Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/42

32 a man to become a distinguished engineer or a professor of Latin by studying a little literature, history, music, and language; yet we expect a woman to undertake an occupation for which, in this age at least, a certain definite kind of training is necessary, without anything more applicable than "general culture,"

The want of co-ordination between training and the needs of life in the education of women has repeatedly brought into question the desirability of the higher education at all for a woman who is to return to the home. As a result, there is a distinct tendency to demand a differentiation in the education of women. The recent proposal of a new type of woman's college is, in fact, a demand for a separate technical school in which there shall be a liberal scientific training with special reference to their domestic occupations and functions.

This is, however, not a new idea. In all those State colleges in which agriculture and the mechanic arts are taught a similar problem and a like solution were presented. The farmers demanded that the agricultural colleges teach how to plow, sow, and reap, rather than how to think; as a result, many of these institutions are to-day little more than high schools, with manual training added. In others it was perceived that, to make a successful farmer or engineer, a man must have the power to think clearly, accurately, effectively on any subject. The best agricultural colleges give little beyond what may be called laboratory demonstrations in field and barn, while the most progressive engineering schools no longer attempt to turn out skilled mechanics. Teachers of these subjects prophesy the complete elimination of shop work and practical farm operations from university courses, and their relegation to the position of entrance requirements.

Shall, then, the woman's college be a technical school, where she may learn all the practical details of housekeeping and sanitary science? It is the same problem, and must also be answered in the negative. Technical schools, wherever outside the university atmosphere, show a fatal lack of breadth. Physicians with only the training of the medical school, engineers with na ideas beyond their own specialty, farmers who despise pure science, housewives who are only perfect housekeepers, are the inevitable product of a purely technical education.

While such propositions as this are being widely discussed, the true solution is coming by a natural process. Within the boundaries of the new universities a few courses are offered to meet the specific needs of women's occupations. What women need is not to know how to cook, and wash, and lay a table, but how to think out clearly, accurately, and effectively any problem