The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on EducationPalmer, Alice Freeman
Philosophy
The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education
Palmer, Alice Freeman
Education; Education, Higher; Women -- Education
Hitherto I have spoken as if coeducation were a western movement; and in
the West it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. But it
originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training, in
Massachusetts. Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest
incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were
from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836,
three years after the foundation of coeducational Oberlin, and in the
very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large hope
of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for young
men just two hundred years before. Ipswich and Abbot Academies in
Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. It has
been the dominant sentiment in the East that boys and girls should be
educated separately. The older, more generously endowed, more
conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the
dormitory system, have remained closed to women. The requirements for
the two sexes are thought to be different. Girls are to be trained for
private, boys for public life. Let every opportunity be given, it is
said, for developing accomplished, yes, even learned women; but let the
process of acquiring knowledge take place under careful guardianship,
among the refinements of home life, with graceful women, their
instructors, as companions, and with suitable opportunities for social
life. Much stress is laid upon assisting girl students to attain
balanced characters, charming manners, and ambitions that are not
unwomanly. A powerful moral, often a deeply religious earnestness,
shaped the discussion, and finally laid the foundations of woman's
education in the East.
In the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women's
colleges which are the richest in endowments and students of any in the
world were founded and set in motion. These colleges--Vassar, opened in
1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885--have received
in gifts of every kind about $6,000,000, and are educating nearly two
thousand students. For the whole country the Commissioner of Education
reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior instruction
of women, with more than twenty-five thousand students. But these
resources proved inadequate. There came an increasing demand, especially
from teachers, for education of all sorts; more and more, too, for
training in subjects of advanced research. For this, only the best
equipped men's universities were thought sufficient, and women began to
resort to the great universities of England and Germany. In an attempt
to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began, twelve years ago,
to provide women with instruction by members of the Harvard Faculty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account