ON WANT OF REASONING POWER.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2681, 10 November 1882, Page 3

ON WANT OF REASONING POWER.

["The Queen."] In these days of School Boards and compulsory education, people are apt to imagine that they will find an increase of intelligence in their younger servants, hutare, as a rule, disappointed. Whether it » that knowledge acquired orally is soon forgotten, or that the mental atmosphere of an ignorant home does away very quickly with impressions only made at school, the mind of a young servant is generally totally devoid of all reasoning power, They can, perhaps.'understand that certain: things are, but why it is so is beyond them, for they have no power of induction. Here are some instances. A recipe for maitre d'hotel butter is given to a youngcook. She is told to shape the butter into balls, and place it on the fish. She does so, and then earefully spreads the shapes with a knife, and sends it to the table. On being asked why she thought the butter had to be made into shapesvif she was to destroy them directly, she looks blank. She had not thought at all. She had merely followed a mechanical impulse. When it is explained to her she catches the meaning at once, being really intelligent; but without the explanation would have been incapable of inducing that butter made into shapes was naturally not to be destroyed before appearing at table. Yet the same girl, on the housemaid's Sunday out (in spite of the lectures upon " trying to think "), in preparing the bedrooms, will hang the nightdress, &c, upon a chair with the lower part of the skirts towards the tire, and the body part away from it. She has been told by her fellow-servants to "hang the things to air," but is incapable of reasoning as to which part of the garments will naturally need the warmth most. Many people say " Oh, servants won't think." It is not so. They cannot think, for they do not know how. I write of willing, affectionate young servants, whotry their best not to give trouble, but they have—from want of training—no reasoning power. Servants, as a rule, do not understand why a window should be opened at the top as well as at the bottom, or why a room cannot be properly aired by a window opened at the bottom only. Why, therefore, in schools to which most respectable young servants have been, and to which their younger sisters are going, should not a system of teaching them to think be formed, beginning by the most simple illustrations, such as that "If two and two make four, three and? one must also make four, because there ara the same number of units." So many desirable things are instinctive with the educated classes, and why ? They will tell you, " Because they were alwaysbrought up to do it, or taught as children." How valuable would some of the same training be to the lower daises. School children are generally taught to wash and keep themselves clean, but it is seldom explained to them why cleanliness is so important ; so that, beyond a general sense of its being seemly, or, as they would say, "{decent like," to appear clean, their reason arrives at little else. Why should not the construction of the skin be explained to them, the action of its pores, th« necessity of not allowing them to be choked up, the consequences thereof ? Surely, all this would bring the use and sense of cleanliness more home to them than crude axiomslaid down, " Cleanliness is next to Godliness," &c. The questions of political economy should be also lightly touched upon in this reasonteaching class of my vision. Why wastefulness is wrong beyond the mere personal loss induced by it ; why the economy of one household becomes a benefit to a wholecommunity by enabling charity to spread from one to another; and why a rich person should be as economical with regard to non-wastefulness as a poor one. At the risk of an outcry, I -would also have theuse of beauty a little taught and reasoned upon in my class. English women of the lower orders have no distinctive dress, not even the noa^ ( cap and jacket of the French peasantry, and as they start devoid of taste, and with little power of improving it, the painful results seen at all school feasts, &c., are not surr prising. Why should not the theory of color be explained to them ? How most colors are composed of other hues —all might be shown, so easily with a Jew paints. Why certain colors clash until joined by a third, whichmust harmonise them. Make them realise the beauty *of uniformity. That three little girls in plain lilac cottons made alikewill look well dressed, when the same three in different dresses, with any amount of different colored ribbons, will loot:: motley and untidy. Show them how a flower in a vase will vase will stand out frcin a plain table cloth, when it is comparatively lost on one with a pattern. Show them how hard red and green look alone together, how adding purple instantly dignifies and harmonises, and how yellow brightens and embellishes. Show again how the difference of a shade will render one admixture of colors poor and cold-looking, or rich and glowing. Let them realise how a bad figure is protected by a dark dress, and exposed by a light one; why a bonnet should not have strings impossible to tie, or even appear to tie ; why a bow that neither confines, nor appears to confine, or finish anything, is simply an excrescence; why a child with rich red hair should not have it tied with scarlet ribbon; why heels in the middle of the foot, and stays like ill-fitting coats of mail, are injurious to the health. Let these things be explained to them, and they will think them out by themselves, having been shown the way. Suitable reading is a most important matter, and it should be carefully provided. Lady Barker's books for children are so simply and colloquially written, that they interest any maids of ordinary intelligence. Another great desideratum and help to the development of reasoning power which would be furthered in reading travels is,. that it would make them realise the meaning of resource. We have been in a furnished house in which were no hot water cans. Several were bought, and brought to another furnished house, in which there are plenty of little hot water cans, but a. paucity of jugs; but until it is pointed out to the servants that they can use some of the cans instead of jugs, it never strikes I them. Again, there is a dinner party, and an extra, table is wanted in the dining-room. The parlor maid does not know what she shall do. She is told to take tne flat dressing table from the spare room, and is delighted at the idea, but " never thought of that" herself. The housemaid regularly causes a brass handle to •'•' unset-eft' iteelP*" every week, by cleaning its socket round and round. On its being suggested to her to clean the socket up and down, she beams with pieasureand adopts theplau atonce, but couldnotthinkoutforheraelfwhythehandle came unscrewed. I covild multiply these instances from daily experience if .necessary, but it is not. Everyone realises, more or less, that servants as a rule have no reasoning power, but it need not be so if people, mistresses of households chiefly, would only_ teach them to think, make them to reasorif force them to think. Of course, it is some trouble in the first instance, but well worth it, even for one's own personal convenience later on, if for no higher reason. And last, though not least of all, teach them that to wilfully neglect, and not try to use their reasoning power, or, as they say, their heads, is to treat one of God's most precious gifts with contempt, for whieh they will have to answer.