Dr. Mahan also says that, owing to the peculiar circumstances under which Oberlin College was established, he has, through subsequent years, maintained a far more familiar acquaintance with his former students than is common for old teachers to do; and that he can count many more broken-down men, among his old graduates, than broken-down women. It would be impossible for one now to conceive the obstacles in the way of the girls who were first admitted to study at Oberlin. Every step was achieved through a moral battle with public opinion and popular prejudice, the depressing effects of which cannot now be estimated. And yet they did go through—stood as high during their whole course, and in their graduating exercises, as the young men. They are all of them married, mothers of families of children, and are strong and healthy, far above the average of American women.
During almost thirty years that he has been president of college faculty meetings, he has never once heard, from any member of the Faculty, any intimation that the girls in the class were in any way whatever a drag upon the class. They invariably keep up, and oftener come out ahead than they lag behind. Nor is this more characteristic in one branch of study than another. Languages, science, philosophy, they grasp as clearly, strongly, and comprehensively as men; and as the result of his observation and of his experience, which, he says, in co-education in a higher course of study, has perhaps been greater than that of any man in the world, he thinks that while it is just as much better for men to be so educated as it is for women, the result to the latter is to make them more practical, more natural, less given to effeminate, rather than feminine affectations, and more readily adaptive to anything life may demand of them than any class of women he has ever known. Also, in the particular of health, he has carefully observed the effects of close and continued study, not only during the course, but in subsequent life, and he will risk his reputation for truthful statements, in saying that he believes—that he knows—the most careful statistics would show among the women who are college graduates, whom he has known, a higher standard of health than among the same number of women from any class of society—working women, fashionable women, or women of merely quiet, domestic habits. And yet, “every well-developed, well-balanced woman who is a graduate from our colleges has actually performed one-fourth more labor than a man who has stood by her side, and she is entitled to one-fourth more credit.”
A girl should be as free to choose for herself as a boy is. She can never truly know herself, nor be known by others, as the power in the world, greater or less, which she was ordained by God to be, until these thousand restrictions that limit and dwarf her intellectual life are removed.
“Let her make herself her own
To give or keep, to live, and learn, and be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood.”
I have recently been assured by one of the best students that have ever graduated from our University, and by another who graduated from Hillsdale College in this State, from precisely the same course as the gentlemen students, that to girls of average capacity, the college course, all that is required of the young men—and all that they are accustomed to perform—is not by any means difficult, and will not over-tax any girl of average health and abilities, who is properly prepared when she enters. But the trouble is that while girls like the studies in the regular course, and study with a real relish, they want more. They are not satisfied with the French and German of a course, they want to speak and write these languages, and add extra private lessons to those of the regular classes. The few lessons of the course in perspective drawing have, in some, awakened an artistic taste, and they want to pursue drawing farther. There are better teachers to be found in the vicinity of a University than they will find at home, and they are constantly tempted to do too much. A number of girls in the literary course of the University attend the medical lectures in certain departments, some teach students who are “conditioned” in certain branches. From all the colleges, the report in this respect is the same—girls can easily do all that is required of the young men, but they will do more. And yet the report from every college is—more young men break down during a course, and are obliged, from ill health, to abandon their studies, than young women. This certainly does not threaten danger to girls who attempt only the same that the young men do. The tendency in our colleges towards elective courses of study is in the right direction to remove the dangerous temptation into which girls are liable to fall—of taking studies outside the course. I hope to see even greater freedom of choice.
From a woman, a mother, and lover of little children, a few words about school buildings and school methods may not be out of place.
Americans are proverbially giving to boasting. People of the older world tell us that this is an expression of our undeveloped youth—a kind of Sophomorism denoting that we are yet not very far advanced. Be that as it may, I have observed that there is no more common subject for boasting than our schools and our school system.
“There are our King's Palaces, where we are training our future monarchs! Those are the towers of our defence—the bulwarks of our republic!” I heard a western Congressman exclaim, as the railway train whizzed past one of those immense school edifices which so closely dot the area of many of our western States, that one scarcely loses sight of one ere the high towers and ornate roofs of another come into view. “I will acknowledge that I am proud—feel like boasting, when I can point a foreigner to such buildings as those, and tell him they are but our common free schools, open to every child in the land, rich and poor, alike.”
The friend addressed, an intelligent, shrewd, naturalized Scotchman, replied that he was “a little old fogy,” he supposed, but that those great high buildings, where six or eight hundred children were gathered in one school, were like great cities, where too many people were gathered together. School life, no more than city life, could be healthy, nor just what life ought to be, under such conditions. To carry out these great union school plans, made a necessity for too much machinery. This it was which was grinding out the education of our children, rather than developing thought, and the result would be machine education. He said that school was a continual worry at home. One child was kept after school one day for one thing, and another the next day for some other thing, and there was a deal of worry and fretting about how they were marked, and a good deal more talk about the marks for the lesson, than there was about what was in the lesson itself. One little girl, a delicate lassie, they had been obliged to take out of school. The child didn't eat, couldn't sleep, and was getting in a bad way altogether.
“There is no more color in L——'s face when she is getting off to school in the morning, than there is in my handkerchief, she is so afraid of being marked,” said a mother to me a day or two since. “Yesterday morning was especially one of trial to the child. I wish you could have seen her when she got off, or rather when she got home at night, and have heard her story. I had charged her not to hurry so, but come back if she was going to fail; I would rather she would lose the day than to gain her school through such an effort.” The child reached the school, and came home at night to tell how. Rushing into the house, the delicately organized, nervous little girl exclaimed: “Oh, mamma, I did get there; and the best of it was, I overtook G—— S—— (another as delicate child); she was as late as I was, and we both ran every step. We managed to get our things off in the wardrobe and get into our seats, but G—— could not get her mittens off; and when she at last dropped into her seat, she put both hands up to her face and burst out crying as loud as she could cry. Oh, I did feel so sorry for her!” The effort of getting to school, the fear of the marks, had thrown the delicate child into hysterics, given her physical system a shock, and made demands on her brain that a year's study could not have done. I could fill a volume, as could any observing woman, with instances like this—the occurrences of every day in the year. They cannot, perhaps, be helped. Teachers are not to be blamed for them. Six or eight hundred children cannot be hindered for one child. All are tied to too much machinery.