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 undoubtedly true that many girls are totally unfitted by home and
school life for a valuable college course. These joys and successes,
these high interests and friendships, are not for the self-conscious and
nervous invalid, nor for her who in the exuberance of youth recklessly
ignores the laws of a healthy life. The good society of scholars and of
libraries and laboratories has no place and no attraction for her who
finds no message in Plato, no beauty in mathematical order, and who
never longs to know the meaning of the stars over her head or the
flowers under her feet. Neither will the finer opportunities of college
life appeal to one who, until she is eighteen (is there such a girl in
this country?), has felt no passion for the service of others, no desire
to know if through history, or philosophy, or any study of the laws of
society, she can learn why the world is so sad, so hard, so selfish as
she finds it, even when she looks upon it from the most sheltered life.
No, the college cannot be, should not try to be, a substitute for the
hospital, reformatory, or kindergarten. To do its best work it should be
organized for the strong, not for the weak; for the high-minded,
self-controlled, generous, and courageous spirits, not for the
indifferent, the dull, the idle, or those who are already forming their
characters on the amusement theory of life. All these perverted young
people may, and often do, get large benefit and invigoration, new
ideals, and unselfish purposes from their four years' companionship with
teachers and comrades of a higher physical, mental, and moral stature
than their own. I have seen girls change so much in college that I have
wondered if their friends at home would know them,--the voice, the
carriage, the unconscious manner, all telling a story of new tastes and
habits and loves and interests, that had wrought out in very truth a new
creature. Yet in spite of this I have sometimes thought that in college
more than elsewhere the old law holds, "To him that hath shall be given
and he shall have abundance, but from him who hath not shall be taken
away even that which he seemeth to have." For it is the young life which
is open and prepared to receive which obtains the gracious and uplifting
influences of college days. What, then, for such persons are the rich
and abiding rewards of study in college or university?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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