Abstract
THE Girls' Public Day School Trust is to be congratulated on the excellence of the book in which Mr. Laurie Magnus has commemorated the jubilee of its foundation. It recalls, as did the recent Cambridge Local Lectures jubilee celebrations, the lofty educational aims and the strenuous and efficient endeavours to embody them in practical measures that marked the early seventies of the nineteenth century. About the middle of the century began a revolt against the false ideals and incompetence of the girls' schools (the “select establishments for young ladies “) of the period, and an insistent demand for a return to more robust and honest standards. This movement, under the guidance of Mrs. William Grey and others, led to the formation of the “Women's Educational Union” the G.P.D.S. Trust, and the Teachers' Training and Registration Society. The Trust stood for “the training of the individual girl, by the development of her mental and moral faculties, to understand her relation to the physical world around her, her fellow-beings, and God, and to know and perform the duties which arose out of those relations.” “The chief object of education should be,” they held, “while fitting boys | and girls for the tasks and duties of practical life, to preserve intact for them … as much as may be of childlike faith, of intellectual reverence and homage, and of gaiety and truthfulness of mind.” The story of the several schools is full of interest. Thirty-eight in all, each with its own special features, they became nurseries of genuine culture; and this was due alike to the well-directed initial impetus given by the founders, to the discrimination exercised in the choice of the heads, and to the large measure of freedom from interference and red-tape which they enjoyed.
The Jubilee Book of the Girls' Public Day School Trust, 1873–1923.
By Laurie Magnus. Pp. x+204+4 plates. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1923.) 5s. net.
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The Jubilee Book of the Girls' Public Day School Trust, 1873–1923. Nature 113, 9 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/113009a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/113009a0