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 impossible to estimate either favorably or adversely the
permanent worth of an undertaking still in its infancy. Manifestly,
the opportunities for the very highest training are here superb, if
they happen to exist at all. In this, however, is the incalculable
feature of the system. The Annex lives by favor, not by right, and it is
impossible to predict what the extent of favor may at any time be. A
girl hears that an admirable course of lectures has been given on a
topic in which she is greatly interested. She arranges to join the
Annex and enter the course, but learns in the summer vacation that
through pressure of other work the professor will be unable to teach in
the Annex the following year. The fact that favor rules, and not
rights, peculiarly hampers scientific and laboratory courses, and
for its literary work obliges the Annex largely to depend on its own
library. Yet when all these weaknesses are confessed--and by none are
they confessed more frankly than by the wise and devoted managers of the
Annex themselves--it should be said that hitherto they have not
practically hindered the formation of a spirit of scholarship,
eager, free and sane to an extraordinary degree. The Annex girl
succeeds in remaining a private and unobserved gentlewoman, while still,
in certain directions, pushing her studies to an advanced point seldom
reached elsewhere.
A plan in some respects superficially analogous to the American annex
has been in operation for many years at the English, and more recently
at some of the Scotch universities, where a hall or college for women
uses many of the resources of the university. But this plan is so
complicated with the peculiar organization of English university life
that it cannot usefully be discussed here. In the few colleges in this
country where, very recently, the annex experiment is being tried, its
methods vary markedly.
Barnard College in New York is an annex of Columbia only in a sense, for
not all her instruction is given by Columbia's teaching force, though
Columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. The new Woman's College
at Cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to Adelbert
College, though to a still greater extent she provides independent
instruction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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