Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/109

Rh doing poor work in poor ways. It is true that most of these are coeducational. It is also true that the great majority of their students are not of college grade at all. In such schools low standards rule, both as to scholarship and as to manners. The student fresh from the country, with no preparatory training, will bring the manners of his heme. These are not always good manners, as manners are judged. But none of these defects is derived from coeducation; nor are any of these conditions made worse by it.

Very lately it is urged against coeducation that its social demands cause too much strain both on young men and young women. College men and college women, being mutually attractive, there are developed too many receptions, dances and other functions in which they enjoy each other's company. But this is a matter easily regulated. Furthermore, at the most the average young woman in college spends in social matters less than one tenth the time she would spend at home. With the young man the whole matter represents the difference between highclass and low-class associates and associations. When college men stand in normal relation with college women, meeting them in society as well as in the class room, there is distinctly less of drunkenness, rowdyism and vice than obtains under other conditions. And no harm comes to the young woman through the good influence she exerts. To meet freely the best young men she will ever know, the wisest, cleanest and strongest, can surely do no harm to a young woman. Nor will the association with the brightest and sanest young women of the land work any harm to the young men. This we must always recognize. The best young men and the best young women, all things considered, are in our colleges. And this has been and will always be the case.

It is true that coeducation is often attempted under very adverse conditions. Conditions are adverse when the little girls of preparatory schools and schools of music are mingled with the college students and given the same freedom. This is wrong, whatever the kind of discipline offered, lax or strict; the two classes need a different sort of treatment.

When young women have no residence devoted to their use, and are forced to rent parlors and garrets in private houses of an unsympathetic village, evil results sometimes arise. Not very often to be sure, but still once in a while. These are not to be charged to coeducation but to the unfit conditions which make the pursuit of personal culture difficult or impossible. Women are more readily affected by surroundings than men are, and squalid, ill-regulated, Bohemian conditions should not be part of their higher education.

Another condition very common and very undesirable is that in which young women live at home and traverse a city twice each day