Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/18

12 with strictly educational questions, and in part with general social considerations, differ in a somewhat suggestive manner as concerns one particular from those which were most commonly encountered in the early days of coeducation. The most frequent probably of all criticisms was the hygienic one. Although it was a matter of prehistoric knowledge that women could work all day in the field, many learned persons predicted a speedy decline for the audacious young female who attempted to follow the same collegiate course as her brother. The young person referred to has, however, both in coeducational colleges and in colleges for women, generally insisted on the retention of oppressively good health. And she has done even worse things to discredit the general calling of prophet by discovering numbers of educated men who were willing and eager to attempt matrimony with her assistance. Worst of all, when she has married, she has had a normal number of vigorous children. The irreconcilables on these points generally deny themselves the luxury of the available statistics. This is by no means to call in question the possibility held out to an injudicious girl of ruining her health by social and mental dissipation at a coeducational college. She can in this way undoubtedly emulate some of her sisters at women's colleges and certain of her brothers at men's universities.

But the intelligent contemporary opponent of coeducation has largely lost interest in the health of college women, and he has of late more often turned his attention to the baleful influence of the sex on social and intellectual standards. It is maintained, for instance, by an occasional instructor that women lower the level of scholarship in his classes. He finds it impossible to make such rigorous exactions of them as he would of men, and in consequence the whole tone of his class is contaminated. There seems reason to believe that this opinion is largely subjective in its basis, and it is suggestively rare on the lips of instructors educated in coeducational institutions. The instructor may have allowed himself to secure from his classes what he deemed the best work by the aid of a class room manner which he properly considers incompatible with the presence of ladies. In such cases one may fairly question the propriety of the pedagogical method. He may cherish a purely sentimental attitude toward women. This is a not infrequent circumstance in the case of young men brought up in men's colleges, and exposed for the first time to the ravages of coeducation. In this case time or matrimony or both are likely to cure his complaint. Certainly there are plenty of instructors who have taught in men's colleges without detecting any such decline of standard upon transferring the scene of their labors to coeducational institutions. Indeed, a contrary opinion has been not infrequently expressed, and one even hears the antithetical argument soberly advanced that women inevitably