A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with - Early Modern Texts

The Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft 12: National education
I am advocating the creation of elementary day-schools
where boys and girls, rich and poor, would meet together.
To prevent any of the distinctions of vanity, they should be
dressed alike, and all obliged to submit to the same discipline.
The school-room ought to be surrounded by a large piece of
ground in which the children could have exercise, because
at this age they shouldn’t be confined to any sedentary task
for more than an hour at a time. But these relaxations could
all be made a part of elementary education, for many things
improve and occupy the senses when introduced as a kind
of show—things that children would turn a deaf ear to if
their principles were dryly laid down. For instance, botany,
mechanics, and astronomy ·could all be taught in practical
ways, out-of-doors·. Reading, writing, arithmetic, natural
history, and some simple experiments in natural philosophy
could fill up the rest of the day; but these pursuits should
never encroach on gymnastic play in the open air. The
elements of religion, history, the history of man, and politics
could be taught by conversations in the Socratic form.
After the age of nine, girls and boys who are intended
for domestic employment or mechanical trades should be
transferred to other schools and be given instruction that is
to some degree adapted to the destination of each individual
pupil; the two sexes should still be together in the morning,
but in the afternoon the girls should attend a school where
simple sewing, dressmaking, millinery, etc. would be their
employment.
Young people of superior abilities, or fortune, might now
be taught—in another school—the dead and living languages,
the elements of science, and more on history and politics,
on a more extensive scale that wouldn’t exclude literature.
‘Girls and boys still together?’ I hear some readers ask. Yes!
And I wouldn’t fear any consequence except that there might
be some early girl-boy attachment that didn’t perfectly agree
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with the views of the parents though it had an excellent effect
on the moral character of the young people. I’m afraid that
we are a long way from having a world that is so enlightened
that parents, anxious only to make their children virtuous,
will let them choose companions for life themselves.
Besides, this would be a sure way to promote early marriages,
and from early marriages the most salutary physical
and moral effects naturally flow. [Then a long page of praise
for the advantages, very much in the spirit of things said in
earlier chapters. A notable episode in this is MW’s treatment
of the ‘coming out’ of debutantes in the fashionable world.
[That was where and when girls of 17+ from wealthy families were for
the first time taken to adult balls and parties and so on.] MW writes:
‘What can be more indelicate than a girl’s coming out in
the fashionable world? That is the process of bringing to
market a marriageable miss whose person [see Glossary] is
taken from one public place to another.’ [ She comes close to
describing a debutante ball as a slave auction where the merchandise is
ogled by potential buyers. ‘Indelicate’ indeed!]]
What I am offering here is only an outline of the plan
I have in mind, not the fully detailed plan. But I must
include one detail that I highly approve of in the regulations
presented in M. Talleyrand’s pamphlet, mentioned earlier. It
is the proposal to make the children and youths independent
of the masters respecting punishments. They should be tried
by their peers, which would be an admirable method of fixing
sound principles of justice in the mind, and might have an
excellent effect on a child’s temperament, which is very early
soured or irritated by tyranny until it becomes peevishly
cunning or ferociously overbearing. . . .
I know it will be said that woman would be ‘unsexed’ by
acquiring strength of body and mind, and that beauty—soft
bewitching beauty!—would no longer adorn the daughters
of men. I think, on the contrary, that we would then see