A MAN’S LEAVE-TAKING
When a man is saying good-by to a group of ladies, he should, on leaving the room, turn his back as little as possible.
CHAPTER XIII
COEDUCATION SOCIALLY CONSIDERED
THE idea of coeducation is a peculiarly American idea. Perhaps nowhere else in the world do such large bodies of young men and young women meet together for purposes of study and, at the same time, enjoy together such social freedom as is the case in the coeducational institutions of the United States. One may question the wisdom of the coeducational idea, but as to its popularity there can be no doubt. Coeducation is not only with us, but, if indications are correct, it has come to stay.
Its opponents say that men and women do not work together so well as apart, that the distraction of sex in coeducational institutions is such as to prevent both men and women from making the highest intellectual effort in their power. The advocates of the system contend that the contact of the sexes in school is a source of improvement to the manners of both, that it makes young men more courteous and young women less sentimental. The friends of the movement also say that men and women are stimulated to their best endeavor by the presence of the opposite sex; and that, as the masculine and the feminine intellects differ, one being complementary to the other, so men and women, studying together, gain a rounded conception of the subject in hand not possible otherwise.
THE SOCIAL AMENITIES
This article is not concerned with the pros and cons of the argument, only with the questions suggested by the freedom and facility with which young people meet one another in coeducational schools. It is easy to say that the usual social conventions should be observed, as of course they should; but it is not hard to see that the somewhat informal conditions under which young people meet in these institutions, make a strict adherence to the code a matter of difficulty. Eighteen is the average age at which young people enter college. They are scarcely men and women, yet they are too old for schoolboy and girl pranks, in which, however, they often feel tempted to indulge. Many young men and young women start to college without social experience. They may belong to good families whose essential ideals of conduct are stanch and fine, but to families in which hard work and financial stress have crowded out the knowledge and practise of social amenities. The youth of the students concerned, the inexperience of many, the variety in previous training and inheritance make the question of social relations much more complicated than it would be in the towns or cities from which the various students come and where each one belongs by custom and birth to a well-defined circle of friends.