction is gained by girls of limited academic potential from learning what it feels like to communicate in another language than English. Some of them actually have much better French or Spanish than English accents!

Budgeting for the running of the home, the care of children, the cost of food and clothing, are all things which can be studied at school at different stages and at different levels according to the particular interests and abilities of the girls involved. Some of the least able girls academically will be those who will most likely go into marriage early and it is entirely relevant that they should prepare for the responsibilities of marriage and home -making when they are at school. The more academic who are going on to higher education will probably not marry as soon as the other girls, but they too will marry much sooner than similar sorts of girls did in the past.

Girls at school to-day, however, are mostly going to be workers as well as housewives. Obviously school has got to give them the basic qualifications for the work they want to do. With the development of secondary reorganization towards comprehensive education, you find in the same school girls looking for an enormous range of qualifications, from the 15+ leaver to the university entrant, and embraced in this wide spectrum are some specifically vocational courses. The Newsom Report has a chapter on 'An Education that Makes Sense', and the writer quotes four needs of such an education : it should be practical, realistic, vocational, and there should be some element of choice. Discussion of vocational education has been through many phases. It was considered at one time to be hostile to the development of a liberal education, then it began to prove itself as the core of interest and therefore as providing a foundation for the development of a good

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1 968 liberal education. We have also to remember that when the word vocational is used in this sense it refers to craft training for commercial work, the building trade, the catering trade, the needle trades, and so on. Oddly enough the idea that a strong academic education is vocational has not usually been accepted, and yet surely its motivation is vocational in the best sense? I do begin to wonder, however, if the strictly vocational course geared to the examinations of the craft organizations such as the City and Guilds Institute is the best way to use the vocational motive in school, and I am more and more coming to think that general education with a vocational twist is the most rewarding and sensible for girls who may leave school and go straight into employment. Increasingly, however, even if girls go into employment they have day release or they go to evening classes and they recognize that their school work is, in fact, only a foundation for further study; even though they are in employment they want to improve their vocational skills. Now that so many women are returning to work in early middle age there is perhaps even more to be said for a general education with a vocational slant while at school, to be supplemented by more specific vocational training prior to taking up work after the child-bearing years are over.

Schools must also provide the general educational qualifications for girls who are going into a general office, bank and shop work, and of course as always to provide the qualifications for institutions of higher education, whether colleges of technology, colleges of art, colleges of education, or the full university course.

I have deliberately not spent time on describing the traditional grammar-school curriculum leading to university entrance because probably to most people here to-day this is the most familiar kind of secondary education. But even here 'things ain't wot they used to be'. The researches of Liam Hudson have revealed the differences between what he calls convergent and divergent intelligences. All too often our traditional academic curriculum has identified and rewarded the con- vergers, whereas perhaps what our rapidly changing society needs is more divergent, unorthodox, original minds. The history of the discovery of D.N.A. seems to show how creative scientific research often grows from the unexpected. James Watson, Nobel prizewinner and joint discoverer of D.N.A. , claims to have been lamentably deficient in mathematics and chemistry and to have devoted an inordinate amount of time to birdwatching. Yet, together with his colleague Frances Crick, a physicist, he reached the heights of scientific discovery. What then of the Dainton report, which recommends that in order to increase the flow to science all pupils should study mathematics until they leave school? Will the mechanical provision of mathematics classes for all in the sixth produce more scientists, and particularly more women scientists? Of course not in itself, and in any case not unless the total educational provision and the atmosphere, ethos, tone, or what you will of the school encourages that spirit of exploration which gives the confidence and courage without which positive choices for science or any other field of intellectual inquiry will not be made. And it is terribly important that more girls should somehow get this inspiration, because in spite of the opportunities now available there is still an illogical and depressing shortfall in the recruitment of women to science and medicine.

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The increase in the numbers going on to higher education has put a very heavy burden on sixth -form staffs, and the complications of the Universities Central Council on Admissions forms, and other clearing house and application procedures are formidable indeed, but the girls take them in their stride.

Increasingly, girls' schools have come to involve themselves in this work and in finding out what the girls do or ought to do when they leave school. At Mayfield, as in many other schools, enormous pains are taken to help girls make sensible choices of studies in the middle school. They must, of course, be protected to the extent of being required to keep on with English, mathematics, a science, and not to drop history and geography, but apart from this they have a wide choice, and each girl virtually has an individual time-table from the fourth year onwards, which we hope is relevant to what she wants to do in the future.

It used to be considered enough that the schools provided a course and got the girls through their examinations and then they went on, with the help of their parents, to find their jobs and find their places in colleges by themselves. The schools now take a far greater interest in the world after school and do provide careers information, in the form of lectures, in pamphlets and other printed literature, and through interviews with the Youth Employment Officers and Careers Advisory Officers; although there is still much to be done, there is a far greater interest in the work that girls are going to do when they leave school than there used to be. (This is part of the closer identification of the school with society than used to be the case. This outward goingness helps to free the girls from the schizophrenic feeling that by being loyal to their school and accepting the values of school they may cut themselves off from the world outside school and even from their families.) I think it is fair to say that even as recently as 10 to 15 years ago most grammar schools prepared their university entrance girls thoroughly for what they were going to do afterwards, but did little for those who were going to leave either at 16 or even later to go into ordinary employment. They were not concerned with that world although many of their girls entered it.

The range of subjects offered in girls' schools to-day should help to explode the myths about girls' subjects and boys' subjects. Can English, biology, cooking and hairdressing really be labelled girls' subjects, and physics, mathematics, and classics as boys' subjects? When one of the Garretts, I think it was Louisa, Elizabeth's older sister, asked her hairdresser if hairdressing would not be a suitable employment for women, she was met with a horrified denial of the possibility, as it had taken him, the hairdresser, a fortnight to learn the trade; it was therefore not possible, it was considered in the latter half of the nineteenth century, for a girl to undertake this arduous job. Similarly at the other end of the scale, you will remember the screams of horror from men and indeed from some women about women going to the universities to study things like mathematics, classics and medicine, and yet among the early university women were Agnata Ramsey, Millicent Fawcett and Elizabeth Garrett, who respectively in classics, mathematics and medicine outshone the men of their generation. The idea that biology is a girls' subject and physics and chemistry are boys' subjects has persisted, although much interesting work in biology, like the discovery of D.N.A.,

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1 968 is done by men, or men and women together, and it is becoming an extremely popular subject for boys as well as girls; in physics and mathematics, particularly in the computer field, women are proving themselves to be extremely capable, and we have before us the example of Dame Caroline and the W.E.S. who proved themselves in a man's field. This does not mean to deny the fact that there are more men than women who are good at maths and physics, and there are probably more women than men who are good at biology and possibly cookery. But the whole idea that there are boys' subjects and girls' subjects inhibits the true development of the human spirit and debases knowledge itself.

Talking of cooking, I wonder if I could remind you of Virginia Woolf 's wonderful description of lunch as provided in a man's college and cooked by men, and dinner provided in a woman's college and cooked by women?

. . . the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes - a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature's daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners were sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's beard and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over. . . . Conversation for a moment flagged. . . . The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.*

*From A Room with a View ; reproduced by kind permission of Mr Leonard Woolf.

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In the colleges described by Virginia Woolf it seems as if the minds of the women, though not those of the men, were on higher things than mere food and its cooking.

Can one really say then that cooking is a girls' subject? Of course it is right for some, but then so are physics and mathematics and architecture and design. We must make sure that the girls in school to-day are treated as persons, as people, that they are given every opportunity to fulfil their talents and their skills and are not restricted by the fact of their sex but only by their own ability or lack of it to take the opportunities which should be freely available to them.

Finally, not only is the girl going to be a wife and a worker, but of course also a citizen, and the preparation provided by the school for both family life and for the world of work must help to make her a good citizen. It is important that all schools should have at some time some conscious and structured education for citizenship and particularly international citizenship, in addition to the incidental education which results from the attitudes implicit in the accepted approach to international affairs of those responsible for the school. The recent demonstrations about the future of the immigrant population in this country have shown how very near the surface is prejudice and ignorant passion, and how tremendously important is the kind of international education which gives a real understanding of what people are like, and of how the races of the world do look to each other. This is an absolutely vital part of the education of girls.

As part of citizenship training contemporary schools have active social service groups, and one of the most exciting developments over the last few years has been the growth of voluntary work. One used to hear people saying that the idea of voluntary work has gone, but of course it not only has not gone, it has now become a national thing. Whereas what we used to think of as a social work and voluntary work was essentially a middle -class activity, the modern concept of social work as evidenced in such organizations as Task Force, shows young people in society helping the society of which they are part. It does not come from above to below; the old lady that you go to help and whose room you decorate might well be your friend's grandmother; she is not somebody from a different world, she is part of your world.

Then, of course, through the school organization there are opportunities for taking responsibility either as prefects or house captain or heads of years, or members of school councils, or whatever devices the schools develop. These are opportunities to take responsibility and to understand public work, committee procedures, public speaking and the difficulty of getting people to do what you want them to.

I should here try to fill out the references I made earlier to the aesthetic subjects and their spill-over into the leisure time of many pupils. Constantly changing displays of art work done by the girls keep alive a sense of wonder on the part of those who look and of achievement on the part of those who do. Music at assembly regularly one day a week (sometimes a record, sometimes a live performance by an individual or group) gives everybody regular experience in listening, and though it cannot inspire all the girls every time, it makes a considerable impact

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1 968 over the years. So do large-scale school productions of operas and plays which involve an incredible number of different kinds of people. We hope that all these things help to develop whole personalities and to link the school with the world outside.

Girls at school to-day, then, have plenty to do and there should be no place for boredom and hostility or a feeling that school is irrelevant to the lives that women are going to lead in the future. 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction', said Virginia Woolf. That money and that room are symbols of the independence that a woman needs if she is to fulfil herself or to 'write fiction'. For girls at school to-day the money and the room represent a job for which she is qualified and a home and husband; she plans her future life in stages - (1) marriage and work, (2) children and home, (3) back to work - and so she will 'write fiction' or be a teacher or doctor or nurse or secretary or cashier or computer programmer. Many recent studies show that women do not go to work only for the money (though naturally they like it) but for interest, and companion- ship, and a sense of achievement. I think that girls at school to-day will want to follow this pattern. I only hope enough of them will decide that teaching is their trade.

DISCUSSION

the chairman: How much change is going on now! I have a sixteen-year-old grand-daughter and am very grateful to think she is really having a much better time ! There seems to me little excuse for the young women of the future not to develop along the right lines. The Dame Caroline Haslett Trust interviews girls for scholar- ships to the university, and they seem to me not only clever but composed, and sure of where they are going. They all seem to have thought things out and not to have the 'nerves' that my generation used to have.

mrs. G. E. mercer : May I ask if thought has been given to the problems which will arise if the age of majority is lowered to 18?

the lecturer: It doesn't affect the schools very much, because most girls leave between 18 and 19. I find in discussing this with the girls that they generally take this very much in their stride. They realize the irrationality of the present situation, particularly over contracts. They are not, I am sorry to say, so keen about the vote. I should have thought that it was the universities which were going to be faced with this problem, particularly if the age of voting is lowered.

MR. Arnold WHiTTicK : When general education becomes 'training', it is rather governed by the professions that actually are open to men and women. Assuming that, in theory at least, all the professions are open to men and women, would Miss Miles advocate that there should be no technical discrimination as between subjects suitable for boys and girls to study - that subjects like domestic science should be taught to boys as well as to girls and civil engineering should be taught to girls as well as to boys?

the lecturer: Yes, I think they should. Boys should have an experience of cookery and girls should have more opportunities than they normally have of doing things like woodwork and metalwork. We were talking about this at lunch to-day, and a male member of my staff said that when he was at school they swopped with the girls' school in the middle of the year - the boys went over to the girls' school

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and did cookery and the girls went over to the boys' school and did woodwork and metalwork. This, I think, was just towards the end of the war. It was a compromise, a way of moving towards more sharing of the courses. I think that wherever it is possible to avoid it there should not be discrimination. The chances are that certain subjects will be heavily weighted towards boys and other subjects towards girls. But surely if a girl wants, and has the facility for, a pre-engineering course she should be able to take it, just as the boys take catering? It is taken for granted that boys can take catering, and in some of the mixed comprehensive schools in London there are more boys doing the catering course than girls. I do not want to enter into any discussion of qualifications for entry into the professions, but one would hope that eventually the way would be open for girls who had the talent and ambition to do any sort of job they wanted.

mrš. j. c. PRIESTMAN, b.sc.(econ.) : I should like to ask whether the personal counselling Miss Miles referred to is done by members of the staff or whether she draws on people from outside?

the lecturer: They are our own people. They don't teach, although they are qualified teachers. One of them is studying for a Diploma in Sociology and is a trained counsellor for the Marriage Guidance Council, and the other one is also doing that course. I think the rôle of counsellor is not the same as the rôle of teacher. The teacher necessarily has to represent authority, however permissive and open the school, whereas the counsellor is able to receive confidences and have a freer sort of conversation. Also, much of the work that counsellors do is very time-consuming and takes more time than a teacher with a full teaching time-table can give to the individual girl who needs help. They have group discussions followed by individual discussions.

mrs. Helen whittick: I should like to ask whether, in this year when we are celebrating the fiftieth year of the acquisition of the vote by women, there is any noticeable increase of interest among girls in a privilege which seems to me somewhat undervalued now?

the lecturer: Young women are faced with the spectacle of a population which on the whole doesn't vote. People's attitudes to the vote to-day cannot be considered apart from their general feeling of interest in affairs. I think the girls are interested, and the publicity, and radio and television programmes about the suffragettes, have made an impact. But one doesn't feel a great political move towards what was captured - the spirit of the suffragettes - because it has taken its place in history and they take it for granted. What we do now is sit down, and protest about Vietnam. The young people who are politically aware will of course also exercise their vote, but they see that the vote alone is not enough, that we have a long way to go to get all sorts of social and educational and cultural improvements before we reach the millennium.

miss m. i. Taylor (Assistant Secretary, Girls' Brigade): Does Miss Miles think girls at school to-day need uniformed youth movements like thé Guides and the Girls' Brigade, and if so, at what age do they need them? And what does she think they should be doing?

the lecturer: I wish I knew. I am all for their having interesting things to do which are going to help them to acquire skills, learn to work together, help society and so on. I am not sure that the uniformed organization is the best way of achieving this in the present context. On the other hand, one sees certain groups which are absolutely dependent on the individual for inspiration. I would say that there is not a great demand for the uniformed youth organizations. There are occasionally waves of enthusiasm for, say, the Guides or Brownies, but somehow they don't last.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOVEMBER 1 968 MR. Neil R. fisk: Would Miss Miles perhaps tell us her opinion about educating

boys and girls together? the lecturer: I think they should be educated together. . . . Need I say more

than that? the chairman: Answers like that make us feel that we should like to pin Miss

Miles in a corner and discuss everything with her in much greater detail ! But I am sure I speak for many people here when I say that to find somebody with her humanity, width of knowledge and feeling for young people, is a great inspiration to us all. It is very difficult to steer between being 'square' and being very much too permissive in the present day. It seems to me that Miss Miles has got exactly the right kind of approach, as her paper has shown.

The meeting concluded with the usual votes of thanks .

BETRO CASE HISTORIES

The full versions of the four case histories of Overseas Marketing which follow are published together in a pamphlet obtainable from the Society . The price of the pamphlet to Fellows is 45 2>d a copy; including postage; to others 5s 6d, including postage.

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Documents

GIRLS AT SCHOOL TO-DAY