The first is,
that girls leave school at about the age of fifteen or sixteen, that
is, as soon as the epoch of rapid sexual development arrives. It
appears, moreover, that during this epoch, or the greater part of it,
a German girl's education is carried on at home, by means of lectures
or private arrangements. These, of course, are not as inflexible as
the rigid rules of a technical school, and admit of easy adjustment to
the periodical demands of the female constitution. The second is the
traditional motherly supervision and careful regimen of the catamenial
week. Evidently the notion that a boy's education and a girl's
education should be the same, and that the same means the boy's, has
not yet penetrated the German mind. This has not yet evolved the idea
of the identical education of the sexes. It appears that in Germany,
schools, studies, parties, walks, rides, dances, and the like, are not
allowed to displace or derange the demands of Nature. The female
organization is respected. The third custom is, that German
school-girls are not invited to parties at all. "All this comes after
the school," says Dr. Hagen. The brain is not worked by day in the
labor of study, and tried by night with the excitement of the ball.
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