If, after hearing a lecture or oral lesson, they can answer in writing Borne simple questions carefully stated, it will be a further advance.
It is something to grasp accurately the scope of a question.

The plague of girls' answers is usually irrelevancy from want of thought as to the scope of questions or even from inattention to their wording.

If they can be patient in face of unanswered difficulties, and wait for the solution to come later on in its natural course, then at least one small fruit of their studies will have been brought to maturity; and if at the end of their elementary course they are convinced of their own ignorance, and want to know more, it may be said that the course has not been unsuccessful.
It is not, however, complete unless they know something of the history of philosophy, the great schools, and the names which have been held in honour from the beginning down to our own days.

They will realize that it is good to have been born in their own time, and to learn such lessons now that the revival of scholastic philosophy under Leo XIII and the development of the neo-scholastic teaching have brought fresh life into the philosophy of tradition, which although it appears to put new wine into old bottles, seems able to preserve the wine and the bottles together..