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
It is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to
the girls' college. It is said that its students never escape from
themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire
a scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. Is it
desirable that they should? That I shall not undertake to decide. I have
merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different
types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women.
Whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a
question of social ethics which the future must answer. I have set forth
a type, perhaps in the endeavor after clearness exaggerating a little
its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor
types than individual cases would justify. There are colleges for women
which closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. No
doubt those which move furthest in the directions I have indicated are
capable of modification. But I believe what I have said gives a
substantially true account of an actually existing type--a type powerful
in stirring the enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in
its penetrating influences over them, and effective in winning the
confidence of a multitude of parents who would never send their
daughters to colleges of a different type.
The third type is the "annex," a recent and interesting experiment in
the education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict.
Only a few cases exist, and as the Harvard Annex is the most
conspicuous, by reason of its dozen years of age and nearly two hundred
students, I shall describe it as the typical example. In the Harvard
Annex groups of young women undertake courses of study in classes whose
instruction is furnished entirely by members of the Harvard Faculty. No
college officer is obliged to give this instruction, and the Annex staff
of teachers is, therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to
year. Though the usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large
majority of its students devote themselves to special subjects. A
wealthy girl turns from fashionable society to pursue a single course in
history or economics; a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a
few afternoons each week from a famous Greek or Latin professor; a woman
who has been long familiar with French literature explores with a
learned specialist some single period in the history of the language.
Because the opportunities for advanced and detached study are so
tempting, many ladies living in the neighborhood of the Annex enter one
or more of its courses. There are consequently among its students women
much older than the average of those who attend the colleges.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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