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
Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great
extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have
done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper
education of woman. To assume that the latter question is settled, as
is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through
many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was
discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not
without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with
the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the
curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few
general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study
themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often
maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. No
one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, where the
richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and
competent research on lines calculated to bring out the
psycho-physiological differences between the sexes and those in
authority are either conservative by constitution or else intimidated
because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here
becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and
the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in
countenance.
Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every
opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of
her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college
is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed,
if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be
trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and
motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even
urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are, as the above
statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do
not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right.
These institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a
new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she nut, maid--old
or young--nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. I recognize the very
great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse class in the
past. Some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of
self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was
meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the class of
superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism
and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did
the monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring about the
Dark Ages, because they were the best and most highly selected men of
their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and
leaving no posterity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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