The Education of American Girls

by Anna C. Brackett

The sixteenth. Again we hear no response. “In Memoriam” is written over her grave.

The seventeenth lives in Mississippi. She was well when visited by some of our Union boys during the war. I have no later report to give.

The eighteenth certainly does not count herself an invalid; and

The nineteenth, who was, as a school-girl, the very personation of energy, looks forward to years of useful labor.

We are told that we must not look at the blooming class on graduation day for the effects of co-education. We have not. We have waited seventeen years. Have we found anything there to frighten even a physiologist?

The theory of Oberlin has never been identical co-education, except in the class-room. There “boys and girls are taught the same things, at the same time, in the same place, by the same faculty, with the same methods, and under the same regimen.” But she has never held, practically or theoretically, “that boys and girls are one, and that the boys make the one,” or that “boys' and girls' schools are one, and that that one is the boys' school.” In all those general regulations which affect both sexes, she remembers that half her children are girls: and the modifications which have consequently been made in ordinary college rules and customs, are found to be just as good for boys, and often a positive advantage. No early bell calls to chapel prayers, but, when the recitations are over, all assemble for devotional exercises. There is no standing during these exercises, and the result is quiet, and an addition both to “the stock of piety,” and “the stock of health.” Oberlin furnishes no pleasanter sight than this daily assembling of its thousand students for evening prayers.

Even in her architecture, simple and unpretending as it is, there is a recognition of the fact that girls are not boys. With one exception, there are no recitation rooms on the second floor; and, while the dormitories for boys are four stories high, Ladies' Hall has but two flights of stairs.

There is no effort made to excite an unhealthful emulation. Prizes are never offered, and ranking of classes is unknown. A record is kept by each teacher, of the daily recitations in his department. If the average of any student is found to be unsatisfactory, he is informed of the fact, and an opportunity given him either to prepare for a private examination, or quietly to withdraw from his class.

The Women's and Men's Departments are entirely distinct, the one being under the supervision of the Faculty, the other of the Ladies' Board. This Board of Managers is at present composed of nine ladies, who live in Oberlin, and, with the exception of the lady Principal, are none of them teachers in the college. To them the trustees of the institution have confided all questions touching the discipline, health, and general welfare of the girls. In doing this, they were, no doubt, actuated by the common-sense view, that women know best what women need, and that, therefore, a Board of Managers composed of experienced women and mothers would frame wiser laws for the government of girls than young tutors, or even gray-haired professors, with the best of intentions, could possibly enact.

To the women who have composed this Board, especially to those who were members during the early days of persecution, much of the success which has attended the experiment of co-education at Oberlin is due. The President of the Board, Mrs. M. P. Dascomb, has been identified with the interests of the institution almost from its founding, and was for seventeen years Principal of the Ladies' Department. A sketch of her life may be found in Lives of Eminent Women. But an impress of her life is left not only in the characters of the 620 women who have graduated, but in the thousands who have studied for a limited time at Oberlin. She is to-day as energetic, as enthusiastic, as untiring in her devotion to sound education as when we first knew her twenty-two years ago. Her elastic step has yet promise in it. Her cheerful outlook upon life has the quickening influence of a June sunshine after a May shower. Many in that last day will rise up and call her blessed.