In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a humanistic and liberal education and have refrained from all details and special curriculization. Many of the above features I believe would be as helpful for boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational institutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal institutions, however, for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly divergent.
As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the predominance of the heart over the mere intellect, I believe myself not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and more passionately in love with woman as I conceive she came from the hand of God. I keenly envy my Catholic friends their Maryolatry. Who ever asked if the Holy Mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the astronomy of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or Babylonian, or even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and who has ever thought of caring? We can not conceive that she bemoaned any limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic, nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and intuition than man. The glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or millionaire.
But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing in the growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and places than one, is in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is coming to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, methods, and ideals, until her original divinity may become obscured. But, if our worship at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should have no resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that she will ere long evolve a sphere of life and even education which fits her needs as well as, if not better than those of man fit his.
Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can turn with unabated faith to the eternally childish, the best of which in each are so closely related. The oracles of infancy and childhood will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coördinate by our logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation and a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures, we have now at least one source to which we can turn—we have found the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the undiscovered pole of human destiny. We know what can and will ultimately coördinate in the generic, which is larger than the logical order, all that is worth knowing, teaching, or doing by the best methods, that will save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of premature and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and line of normal development in the child in our midst that must henceforth ever lead us which epitomizes in its development all the stages, human and prehuman; that is the proper object of all that strange new love of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophisticated in human nature. The heart and soul of growing childhood is the criterion by which we judge the larger heart and soul of mature womanhood; and these are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new education which is to be, when the school becomes what Melanchthon said it must be—a true workshop of the Holy Ghost—and what the new psychology, when it rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the true paradise of restored intuitive human nature.
[Footnote 1: David Starr Jordan: The Higher Education of Women.
Popular Science Monthly, December, 1902, vol. 62, pp. 97-107. See also
my article on this subject in Munsey's Magazine, February, 1906, and
President Jordan's reply in the March number, 1906.]
[Footnote 2: Coeducation. A series of essays by various authors, edited by Alice Woods, with an introduction by M.E. Sadler. Longmans, Green and Co., London 1903, p. 148 et seq.]
[Footnote 3: The Evolution of Ideals. W.G. Chambers, Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 101-143. Also, B.E. Warner: The
Young Woman in Modern Life. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1903, p. 218.]
[Footnote 4: The Psychology of Woman. Translated by G.A. Etchison.
Richards, London, 1899.]
[Footnote 5: Physical Development of Women and Children. By Miss M.E.
Allen. American Association for Physical Education., April, 1890.]
[Footnote 6: A Review of the Higher Education of Women. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp 25-40. See also G. von Bunge: Die zunehmende Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. München Reinhardt, 1903, 3d ed. Also President Harper's Decennial Report, pp. xciv-cxi.]