Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
A typical contemporary writer[1] thinks the question whether a girl
shall receive a college education is very like the same question for
boys. Even if the four K's, _Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen,_ and _Kleider_
(which may be translated by the four C's, _Church, Children, Cooking,_
and _Clothes_), are her vocation, college may help her. The best
training for a young woman is not the old college course that has
proven unfit for young men. Most college men look forward to a
professional training as few women do. The latter have often greater
sympathy, readiness of memory, patience with technic, skill in
literature and language, but lack originality, are not attracted by
unsolved problems, are less motor-minded; but their training is just
as serious and important as that of men. The best results are where
the sexes are brought closer together, because their separation
generally emphasizes for girls the technical training for the
profession of womanhood. With girls, literature and language take
precedence over science; expression stands higher than action; the
scholarship may be superior, but is not effective; the educated woman
"is likely to master technic rather than art; method, rather than
substance. She may know a good deal, but she can do nothing." In most
separate colleges for women, old traditions are more prevalent than in
colleges for men. In the annex system, she does not get the best of
the institution. By the coeducation method, "young men are more
earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized
than under monastic conditions. The women do more work in a more
natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than
when isolated from the influence of the society of men. There is less
silliness and folly where a man is not a novelty. In coeducational
institutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any
form are rarely known. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from
the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility."
The character of college work has not been lowered but raised by
coeducation, despite the fact that most of the new, small, weak
colleges are coeducational. Social strain, Jordan thinks, is easily
regulated, and the dormitory system is on the whole best, because the
college atmosphere is highly prized. The reasons for the present
reaction against coeducation are ascribed partly to the dislike of the
idle boy to have girls excel him and see his failures, or because
rowdyish tendencies are checked by the presence of women. Some think
that girls do not help athletics; that men count for most because they
are more apt to be heard from later; but the most serious new argument
is the fear that woman's standards and amateurishness will take the
place of specialization. Women take up higher education because they
like it; men because their careers depend upon it. Hence their studies
are more objective and face the world as it is. In college the women
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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