ABSTRACT
Sir,—The lamentable occurrence at Purfleet, and its just punishment, points to scandals that I hope the exposure in your pages will be the means of remedying. I allude to the employment of men as teachers to young girls, many of whom are verging on womanhood, and to the mixing of the sexes in the adult schools, where all the profanity of the barrack-room is instilled into the minds of females by grown lads, drummers, bandsboys, or the sons of the soldiers. Surely schoolmistresses, who have passed a qualifying examination and a lengthened course of training (most of them being employed as mistress or pupil teacher from twelve years of age), should be allowed to instruct the adult female children in all that is requisite, or at least a school mistress should always be present when any instruction is given to females in the boys’ schoolroom. I think it a scandal that a schoolmistress should be prohibited from giving instruction in grammar, geography, history, arithmetic, &c., after being compelled to undergo an examination in these subjects, and accounted able to give “object lessons,” more of the nature of lectures, as take for instance whalebone. She must explain its elasticity, pliability, opaqueness, semitransparency, &c., &c., and illustrate the difference between these properties. This system also gives the schoolmaster a superiority over the schoolmistress that he is not slow to claim, and greatly tends to deteriorate the efficiency of the latter.
