DOES COEDUCATION FEMINIZE COLLEGE?
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. Münsterberg; 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."