Farm life -- United States; Girls -- United States
In the schools of to-day the education is modeled upon the needs of the
man. In this country especially, when schools of the higher kind began
to be built, the need was for emphasis on professional education. To
prepare men for that need was the aim. This was what women found when
they began to enter institutions of higher education: they found a
system adapted for men's needs, and especially to prepare them for the
professions. At first it seemed strange to many men that women should
desire to gain this kind of education. But there were other men who saw
that the path toward their own needs was through the well-paved avenues
of education as it then existed. So women went on; they felt that their
first duty was to take the training that men were taking, if for no
other reason than to show that they could. They did this. They showed it
abundantly. Then they began to philosophize on the situation. They saw
that they must have a system of education more adapted to their own
needs. Hence the rise of courses of study adapted to the immediate needs
of women in their work as home-makers and household administrators. So
far these courses of study are usually found in the agricultural
colleges or in institutions formed for the special purpose of training
women for home-making. This is because the agricultural college has been
founded in the main since the new vision of the relation of education
and the work of women has touched the eyes of educators. The old-line
colleges preserve the ideals of decades ago. They are hopelessly
masculinized and professionalized. There women will perhaps never find
a natural normal education. At all events they will not find this until
it is understood that psychology must as thoroughly prepare the young
women to understand the development of the child's mind as it does the
business man to understand the principles of advertising, and that
chemistry should fit the housekeeper to gain aseptical cleanness in her
household laboratory as efficiently as it does the manufacturer's expert
to find a use for the by-product and turn it into money value. That the
woman has a right to expect her college education in all its branches to
prepare her for the duties that are hers, has not yet seemed to enter
the minds of educators. She should no longer be required to go to a
special institution for this. She has shown that she can undertake the
severest strains of educational training; she no longer needs to keep
that purpose in view. What she now needs is adaptation for her own work.
The highest institutions that exist should give her what she needs.
Until this comes along in the natural course of educational
development--as it surely will--she must gain the training she needs in
such ways as she can.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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