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
The girl who goes to the University of Michigan to-day, just as when I
entered there in 1872, finds her own boarding-place in one of the quiet
homes of the pleasant little city whose interest centres in the two
thousand five hundred students scattered within its borders. She makes
the business arrangements for her winter's fuel and its storage; she
finds her washerwoman or her laundry; she arranges her own hours of
exercise, of study, and of sleep; she chooses her own society, clubs,
and church. The advice she gets comes from another girl student of
sophomoric dignity who chances to be in the same house, or possibly from
a still more advanced young woman whom she met on the journey, or sat
near in church on her first Sunday. Strong is the comradeship among
these ambitious girls, who nurse one another in illness, admonish one
another in health, and rival one another in study only less eagerly than
they all rival the boys. In my time in college the little group of
girls, suddenly introduced into the army of young men, felt that the
fate of our sex hung upon proving that "lady Greek" involved the
accents, and that women's minds were particularly absorptive of the
calculus and metaphysics. And still in those sections where, with
growing experience, the anxieties about coeducation have been allayed, a
healthy and hearty relationship and honest rivalry between young men and
women exists. It is a stimulating atmosphere, and develops in good stock
a strength and independent balance which tell in after-life.
In estimating the worth of such a system as this, we may say at once
that it does not meet every need of a woman's nature. No system can--no
system that has yet been devised. A woman is an object of attraction to
men, and also in herself so delicately organized as to be fitted
peculiarly for the graces and domesticities of life. The exercise of her
special function of motherhood demands sheltered circumstances and
refined moral perceptions. But then, over and above all this, she is a
human being--a person, that is, who has her own way in the world to
make, and who will come to success or failure, in her home or outside
it, according as her judgment is fortified, her observations and
experiences are enlarged, her courage is rendered strong and calm, her
moral estimates are trained to be accurate, broad, and swift. In a large
tract of her character--is it the largest tract?--her own needs and
those of the young man are identical. Both are rational persons, and the
greater part of the young man's education is addressed to his rational
personality rather than to the peculiarities of his sex. Why, the
defenders of coeducation ask, may not the same principles apply to
women? Why train a girl specifically to be a wife and mother, when no
great need is felt for training a boy to be a husband and father? In
education, as a public matter, the two sexes meet on common ground. The
differences must be attended to privately.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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