Frances Mary Buss; Her Life and Works (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ...and do what you expect of them. She dwelt on the good, insisted on it to them, wrestled for it with them, established it in them, and straightway forgot the evil or remembered it only as a passing phase. And the sign of this large-hearted sympathy in an optimistic temperament is shown in the special devotion to Miss Buss of all the so-called naughty girls. It is needless to enlarge on her possession of the administrator's gift of relying with generous trust upon her tried helpers. This, too, was in her a matter of the heart quite as much as of the head. She felt about them as one with her in a joint work of which in all its phases she spoke as 'ours, ' not as 'mine.' It was pleasanter, more natural to her, to be the controlling centre of a plural will than to be a single will governing others with more or less allowance for their freedom. As regards the question of the relation of the head to her assistants, this might be described as the theory of her practice, elastic as all theories must be in a mind of truly practical genius. She believed thoroughly in the legal autocracy of the head as the best form of school government, but in her view of the autocrat's standard for himself she expected him to exercise rule with due regard for ministers and parliaments. CHAPTER X. THE HEAD-MISTRESSES ASSOCIATION. L'Union fait la Force. Probably none of her public work gave Miss Buss more unqualified satisfaction than the Head-mistresses' Association, of which the first germ seems to be contained in a passage from one of her Journal-letters of September, 1874, written from Bonaly Tower, Edinburgh--Miss Beale of Cheltenham called on me the day I was in London.... She and I think we must form an Association of...