The Education of American Girls

by Anna C. Brackett

There will be no difficulty in preserving the desired privacy for the family, though the wearying privacy of many English homes leads not a few to think it is not worth preserving in the English degree.

Adopt and apply the plan of which Mrs. King suggests an outline, press the division of labor principle in woman's work as far as it will go, and the wives and daughters who make our homes will not break down from overwork.

The readiest and surest corrective for the excessive greed of our girls for society is to carry on the system of co-education. This supplies a temperate gratification to the social appetites, induces girls to remain longer in school, and to do more thorough work, thus securing to them other sources of pleasure than social amusements and the companionship of friends. The process of co-education tends to develop a well-balanced character, and to put into it a trustworthy ballast, which American girls cannot afford to do without. For confirmation of this, one need only read the reports of any school judiciously managed on this plan, or he need only use his eyes in comparing the past school days with those of girls educated in the high schools and private schools of our Western cities. Of course girls of the present average habits and inherited tendencies must not be pressed up to quite the same degree of work that may be safely required of their brothers, who have fewer domestic demands upon their time, more out-of-door exercise, a freer style of dress, and, in general, healthier habits of life. Many a girl who takes especial care of herself—and, as a rule, the able girls do this—or who has especial care from her mother, may safely do what the best boys do without especial care.

But so long as girls require from one hour and a half to three hours a day, to be, or to develop themselves into, the conventional girl, and boys require only about one-third of that time to get themselves up into the conventional pattern for a boy, girls must either be superior to boys to begin with, or they must economize their power better, if they are able to do as much school-work in a year as boys; that is, if girls must consume power in all the ways that constitute the approved specialties of girls, they cannot do the whole work of boys without doing much more than boys do.

Whether the future has possibilities for girls that will give no occasion for this deficit of available power for school-work, it is impossible to say. Oberlin College and Michigan University report that the young women are no more frequently absent from their classes on account of ill-health than the young men. But it must be remembered that the women are few in number, and in some important respects more above the average of women than the young men are above the average of young men. Especially in the respect of a prudent care for their health their necessities have made them wise—and this will be the character of most of the women who go to college for some time to come. Our schools, too, show as high an average of work for girls as for boys, but this must not be wholly put down to equal resources. Girls, on the average, are more anxious for approval than boys are, and if work is assigned them, in spite of disadvantages they are quite as likely to do it as boys are.

Nor are we to suppose that the best average education for the present girls would show just the same average in direction as the best average education for boys.

Oberlin, the oldest experiment in co-education at college, arranges its plans with especial reference to the average differences between the quantity and direction of the school-work at present demanded for men and women. It has its “Ladies' Course,” as well as its University Course. The young women are allowed to pursue the University Course, though out of the four or five hundred young women who are in attendance, those who have taken degrees give only an average of about two in a year. At Antioch there was a large range of optional subjects, and among them was Greek, which the Western young men were about as much disposed to omit as the young women. The curriculums of the Western high schools have also a wide optional margin.

The growing educational sentiment is setting aside the old idea that it is well for all boys to pursue the same line of study, independent of tastes, and past and prospective circumstances in life; and another still more pernicious notion is sure soon to give way, that boys and young men, of whatever physical and brain power, are to be put through a definite course of study in just the same time. No one thinks it much of a guarantee for a man's scholarship that he holds an A.B. or an A.M. degree. This only assures us that he has spent four years at some institution that has a right to confer these degrees. When our system of schools and colleges is sufficiently flexible to meet the varying needs of boys and young men, we shall not find that it lacks anything to adapt it to the varying needs of boys and girls, or men and women. Men furnish us with examples through the whole scale of physical power and mental aptitude, and so do women.

The best girls will at least have no difficulty in carrying on three subjects of study, while the best boys carry on four; and girls not only can, but as a rule do, remain longer at school than the boys. It would be well, too, to give more credit to the specialties of girls in the schools. I can think of nothing else that would conduce so much to the thorough and satisfactory study of music as to give it an optional place in our school curriculums.

Doubtless the best plan would be to give girls a moderate amount of home work along with their school-work—that is, to develop a united domestic and intellectual taste. With the habit once formed of making this combination of pursuits, we should be much surer of their continuing their intellectual cultivation through life. If this could be done, they ought, as a rule, to be able to do more than men do in the last fifteen or twenty years of their lives.