June 15 – 16 [in the original book this was a single long entry running over two date pages]
“All such knowledge should be given her, as may enable her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men; and yet it should be given, not as knowledge, - not as if it were, or could be, an object for her to know; but only to feel and to judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or perfectness in herself, whether she knows many languages or one; but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show kindness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of a stranger’s tongue. It is of no moment to her own worth or dignity that she should be acquainted with this science or that; but it is of the highest, that she should be trained in habits of thought, that she should understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural laws, and follow at least one path of scientific attainment, as far as to the threshold of that bitter Valley of Humiliation, into which only the wisest and bravest of men can descend, owning themselves for ever children gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence how many positions of cities she knows; or how many dates of events, or names of celebrated persons, - it is not the object of education to turn the woman into a dictionary; but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter with her whole personality into the history she reads; to picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to apprehend with her fine instincts the pathetic circumstances and dramatic relations, which the historian too often eclipses by his reasoning and disconnects by his arrangement; it is for her to trace the hidden equities of divine reward and catch sight, through the darkness, of the fateful threads of woven-fire that connect error with retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is being for ever determined as the moments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath; and to the contemporary calamity, which, were it but rightly mourned by her, would recur no ore hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagining what would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she were daily brought into the presence of the suffering which is not the less real because shut from her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the proportion which that little world in which she lives and loves, bears to the world in which God lives and loves; - and solemnly she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her prayer more languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her husband or child, when it is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none to love them, - and is ‘for all who are desolate and oppressed.’”
RUSKIN
