This goes back to the fountainhead of the higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was running her school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was training young women to TEACH, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school in the United States.
From that time to this most college women have taught school before getting married. The higher education of women has been, in economic effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher.
But isn't it the purpose of the colleges to avoid training their pupils for specific occupations? Isn't it their purpose to give their pupils discipline and culture, pure and broad, unaffected by commercial intention? Isn't that what colleges are, and ought to be, for?
On the shore of this vast and violent controversy we discreetly pause and stealthily sidle off, taking note of just three reefs of solid fact which unsubmergably jut out above the surface of the raging waters.
First. The colleges instruct their pupils in the subjects which those pupils subsequently teach.
Second. The pupils specialize in the subjects which they are going to teach.
Third. The colleges, besides providing the future teachers with subjects, almost always offer to provide them with instruction in the principles of education, and frequently offer to provide them with instruction in the very technique of classroom work.
Our verdict, therefore, which we hope will be satisfactory to counsel on both sides, is that the college is by no means a trade school, but that if the woman who is going to earn her living will choose the one trade of teaching, she can almost always get a pretty fair trade training by going to college.
We are more interested in observing that the amount of trade training which a teacher is expected to take is increasing year by year. In teaching, as in other trades, the period and scope of preliminary preparation continue to expand.
In the last calendar of Bryn Mawr College, the Department of Education, in announcing its courses, makes the following common-sense remarks: