Thorough Training, Rather than Separate
Training, is the Need of the
Times, Says President Jordan.
President David Starr Jordan, of Leland Stanford Junior University, has
ever been a strong advocate of coeducation. At the present time, when the
system is being so severely criticized in so many quarters, his defense of
it, which appears in _Munsey's Magazine_ for March, sounds a note of
reassurance. The article is an answer to an attack on coeducation--in the
February issue of the same magazine--by President G. Stanley Hall, of
Clark University.
To the charges that the character of college work has been lowered by
coeducation, and that it offers difficulties or embarrassments in the
class-room, Dr. Jordan replies with categorical denials. The argument that
the presence of women tends to "feminize" the universities is, he grants,
more serious. But he then enters into the following distinctions:
It has been feared that the admission of women to the
university would vitiate the masculinity of its standards;
that neatness of technique would impair boldness of
conception; and delicacy of taste replace soundness of
results. It is claimed that the preponderance of high school
educated women in ordinary society is showing some such
effects in matters of current opinion.
For example, it is claimed that the university extension
course is no longer of university nature. It is a lyceum
course designed to please women who enjoy a little poetry,
play, and music, who read the novels of the day, who dabble
in theosophy, Christian science, or psychology, who
cultivate their astral bodies and think there is something
in palmistry, and who are edified by a candy-coated ethics
of self-realization. There is nothing ruggedly true, nothing
masculine left in it.
Current literature and history are affected by the same
influences. Women pay clever actors to teach them, not
Shakespeare or Goethe, but how one ought to feel on reading
"King Lear" or "Faust." If the women of society do not read
a book, it will scarcely pay to publish it.
Science is popularized in the same fashion by ceasing to be
science and becoming mere sentiment or pleasing information.
This is shown by the number of books on how to study a bird,
a flower, a tree, or a star, through an opera-glass, and
without knowing anything about it. Such studies may be good
for the feelings or even for the moral nature, but they have
no elements of that "fanaticism for veracity" which is the
highest attribute of the educated man.
These results of the education of many women and of a few
men, by which the half-educated woman becomes a controlling
social factor, have been lately set in strong light by Dr.
Muensterberg; but they are used by him, not as an argument
against coeducation, but for the purpose of urging the
better education of more men. They form likewise an argument
for the better education of more women.
The remedy for feminine dilettanteism is found in more
severe training. Current literature reflects the taste of
the leisure class. The women with leisure who read and
discuss vapid books are not representative of woman's higher
education. Most of them have never been educated at all.
In any event, this gives no argument against coeducation. It
is thorough training, not separate training, which is
indicated as the need of the times. Where this training is
taken is a secondary matter, though I believe with the
fulness of certainty that better results, mental, moral, and
physical, can be obtained in coeducation than in any
monastic form of instruction.
The question whether or not coeducation leads to marriage seems to present
few difficulties to Dr. Jordan. "Love and marriage and parenthood," he
says, "will go on normally whatever our scheme of education."