No Sex in Education/Chapter 7

"Th' yoong men noo-a-deys, the're poor squashy things—the' looke well anoof, but the' woon't wear, the' woon't wear."—George Eliot.

AS I have said more than once, our systems of education are far from perfect. In the public schools there is too great a strain upon the physical and mental powers of the young pupil. The hours and the studies should both be fewer, even though this plan resulted in lengthening somewhat the number of years spent in elementary learning.

When we come to our female seminaries, we find them in almost all respects what they should not be. They are hot-houses for the premature development of human flowers. My ​strongest objection against them, however, is that girls lack in them the one element that in this important epoch of their lives they most need—the constant and familiar social intercourse of the other sex. A girl brought up in the cloister-like seclusion of the female seminary is not naturally developed in her sexual nature. She goes either to one extreme or to the other. She has neither mental nor moral balance in these matters. She fosters in her own mind romantic ideas of the other sex very far removed from the truth; and when she is at last released from the restraint of school, and meets that sex in society, she has neither correct standard nor gauge by which to measure it, and easily falls a victim to the designing villain or to the worthless fool.

The moral standard of these seminaries is hopelessly low, no matter how earnest and worthy may be the teachers. Within their walls solitary vice is alarmingly prevalent. It spreads from one pupil to another like a deadly contagion; the unnatural seclusion in which they are kept is the very atmosphere in which ​it thrives, and there is no counteracting influence felt from the beneficial presence of the other sex to bring the blush of shame to their cheeks and cause them to realize the enormity of their guilt.

I have never been to a man's college, but we all know what is the reputation of collegians for sobriety and morality. The same thing can probably be said in kind of the one as of the other, while undoubtedly the vices of the college outstrip those of the seminary in number and degree. The fact is that, in the developing of a perfect man or woman, the influence of the opposite sex is imperatively required—not a brief outside influence, touching at rare intervals, but a daily, constant one that shall be felt and recognized until it shall contribute to form the character. Dr. Clarke acknowledges this when he says:

"It is possible that many advantages might be obtained from the co-education of the sexes that would more than counterbalance the evils of crowding large numbers of them together."

He also quotes approvingly the testimony of ​President Magoun, of Iowa College, on this same point:

"Nothing needs to be said as to the control of the two sexes in the college. The young ladies are placed under the supervision of a lady principal and assistant as to deportment and everything besides recitations (in which they are under the supervision of the same professors and other teachers with the young men reciting with them); and one simple rule as to social intercourse governs everything. The moral and religious influences attending the arrangement have been most happy."

Dr. Clarke acknowledges:

"There is less or certainly no more danger in having the sexes unite at the repast of knowledge than, as Plautus bluntly puts it, having he-wits and she-wits recline at the repasts of fashion. Isolation is more likely to breed pruriency than commingling to provoke indulgence. The virtue of the cloister and the. cell scarcely deserves the name. A girl has her honor in her own keeping. If she can be trusted with boys and men at the lecture-room and in church, she can be trusted with them at school and in college. Jean Paul says: 'To ensure modesty, I would advise the education of the sexes together; for two boys will preserve twelve girls or two girls twelve boys inno​cent, amidst winks, jokes and improprieties, merely by that instinctive sense which is the forerunner of matured modesty. But I will guarantee nothing in a school where girls are alone together, and still less where boys are.' A certain amount of juxtaposition is an advantage to each sex."

Still, Dr. Clarke thinks there is danger of going too far in this matter of freedom of intercourse between the sexes. However, I think nature may safely be trusted. She has set boys and girls in families and put no fence between them; and I think if they have prudent counselors and guardians, and, more than this, are taught to rely upon their own honor and virtue, there is less danger than under the present social and educational arrangements, by which boys and girls are put in separate pens, while they jump out whenever opportunity offers, to the scandal of the onlookers.

There is one thing which Dr. Clarke does not over-estimate—the advantages to both girl and boy to be derived from studying together; only he happens to call it a disadvantage:

"Put a boy and girl together upon the same course ​of study, with the same lofty ideal before them, and hold up to their eyes the daily incitements of comparative progress, and there will be awakened within them a stimulus unknown before, and that separate study does not excite. The unconscious fires that have their seat deep down in the recesses of the sexual organization will flame up through every tissue, permeate every vessel, burn every nerve, flash from the eye, tingle in the brain, and work the whole machine at highest pressure. There need not be, and generally will not be, any low or sensual desire in all this elemental action."

He thinks this fire is kept alive by the waste of the system; but if it is, it is because nature intended just such waste, and is perfectly capable of supplying it. It is one of the uses she had in view when she implanted the passional nature in male and female, and a use just as honorable and just as legitimate as any to which it can be put. This use of the passional nature brings a glow and impetus of life which is followed by no depressing reaction; its remembrance is fraught with perpetual pleasure, and never tinges the cheek with shame. Begging the author's pardon, experience does not show ​that a normally developed person of either sex ever suffers in this stimulus. It is what boys and girls alike need. Its absence accounts for the frivolity and low intellectual tone of most female institutions of learning, and the still more baneful frivolity and low moral tone of boys'.

Dr. Clarke says the experiment of co-education has failed wherever tried. The professors and students who have been personally concerned in the experiment say it has not. Who knows best? He quotes a gentleman who has given attention to the subject as saying, "The co-education of the sexes is intellectually a success, physically a failure." So, if that be true, it is only half a failure, after all; and that element of failure must have entered into the result for no other reason than that, while the girls conformed to the intellectual regimen prescribed to the boys, they failed to practice the physical regimen also. It was a success just so far as the education was identical; when a difference of physical life was allowed to distinguish the sexes, it proved a failure. It was be​cause the co-education was not identical in all respects, because in some things girls are still regarded as girls and future "ladies"—that is to say, as something quite different from human beings as a species. When we find a school conducted, in respect to dress, diet, fresh air, exercise, etc., on strictly hygienic principles, or, not requiring so much as that, when girls are as free from sins against health as their male fellow-students, I am positive the sexual system will need no special looking after by a special system of education, but may be left to take care of itself. At the same time, the young men will have to look well to their laurels.

I am not speaking merely from theory in this matter of feminine power of continued application and endurance. I have yet to see the man who could equal some women I know in constant, deep, prolonged and unremitting (except by the regular daily rest and exercise) mental labor, often being freighted at the same time with the cares and the physical disabilities of maternity, or prospective maternity, and come ​out of the ordeal as fresh, and as ready and eager to renew it, as when they began.

No doubt the curriculum of our schools and colleges needs some modification before it is just suited to the requirements of girls. But if this modification is ever made, I will venture to hazard the statement that it will be found equally improved for young men. There should be no incentive to over-study by either sex; and if the hours daily spent in class- and lecture-rooms were somewhat curtailed, it would no doubt work advantageously to both sexes alike.