general claim to comprehensive culture and awareness unafraid the legend
of her vicarious exposure.
Mr. Frank Sanborn's school, which I have already mentioned and to which
the following alludes, was during the years immediately preceding the
War, as during those of the War itself, the last word of what was then
accounted the undauntedly modern, flourishing as it did under the
patronage of the most "advanced" thought. The "coeducational" idea had
up to that time, if I mistake not, taken on no such confident and
consistent, certainly no such graceful or plausible form; small boys and
big boys, boys from near and boys from far, consorted there and
cohabited, so far as community of board and lodging and of study and
sport went, with little girls and great girls, mainly under the earnest
tutoring and elder-sistering of young women accomplished as scholarly
accomplishment in such cases was then understood, but with Mr. Sanborn
himself of course predominantly active and instructional, and above all
with the further felicity of the participation of the generous Emerson
family by sympathy and interest and the protective spread of the rich
mantle of their presence. The case had been from the first a frank and
high-toned experiment, a step down from the tonic air, as was so
considerably felt, of radical conviction to the firm ground of radical
application, that is of happy demonstration--an admittedly new and
trustful thing, but all the brighter and wiser, all the more nobly and
beautifully workable for that. With but the scantest direct observation
of the attempted demonstration--demonstration, that is, of the excellent
fruit such a grafting might produce--I yet imagine the enacted and
considerably prolonged scene (it lasted a whole decade) to have heaped
perfectly full the measure of what it proposed. The interesting, the
curious, the characteristic thing was just, however, I seem to make
out--I seemed to have made out even at the time--in the almost complete
absence of difficulty. It might almost then be said of the affair that
it hadn't been difficult enough for interest even should one insist on
treating it as sufficiently complicated or composed for picture. The
great War was to leave so many things changed, the country over, so many
elements added, to say nothing of others subtracted, in the American
consciousness at large, that even though the coeducational idea, taking
to itself strength, has during these later years pushed its conquests to
the very verge of demonstration of its inevitable limits, my memory
speaks to me of the Concord school rather as of a supreme artless word
on the part of the old social order than as a charged intimation or
announcement on the part of the new. The later arrangements, more or
less in its likeness and when on a considerable scale, have appeared, to
attentive observation, I think, mere endlessly multiplied notes of the
range of high spirits in the light heart of communities more aware on
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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