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I always thought it wasn't such an objectionable feature, in the coeducational system, if the young people did get acquainted under it, and maybe so well acquainted that they didn't want to part enemies in the end. I said to my wife that I didn't see how, if a girl was going to get married, she could have a better basis than knowing the fellow through three or four years' hard work together.
Would not work, even at a coeducational college with a real degree in prospect, be rather flat without her friend the enemy? The next morning at breakfast it suddenly struck Anne that Matthew was not looking well. Surely he was much grayer than he had been a year before. "Marilla," she said hesitatingly when he had gone out, "is Matthew quite well?"
The responsibility for decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility." The character of college work has not been lowered but raised by coeducation, despite the fact that most of the new, small, weak colleges are coeducational.
We might have known when we let her go to a coeducational college that we were taking a risk of losing her; but we lost our other daughter that way, and SHE never went to ANY kind of college. I guess we counted the chances before we let her go. What's the use?
I spent three years in the graduate school of Chicago, where coeducational girls were as thick as autumn leaves, and some thicker. And as a college professor at McGill University in Montreal, I have taught mingled classes of men and women for twenty years. On the basis of which experience I say with assurance that the thing is a mistake and has nothing to recommend it but its relative cheapness.
For to-day the candle is free and the college is free and the student has a "Union" like the profiteer's club and a swimming-bath and a Drama League and a coeducational society at his elbow for which he buys Beauty Roses at five dollars a bunch. Or turn if one will to the moral side. The older way of being good was by much prayer and much effort of one's own soul.
Always the limited educational opportunities offered to women were pointed out, and Oberlin College and Antioch, both coeducational, were held up as patterns for the future. Resolutions were passed, demanding that Harvard and Yale admit women. Women's low wages and the very few occupations open to them were considered, and whether it was fitting for women to be doctors and ministers.
I fear, however, the change was anything but a success. The life of the big coeducational school did not appeal to him at all and, in spite of two or three friendships he made among the girls and boys, he depended for amusement almost wholly on his own resources. In the afternoons and on holidays he took long walks over the country roads and in search of adventure visited many farmhouses.
I realize the difficulty of applying this rule in many high schools where the foundations of sex-education are well laid on the biological basis. There is no reason why the biological studies should not be coeducational through nature-study and biology as far as the development of frogs and birds and, in a general way, of mammals.
One most important fact has come out of our great coeducational experiment: The college cannot entirely rub feminity out and masculinity into a woman's brain. The woman's mind is still the woman's mind, although she is usually the last to recognize it. It is another proof of the eternal fact that Nature looks after her own good works!
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