LOUD LYTTELTON AND FEMALE EDUCATION.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 788, 14 March 1871, Page 3

LOUD LYTTELTON AND FEMALE EDUCATION.

Lord Lyttelton, chairman of the Endowed Schools Commission, recently presided over a public meeting in the St. Pancraa Vestry Hall, to establish an institution to supply the want of good and cheap education for girls of the lower middle classes in the district of Camden-town. His Lordship said it was a great disgrace that for the last two or three centuri s all the great endowments of education of this country, with which the Endowed Schools Commission was concerned should have been monopolised for the education of boys, without any advantage whatever to girls. It was a great and crying evil, but was in course now'of being diminished, he hoped, by the operations of the Commission to which he belonged. He had very great sympathy with those who believed that a considerable change was called for in the education of children, but he doubted that the mental capacity for all branches of intellectual occupation was the same in both sexes. At the same time he could not resist the appeal of the advocates of female progress that an experiment should be allowed to bo fairly made to see whether, with the advantages of early training similar in all but physical respects to boys, girls in after life would prove themselves as well fitted as the opposite sex for the various branches of intellectual occupation in this country. He confessed that the remarkable results which had attended the recent elections for the London School Board showed a tendency in the public mind to that opinion.