We here see the educational system, at its college academic level, moving not simply toward preparing girls for money-earning work but also toward actually putting them into that work and, in order to put them into it, finding it.
This last innovation, this advising of graduates with regard to the occupational world and this guiding of them into the occupations for which they are best fitted, will bring education closer to the ultimate needs of those who are being educated than any other innovation of recent years. It will establish the final permanent contact between two isolations,—the isolation of aimless learning and the isolation of ignorant doing. It is still, however, a project, a prospect. The other two innovations which we have mentioned press closer to immediacy. Immediate, certainly, is the demand of “middle class” women for larger occupational opportunities. And almost immediate is the success of the demand that the school system shall fit them to the use of those opportunities.
In a small Illinois city there is a woman’s college, founded as a preparatory school in the forties and soon advanced to be a seminary, which, with Anna P. Sill for its first head, Jane Addams for its best-known graduate, and Julia Gulliver for its present president, has come to be a college of standing and of leading. Only Troy Female Seminary and Mount Holyoke 82 Seminary preceded it, in date of foundation, among the important women’s institutions.
Rockford College is ranked to-day, by the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education, in rank one—among the sixteen best women’s colleges in the United States. It hasn’t risen to that rank by any quick, money-spurred spurt. It brings with it out of its far past all the traditions of that early struggle for the higher education which, by friction, kindled among women so flaming an enthusiasm for pure knowledge. It remains “collegiate” in the old sense, quiet, cloistral, inhabiting old-fashioned brick buildings in an old-fashioned large yard, looking still like the Illinois of war times more than like the Illinois of the twentieth century, retaining all the home ideals of those times—a large interest in feminine accomplishments, a strict regard for manners, a belief in the value of charm.
But here, in this quiet, non-metropolitan college, so really “academic,” so really—in the oldest-fashioned ways—“cultural,” here is a two-year course in Secretarial Studies.
ROCKFORD COLLEGE, IN ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS. IN ITS OLD-FASHIONED BUILDINGS, WHICH PRESERVE THE SPIRIT OF THE ACADEMIC LIFE OF THE OLD DAYS, THERE IS NOW A VERY MODERN DEPARTMENT OF SECRETARIAL STUDIES.
It is the first time (within our knowledge) 83 that such a thing has happened in any of the old first-rank women’s colleges.