from the training of every college that is worthy of the name; and
fortunately it is impossible to enlarge knowledge without, to some
extent, enlarging life. But the question is one of directness or
indirectness of aim. The woman’s college puts this aim in the foreground
side by side with the acquisition of knowledge. By setting its students
apart in homogeneous companies, it seeks to cultivate common ideals.
Of its teaching force, a large number are women who live with the
students in the college buildings, sit with them at table, join in their
festivities, and in numberless intimate ways share and guide the common
life. Every student, no matter how large the college, has friendly
access at any time to several members of the faculty, quite apart from
her relations with them in the class-room. In appointing these women
to the faculty no board of trustees would consider it sufficient that
a candidate was an accomplished specialist. She must be this, but
she should be also a lady of unobjectionable manners and influential
character; she should have amiability and a discreet temper, for she is
to be a guiding force in a complex community, continually in the presence
of her students, an officer of administration and government no less than
of instruction. Harvard and Johns Hopkins can ask their pupils to attend
the lectures of a great scholar, however brusque his bearing or unbrushed
his hair. They will not question their geniuses too sharply, and will
trust their students to look out for their own proprieties of dress,
manners, and speech. But neither Wellesley nor any other woman’s college
could find a place in its faculty for a woman Sophocles or Sylvester.
Learning alone is not enough for women.
Not only in the appointment of its teaching body, but in all its
appliances the separate college aims at a rounded refinement, at
cultivating a sense of beauty, at imparting simple tastes and generous
sympathies. To effect this, pictures are hung on the walls, statues
and flowers decorate the rooms, concerts bring music to the magnified
home, and parties and receptions are paid for out of the college purse.
The influence of hundreds of mentally eager girls upon the characters
of one another, when they live for four years in the closest daily
companionship, is most interesting to see. I have watched the ennobling
process go on for many years among Wellesley students, and I am confident
that no more healthy, generous, democratic, beauty-loving, serviceable
society of people exists than the girls’ college community affords. That
choicest product of modern civilization, the American girl, is here
in all her diverse colors. She comes from more than a dozen religious
denominations and from every political party; from nearly every State and
Territory in the Union, and from the foreign lands into which English
and American missionaries, merchants, or soldiers have penetrated.[3]
The farmer’s daughter from the Western prairies is beside the child
whose father owns half a dozen mill towns of New England. The pride of a
Southern senator’s home rooms with an anxious girl who must borrow all
the money for her college course because her father’s life was given
for the Union. Side by side in the boats, on the tennis-grounds, at the
table, arm in arm on the long walks, debating in the societies, vigorous
together in the gymnasium and the library, girls of every grade gather
the rich experiences which will tincture their future toil, and make the
world perpetually seem an interesting and friendly place. They here learn
to “see great things large, and little things small.”
This detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls’ college
renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses.
According to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities
themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement.
Living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and
altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. Petty selfishness retreats
or becomes extinct. An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated,
and the break between college life and the life from which the student
comes is reduced to a minimum.
It is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to
the girls’ college. It is said that its students never escape from
themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire
a scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. Is it
desirable that they should? That I shall not undertake to decide. I
have merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different
types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women.
Whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a
question of social ethics which the future must answer. I have set forth
a type, perhaps, in the endeavor after clearness, exaggerating a little
its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor types
than individual cases would justify. There are colleges for women which
closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. No doubt
those which move furthest in the directions I have indicated are capable
of modification. But I believe what I have said gives a substantially
true account of an actually existing type—a type powerful in stirring the
enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in its penetrating
influences over them, and effective in winning the confidence of a
multitude of parents who would never send their daughters to colleges of
a different type.
The third type is the “annex,” a recent and interesting experiment in the
education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict. Only
a few cases exist, and as the Harvard Annex is the most conspicuous,
by reason of its dozen years of age and nearly two hundred students, I
shall describe it as the typical example. In the Harvard Annex groups of
young women undertake courses of study in classes whose instruction is
furnished entirely by members of the Harvard Faculty. No college officer
is obliged to give this instruction, and the Annex staff of teachers is,
therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to year. Though the
usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large majority of its
students devote themselves to special subjects. A wealthy girl turns from
fashionable society to pursue a single course in history or economics;
a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a few afternoons each
week from a famous Greek or Latin professor; a woman who has been long
familiar with French literature explores with a learned specialist some
single period in the history of the language. Because the opportunities
for advanced and detached study are so tempting, many ladies living in
the neighborhood of the Annex enter one or more of its courses. There
are consequently among its students women much older than the average of
those who attend the colleges.
The business arrangements are taken charge of by a committee of ladies
and gentlemen, who provide class-rooms, suggest boarding-places, secure
the instructors, solicit the interest of the public—in short, manage all
the details of an independent institution; for the noteworthy feature
of its relation to its powerful neighbor is this: that the two, while
actively friendly, have no official or organic tie whatever. In the same
city young men and young women of collegiate rank are studying the same
subjects under the same instructors; but there are two colleges, not one.
No detail in the management of Harvard College is changed by the presence
in Cambridge of the Harvard Annex. If the corporation of Harvard should
assume the financial responsibility, supervise the government, and give
the girl-graduates degrees, making no other changes whatever, the Annex
would then become a school of the university, about as distinct from
Harvard College as the medical, law, or divinity schools. The students of
the medical school do not attend the same lectures or frequent the same
buildings as the college undergraduates. The immediate governing boards
of college and medical school are separate. But here comparison fails,
for the students of the professional schools may elect courses in the
college and make use of all its resources. This the young women cannot
do. They have only the rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many
public lectures and readings of the University.
The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman’s college, with no degrees, no
dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up
from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, where offices, lecture
and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart
of old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings.
This is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. Here
they gather their friends at afternoon teas; here the various clubs which
have sprung up, as numbers have increased, hold their meetings and give
their entertainments. The students lodge in all parts of Cambridge and
the neighboring towns, and are directly responsible for their conduct
only to themselves. The ladies of the management are lavish in time and
care to make the girls’ lives happy and wholesome; the secretary is
always at hand to give advice; but the personal life of the students is
as separate and independent as in the typical co-educational college.
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.
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 co-education a woman’s study is
carried on inside a men’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
co-educational 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.
The result of all these diversities is the most instructive body of
experiment that the world has seen for determining the best ways of
bringing woman to her powers. While the public mind is so uncertain, so
liable to panic, and so doubtful whether, after all, it is not better for
a girl to be a goose, the many methods of education assist one another
mightily in their united warfare against ignorance, selfish privileges,
and antiquated ideals. It is well that for a good while to come woman’s
higher education should be all things to all mothers, if by any means
it may save girls. Those who are hardy enough may continue to mingle
their girls with men; while a parent who would be shocked that her
daughter should do anything so ambiguous as to enter a men’s college
may be persuaded to send her to a girls’. Those who find it easier to
honor an old university than the eager life of a young college, may be
tempted into an annex. The important thing is that the adherents of these
differing types should not fall into jealousy, and belittle the value
of those who are performing a work which they themselves cannot do so
well. To understand one another kindly is the business of the hour—to
understand and to wait.
BOXFORD, MASS, 1889.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1887-88, Chapter xi.
[3] See the President’s Report of Wellesley College for 1889-90.
THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN ACADEMIES AND COLLEGES.
BY PROFESSOR LUCY M. SALMON, VASSAR COLLEGE.
Copyright, 1890, by George A. Bacon.
The old Greek legend representing the muse of history as of divine
lineage, and the eldest of her sisters, rested on a philosophic as well
as a poetic basis. With dim perceptions of the nature of a future life,
men early sought it in the record of their earthly deeds, hoping thus to
win immortality in spite of death.
History thus ministered to the individual, and in the dim twilight of the
race sang the wrath of Peleus’s son and the fortunes of the exiled men of
Troy. As the importance of the individual became merged in that of the
nation, it was the jealousies of rival States and foreign conquests that
employed her pen. Nations, like individuals, were of special interest to
themselves, and their achievements in war and politics were recorded by
admiring and servile chroniclers. Men saw in history only an attempt to
rescue from oblivion national and individual deeds worthy of emulation or
demanding universal condemnation. Until our own period, therefore, the
muse of history has, with few exceptions, been an annalist looking from
a lower window. Men and events have passed before her, but she has not
cared whence they came or whither they went. But as modern chemistry is
the outgrowth of mediæval alchemy, and astronomy of the astrology of a
still more ancient day, so modern history has been developed from these
chronicles of a remote past. Clio no longer seeks alone to win enduring
fame for her favored heroes, but she depicts the past, that men may live
more wisely in the present. As the muse of comparative history, she goes
to the mountain-top and makes the whole world hers by right of eminent
domain.
Several influences have contributed to bring about this change, but the
most important have come through the French Revolution. Those great
intellectual movements that culminated in the overthrow of absolutism
in France and the creation of new political ideals throughout Western
Europe gave to history a different conception of the relative position
of potentates and peoples. The subject gained new dignity as it abandoned
the homage previously paid to civil, military, and ecclesiastical rulers,
and concerned itself more with the characteristics of nations. Voltaire
anticipated Macaulay and Green by one hundred years when he wrote, “I
wish to write a history, not of wars, but of society.... I want to know
what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.”
History has thus during the present century gained a new theme in the
portrayal of those democratic tendencies of which its new purpose has
been the result.
But not only did the French Revolution create a truer historical
perspective within the different nations—it also widened the horizon of
each. The armies of Napoleon and the allies, that swept over Europe from
the Spanish peninsula to the heart of Russia, broke down the artificial
barriers that had separated nation from nation. Provincialism was
diminished, national interest was less self-centred, States for the first
time became aware of the existence of institutions after which their
own might profitably be modelled. The political, social, industrial,
and educational condition of nations became of more vital interest than
the hours of dining and retiring of capricious sovereigns. The study
of comparative history was born of the same destructive forces that
overthrew the oldest and apparently most stable institutions of Europe.
While history has thus been indebted to political revolutions for new
themes, it has also been indebted to changing intellectual standards
for new methods of work. The early age had been one of credulity and
adulation. But men came in time to see that “fables begin to be current
in one generation, are established in the second, become respectable
in the third, while in the fourth temples are raised in their honor.”
Scepticism and speculative thought followed in turn, and these have
been superseded by a demand for the study of facts, not for their own
sake, but to determine the laws that govern them. Science and scientific
methods have become controlling intellectual forces, and history, like
every other subject, has come under this influence. As a result of this
awakening, Voltaire in France, Niebuhr in Germany, and Arnold in England,
gave the impulse to that form of historical writing which has made
history pre-eminent in the world of letters in our own century. It has
not been forgotten that there were immortal names in Greece and Rome, and
that the eighteenth century produced a Gibbon; but these are exceptions
that show that the true historical spirit characterized the individual,
not the age.
If history has thus been affected by the credulity of one period and the
indiscriminating love of facts of another, now by speculative tendencies
and again by scientific movements, is it not a chameleon unworthy of
consideration among more stable subjects? The important place it has won
for itself in the curricula of all our colleges and secondary schools
must at this time be a sufficient answer to the question; but it is
fitting to ask what are the dangers that at present beset the path of
students and teachers of history.
The first danger is the failure to recognize the individuality of
history. This is often due to a desire to acknowledge the indebtedness
of history to science. Schools announce the employment in history
of “laboratory methods,” publishers advertise text-books in history
constructed on the laboratory plan, and a recent catalogue of a large and
important university proclaims that no text-book in history is used, but
that one is being prepared by the professor and advanced students in the
historical laboratory of the university. Historical laboratory, indeed!
Is the old word _library_ to become obsolete and referred in the next
edition of Webster to the heading _laboratory_? Must our study-table give
place to a more scientific article of furniture yet to be produced in
some other historico-scientific workshop? The true student and teacher
of history is ever foremost to confess his obligation to scientific
methods, but he will never recognize in history a subdivision of physics
or biology, or look forward to an historical Newton who will reduce the
events of the past to mathematical formulæ or physical laws.
A second phase of the same danger assumes the form of a desire to make
history the vehicle for our philosophical conceptions of the past,
present, and future. This desire to know and to teach the philosophy of
history is a reaction against that spirit which saw in the events of the
past only an enumeration of facts, a skeleton without flesh and blood.
This reaction has been inevitable, and in a sense is not to be regretted;
but it has brought its own attending dangers. A class of teachers, by no
means small in numbers or restricted in influence, whose knowledge of
history and of philosophy is based on Hegel’s _Philosophy of History_,
supplemented by a course of lectures at the Concord School, is to-day
instructing history classes in our high-schools that the ultimate aim
of the world is the mind’s consciousness of its rational freedom. For
the type of mind that has first grasped the idea that it is not all of
history to teach Barnes’s text-books memoriter from cover to cover, the
transition is easy to the Hegelian conception that in Greece the mind was
introspective; among the Romans the mind was resolved into generality,
which makes mind itself universal; while in Christianity the mind first
withdraws into pure introspection in communion with the universal; then
follows the reconciliation, which is the introspective mind transforming
the world. (Diesterweg’s summary.) A disciple of this school, whose
sublime indifference to the fact that the Norman Conquest came in the
eleventh rather than in the first or the nineteenth century, had been
the despair of his instructor, when asked what material he would select
for a class in history in the grammar grades, replied promptly, “I would
teach them the philosophy of history.” It is this spirit that teaches
in our academies and high-schools the philosophical, psychological and
physiological aspects of the French Revolution, that discusses history,
as has been said of Mr. Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_, “in the past
potential subjunctive,” and all this without any sound, accurate
knowledge of the facts on which the conclusions of others have been based.
A third danger comes in the adaptation of the fatalistic “whatever
is, is right,” into the fashionable “whatever is European, is right.”
This, again, is but the expression of a reaction against a too fervid
patriotism which would have nothing of the effete monarchies of the Old
World; but special evils follow in its train. The college that employs
laboratory methods and teaches the philosophy of history to freshmen
glories in “original investigation” and the German seminary. He is of all
men most deceived who dreams that the German _Seminarium_ can be built
upon anything but a German university basis. Doubtless the word seminary
is often used with us to characterize a form of instruction affording
special freedom of intercourse between professor and student, and in this
sense its use is not objectionable, but the typical German seminary in
an American college is an anomaly.
A fourth danger comes from another adaptation of the old saying into
“whatever is new, is right.” This, again, is a reaction against certain
misconceptions of the subject-matter of history. Since Mr. Green wrote
his _Short History of the English People_, in protest against the
previous exclusive consideration of military and political affairs, it
has become the fashion to decry every history that does not treat of “the
people.” The protest has been well made; but there is danger that the
teacher who welcomes emancipation from the drudgery that compelled the
memorization of all the campaigns of the Revolutionary War will forget
that
“civlyzation doos git forrid
Sometimes upon a powder cart.”