Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/30

24 Turning to the present and the future, and applying standards properly applicable to the coeducational system, it must be admitted that on the instructional side only one difficulty of serious import appears to exist. This is the tendency toward sex segregation in certain courses of which we have already spoken at length. The most unequivocal advantages of coeducation spring from the fact of joint instruction, and any influences which tend to preclude this are unfortunate. For the various other alleged shortcomings of the system on this side, there is no conclusive evidence and opinion is hopelessly diverse. Furthermore, the criticisms which are advanced, so far as they are capable of satisfactory proof, concern the merely incidental and obviously remediable excrescences of the system, and not its fundamental principles. On the other hand there is almost complete unanimity of opinion regarding the difficulties actual and possible on the social side of coeducational college life.

This fact itself is altogether significant—essential unanimity of opinion regarding one class of difficulties, with radical and complicated differences regarding the other class.

It does not seem chimerical to hope that the first difficulty may at an early date in large measure take care of itself without artificial assistance. Despite the common assertion of the educational rhapsodists that women's native tastes are all in emotional and esthetic lines, even her religious bent included, a study of the elections made by women in the courses of both coeducational and women's colleges suggests, as we have already seen, a much more equitable and catholic distribution of her interests. As wider academic and professional fields open to women, and as the number of women increase who are not obliged to conform their collegiate work to immediate bread and butter interests, there will certainly be a less proportion of them found in the literary courses than at present. And on the other hand, as regards the men, there seems some reason to believe that we may see a reaction from the present extreme tendency to cater to a purely technical preparation for professional life. Certainly it is hard to believe that in the long run the racial confidence in the value of the humanities, shown by educational history, should not secure wider recognition than it often does at present from some of the builders of required curricula for the professions. It seems not improbable, too, that the reconstruction of the work of professional preparation both in school and college with its tendency toward a shortening of the collegiate course, will be accompanied by a disposition to include more of literature in the early part of the training than is now the case. And, as in the case of women just mentioned, there will unquestionably be an increasing number of men in coeducational institutions whose means will