Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/32

26 The deepest and truest ethical tendencies of the time emphasize not divisions of sex or creed or party, but the unity of social service. And this is social service not in the moralistic, goody-goody sense, but in the sense of actual social function. If men and women are to be fitted for life with this ideal in its broadest implication as a primary determinant of curriculum and method, then coeducation, judged either by its fruits or by its promise, and acknowledging frankly its defects, is unquestionably a hopeful system. When it shows itself clearly disastrous to the solidarity of the highest social interests, it will unquestionably be discarded. But it will not be discarded upon any purely doctrinaire considerations of sexual functions and capacities. Meantime each one of us in the last resort tests it all by his own social creed, and with most of us this is at bottom largely a matter of feeling and not a matter of carefully rationalized judgment, a reflection of our own training and surroundings and not a product of our purely logical processes. Complete agreement, therefore, upon the merits of coeducation is hardly to be looked for in the near future.