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
In both Barnard and Cleveland women are engaged in instruction and in
government. Indeed, the new annexes which have arisen in the last three
years seem to promise independent colleges for women in the immediate
neighborhood of, and in close relationship with, older and better
equipped universities for men, whose resources they can to some extent
use, whose standards they can apply, whose tests they can meet. When
they possess a fixed staff of teachers they are not, of course, liable
to the instabilities which at present beset the Harvard Annex. So far,
however, as these teachers belong to the annex, and are not drawn from
the neighboring university, the annex is assimilated to the type of the
ordinary woman's college, and loses its distinctive merits. If the
connection between it and the university should ever become so close
that it had the same right to the professors as the university itself,
it would become a question whether the barriers between the men's and
the women's lecture rooms could be economically maintained.
The preceding survey has shown how in coeducation a woman's study is
carried on inside a man's college, in the women's college outside it,
in the annex beside it. Each of these situations has its advantage. But
will the community be content to accept this; permanently to forego the
counter advantages, and even after it fully realizes the powers and
limitations of the different types, firmly to maintain them in their
distinctive vigor? Present indications render this improbable. Already
coeducational colleges incline to more careful leadership for their
girls. The separate colleges, with growing wealth, are learning to value
intrepidity, and are carrying their operations close up to the lands of
the Ph.D. The annex swings in its middle air, sometimes inclining to the
one side, sometimes to the other. And outside them all, the great body
of men's colleges continually find it harder to maintain their
isolation, and extend one privilege after another to the seeking sex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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