Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/28

22 to emphasize the truth of this assertion. This fact is still further brought out by the observation that the hostility to the system is greatest in those institutions which are most intimately in contact with older ideals. If one follows the history of the development of the system, one is impressed with the fact that in its inception anyhow the movement possessed the true spirit of robust frontier democracy. It originated in the democratic impulse to give women the highest educational opportunities and to test their fitness for such opportunities by the use made of them, and not by à priori notions of the sexually appropriate. Its typical virtues are earnestness, honesty and vigor. It is frequently crude, but it is rarely shallow. It is often obtuse, but it is seldom perverse. It springs from a deep-seated social conviction that men and women are in the first instance human beings, and only secondarily devices for continuing the race. It involves in practice, whatever the theory, a vital scepticism concerning the sexuality of intellect, a position which finds interesting though generally unintentional confirmation in the curricula of women's colleges and annexes. Even under the guidance of learned men and women, it does not seem to have proven possible to better materially the curricula of the men's colleges, to which even the extremest variants are now approximated. Individual preference operating under a liberal elective system has almost everywhere displaced curricula developed under preconceived notions of the sexually fit. Upon the catholic range of these feminine preferences, we have already commented.

Coeducation assumes that if, as is apparently the case, men and women are to be thrown into increasingly intimate contact in relations that do not involve reference to sex, it is desirable that the formal educational process, so often falsely severed from the rest of life, should recognize this fact by bringing boys and girls into contact with one another all their lives.

Like all other influences making for the higher education of women, coeducation is necessarily opposed to the view that woman's only function is maternity, and that her only proper attainments are either of a domestic or sexual character. The condition of women in continental and oriental countries in which this view of woman has prevailed, and the social consequences which have sprung from it, leave no question in the western mind as to the preferable extreme, if one must have an extreme in this matter. On the other hand, the advocates of coeducation regard maternity as a function for which no education is too high nor too broad.

When one brings to bear upon coeducation standards that can fairly be considered intrinsic to it, one can but admit that in the past anyhow its operation has been remarkably successful. The register of