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Untitled Article
not the evenings of the other days be employed in teaching , especially the deserving , the elements of the higher and more directly useful branches of knowledge ? And here I must be allowed to put in a plea on behalf of the female youth of the labouring population . One of the most marked and injurious defects of education is its almost entire divorcement from what is of
immediate practical utility . A Grecian , we are told , being asked what children should learn , replied , what would be of service to them when grown up . But the little that the youthful poor are taught is almost entirely disconnected from any practical application . Why cannot our Sunday Schools be made the occasions of forming what maybe termed seminaries for the practical duties of life ? Is it of value to a poor girl to know how to read ? as much so to know how to sew , —to be formed to habits of order , neatness ,
cleanliness , —to be taught to obey that she may learn how to command , to be instructed in the proper mode of domestic discipline , —what motives to appeal to , what to repress , —what sanctions to use , what rewards to offer ,, —how the good may be encouraged , the bad improved , —and especially how to make a small income procure the greatest comforts , —how to treat the
ordinary complaints of children and others , —how to perform with skill , and so as to make the food go farthest , the more simple operations of cookery , —in a word , how to become good servants , good wives and mothers . Of these things the need in the manufacturing districts is , we know , immeasurably great , and the ignorance that prevails respecting them a source of the greatest discomfort and wretchedness . Girls are sent into factories at the
early age of eight or nine years , and there they continue , with no opportunity of learning the duties of housewives , till they are married and taken to a home which they soon , by their ignorance and sluttish habits , render filthy and miserable . The husband has no attractions in his home , but many discomforts , and , therefore , though well disposed perhaps at first , soon quits it to seek , in his few hours of leisure , enjoyment and relaxation in the pothouse . We know not how all that is desirable could be effected
for the female poor unless our Christian mothers , who are in easy circumstances , would receive each three or four poor girls into their house , with a view to train them in the duties of housewifery , —to form them to good habits , and to impart good moral and religious principles . In this , as in every thing , practice is of more
value than theory , and the discipline and model of a well regulated family would be of incalculable good to the female poor . In this work of beneficence there might , there would be trouble , not much expense , —the girls would , by their labour , nearly if not quite reimburse the cost of their clothes and subsistence .
Untitled Article
238 Sunday School Education .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 238, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/22/
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