College training for women

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. What the College can do . . i

II. The Preparation 31

Chapter I. What The College Can Do

IT does not seem to matter how many times we have found out by past experience that any way of life, any theory carried out into action, any social institution adopted into practice, has both its advantages and its disadvantages, its harms and its helps also for society in general; that the good has never been so good as to make the world completely over; that the bad has never been so z bad but that humanity has contrived to struggle along under it somehow — when we look to the future, we are prone to see in any new scheme or plan all the concentrated and absolute good or evil that has never, in the history of the human race, been embodied in any one institution. It will regenerate the world, to our thinking, or else it will send it to ruin. Little by little, experience of the new plan of life reveals its limitations and imperfections both of good and evil ; we cease to hope so much from it, or to entertain such fears concerning it, and the institution is seen for what it really is, — a centre of certain definite lines of influence, more or less effective in their operation, and more or less restricted in their scope.

To this latter stage of exact and unemotional comprehension, general thought about the collegiate training of women has not altogether arrived. We are still largely in the period of extravagant expectation of comprehensive good or evil. The fear is often expressed that the college woman, as a result of her college experiences, will lose her health, her womanly charm, her chance of matrimony, her possibilities of motherhood, her taste for domestic life, her interest in her home and in her home-friends ; that society will, in consequence of any considerable spread of collegiate education among women, be reduced to an unrelated, unattached assemblage of selfcentred and self-conscious celibates. On the other hand, the most comprehensive demands are made upon the supposedly exhaustless treasure we expect the college woman to have laid up in the four short years of her college life. She is supposed to be stored, not only with all manner of learning, so that any problem of any nature may be solved by her at any casual presentation of it, but she is required to show a power of invention and original production, to exhale a fine aroma of culture, to present a finished manner and bearing, to be heard in wellmodulated accents and delicately chosen words, to make an agreeable and artistic appearance in dress, and to evidence an all-around and harmonious physical development.

By this time, however, the college for women has been so long at work that we can perhaps avoid disappointment by looking at it closely in its actual concrete conditions, to see just what it does and can do, and just what it does not and cannot do.

In the first place, we may expect the college to open to the student the great stores of information collected by the human race in its long journey out of the past. Of late a wholesome reaction has taken place against the idea that the imparting of fact is the only business of teaching; but this reaction has now gone so far that there is danger of our forgetting how indispensable, after all, is a sure and easy command of mere brute fact in the endeavor to deal with most problems. The thinker can have his effect in the world about him only by taking account of what is really there; he can have effect upon the minds of the people in it only by taking account of what their minds contain. In old times the accessible stock of information about the concrete facts of life and the world was so small that any thinker who exercised his mind on its problems not only could, but was compelled to, present a large proportion of theory to a small proportion of definitely known truth ; by to-day, however, so vast a bulk of fact has been gathered, and is so generally accessible, that to build theory upon the slender foundations allowable in those older times will brand the thinker as a sciolist and a pretender. The college, then, if it wants to influence life and thought through its graduate, must teach facts, and more persistently and insistently than ever.

It must, besides, teach some principles of selection and arrangement to make those resources of fact available. The more the student has to take into her mind, the more necessary it is that she should stow it away in good order, so that she can know what is there, and what it is good for. The college should teach her to relate her acquirements to certain leading lines of thought, around which they may cluster naturally, and hold together by the force of their relation. It should teach her to separate the important from the unimportant in that relation, the relevant from the irrelevant ; that which typifies, explains, or illustrates from that which is not so typical or explanatory ; that which forms one link in a continuous chain of development, either logical or concrete, from that which is presented without its cause on the one hand and its effect on the other.

Facts and a method, — the matter and form of knowledge, — the acquirement of these is the result that the college aims at directly and ostensibly. For this it plans in its curriculum ; the steps to this can be set down in black and white in its catalogue.

There are, besides, certain indirect results of the college discipline brought about by the circumstances under which the direct and intended results are produced that are less definitely noticed, and perhaps even more worthy of attention, — "by-products " of the educational process, so to speak, which, like the "by-products" of certain mechanical and chemical processes, may turn out to be of as much if not of more value than the main product itself.

Such "by-products" are especially manifested in those elements of feeling rather than of thought, of taste rather than of intellectual discrimination, that go to make up that elusively indefinite complex we know as personal character. The student leaves college not only with certain definite intellectual traits established, but with certain ways of looking at things, and of bearing herself in relation to them. An intricate network of preferences and dislikes, ideals, notions, fancies, prejudices, perhaps, has formed itself in her mind, and will determine largely the uses and availability of her mental equipment. How is this network woven ?

Chief among the influences formative of personal character is the personal character of others. Within the college walls, whatever relations the student may have besides with the outside world, she is under three sets of influences, — that of the teaching body, that of the governing body, and that of the student body as a whole. The college instructor may teach directly, in set lesson, facts and a method ; he teaches indirectly, in every word he says, in every look and act, the elements of his own character. One will come before his class a daily lesson in vanity, unworthy emulation, showiness, envy, and jealousy ; another will give indirect, but none the less effective, instruction in the arts of the tyrant, — browbeating, bullying, and sarcasm ; another will display carelessness of duty, and carry out in practice the principle that the mercenary motive is the strongly constraining one; another will evidence in his own

FOR WOMEN. I I

person the power of the flesh ; still another will teach by his presence an unwearied enthusiasm in pursuit of the best, a noble largeness of sympathy and purity of motive, and that disinterested devotion to truth and to humanity which is the crown of the scholar's life.

Perhaps the most interesting of the influences at work upon the student is that of the student body of which she forms a part. This influence has always been vaguely recognized. It has been remarked many a time that the college boy learns more from his fellows than from his teachers; but little definite thought has been given to find out just what that influence is, how far it extends, what, exactly, are the lessons it tries to teach, and what means it employs to teach them. We are now learning to think of a social group as a collective person, with thoughts and feelings of its own, and to believe that from it is developed the individual person — a result, not a cause, of the social personality. The group is the originally active power ; the individual is the result: the group character is not formed by adding together the individual characters of its members ; those individual characters are formed by contact with the group character. The student body of a college is one of those " social persons ;" and it is interesting to watch in it the same formative process going on that was at work in the beginning to establish our human traits, and has been at work ever since, in some way or other, to shape them.

A complete study of the student-group as a sociological force has not yet been made ; certain leading traits are, however, obvious. There is a curious interest attaching to the study of this group from the fact that it parallels in many features the primitive group of human society in general. Just as in the development of the physical organism the human creature in its successive embryonic and infantile forms shows the stages traversed by the succession of species in their struggle upward to man, so the group formed of the young of the race reproduces the traits manifested in the group of the young race. The first notable characteristic common to the college-group and primitive society is the great relative control of the whole over the parts. In both the group dominates the individual with tyrannical sway; in neither is the individual developed so far as to be able to stand upon his own character and judgment. Every one knows how susceptible the young are to opinion; the criticism, ridicule, or approval of their kind seems about the only influences they are really and deeply touched by. Ethnology teaches how strong a trait in primitive races is their abasement before the same impalpable force. The girl going to college finds that she must conform closely to certain well understood rules of manners and morals ; the primitive tribesman is born into a society governed by an elaborate code, which neither he nor any one else would think it proper to disobey or change. Another obvious trait of the college-personality also common to primitive man is that its code has more to do with manners than morals, with acts than thoughts, with rites and ceremonies than with intentions and motives. The " college-spirit " prescribes certain ways of behavior, speech, and dress as fitting or the reverse, and shapes the outer man or woman into conformity with its own type.

Like primitive man, too, the college personality lays down an unwritten code of tradition and custom, rather than a written code of rule and regulation. The young are commonly thought of as the arch-radicals of nature, the born destroyers of all rule and law. It is, however, largely their very subservience to a rule of law, unformulated, unwritten, the existence of which is therefore largely unsuspected, but none the less real, that makes them break the formulated, written law of adult life when, as so often happens, it runs counter to their own. So it can occur that in the college the student often appears as the natural enemy of all set rule and regulation, while she is really influenced in every act of her daily life by the stringent law of the " college-spirit," which acts, not by definitely prescribed punishment or reward for a definite act, but by an equally effective process of suppression or encouragement, carried on by the subtle suggestion of look, tone, and general attitude on the part of the group.

The lessons that the college-group teaches are, in the main, wholesome ones. In the first place, by its own intolerance, it opens the way to tolerance and a wider view of things on the part of its individual member. Its first work, preparatory to teaching its own special lessons, is to crack the shell of personal prejudice and local peculiarity, showing the student that her standard is not that absolute canon of truth and propriety she may have thought it. It frowns upon eccentricity, and a desire to make one's self conspicuous. It shows its member that within the grouplimits are other individuals of other personal and local traits than her own, whom the group values quite as highly as it does her. Social and local distinctions being thus made subordinate to the one purpose of constraining conformity to a "college-type," the individual may learn to think of them as relative and transitory in other relations, and will begin to recognize and value the fundamental traits of our common humanity in their persistence and force.

Having cleared the ground of all obstacles of individual peculiarity, the group proceeds to its own positive lessons. It teaches its member not to put her own private interest above the interests of the group. She is not allowed to ignore its calls ; she is made ashamed of preferring her own ease to its benefit. In all her comings and goings, in all her acts and words, she must have regard to the dignity and decorum of the group as represented in her person ; she must preserve its honor untarnished, whatever her own private temptations or occasions to do otherwise. Thus is encouraged a spirit of devotion to a common cause, and a forgetfulness of self, that are most wholesome elements in the matured character.

It indirectly inculcates courtesy and respect for the feelings of others ; no one member of the group may be allowed to assert herself unpleasantly against the others, although, as expressing group feeling and opinion, she may be alarmingly frank and direct in reproof and criticism. In general it discountenances sham, and respects and admires the genuine and real ; but, since it is human, it is not always infallible in detecting the one and the other. It tends to elevate the standard of appearance, behavior, and manner, from the fact that it lays down as a type, not the traits actually shown in its members, but those that it likes and fancies. The crowd, as a crowd, is quick to condemn in any one of its members an act, a manner, a way of speech, that any other member, singly, might be not at all disinclined to manifest in her own person.

The strong character will develop a greater and more assured strength in its contact with the college-group, since it must justify its own worthiness to exist at every step of the way ; the weak character will find itself benefited by its endeavor to conform to the college-type, which is somewhat above the level of the average girl, since it expresses, not the sum of actual traits and characters of the individuals making up the group, but the group-ideal.

While the group is thus powerful in its influence over the individual member, it is itself subject to influence. The leading traits above indicated characterize it pretty constantly, because the college-group, wherever and however situated, is a group of the young ; yet in the details of its character it is modified by the character of its elements and the nature of its surroundings. Each separate college-group has its own distinctive personal traits, due to its own peculiar position and circumstances. The personality of the Western college-group differs from that of the Eastern, that of the Northern from that of the Southern ; its physiognomy is different in the coeducational college from what it is in the college for women only. The college-group in the town will be more careful of the small proprieties of life than the college-group in the country ; the college-group housed in dormitories will exercise more control over its members than the college-group that is dispersed every night.

The individual member, although under the sway of the group, influences it in turn. If one could decide what characteristics or qualities make the leader in the college-group, one could perhaps penetrate the secret of the demagogue, the popular orator, or the "magnetic" politician. The "popular girl" often has much to do in giving the last formative touches to the distinctive social type dominant in the college at the moment ; but what is it that makes her the " popular girl ? " She will naturally, to greater or less extent, express in her own person that unformulated ideal of the group, the characteristics of which we have just been trying to outline ; but added to this is some trick of personality, some idiosyncrasy, that catches the group fancy, and sets them all to admiring, imitating, and following. Not often, but occasionally, the group is influenced, not through its taste and feelings, but through its reason, by some member in it of strong mind and determination. In general, however, the group can be led by its member but a very little way, and that only by one that has already a strong hold on its feelings and preferences.

Another influence that goes to mould the group-character is the governing body of the college, and this is a powerful one ; for it is theirs to determine the outer conditions in which the group is to work, and it is also theirs to come even more closely into relation with the group-life. By "governing body" is not meant necessarily the legally constituted and nominal guides and directors of the institution, but the real centre of power, whether board of trustees, committee of the faculty, dean of a school, or president, — the source from which comes all actual direction of college affairs, and to which must be referred all real responsibility for their management. They have it largely in their power to give the tone, the form, and the direction to the college-spirit, and thus to enter into one of the strongest influences in the college. They can to a great extent determine whether the college-ideal shall be comparatively low or comparatively high, whether the natural proneness of the young group to the outward and visible shall be encouraged to its highest pitch, whether its natural taste for rite and ceremony and the proprieties shall altogether outweigh its equally natural feeling for the real and true and genuine beneath all outward forms. Their influence upon the student as an individual may be also great. They can set the seal of approval upon a mechanical scholarship, a tricky method, and a material success, or upon the living power of the mind, the straightest integrity in all dealings, and a success that cannot be measured by "marks," "grades," or fellowships.

In summing up the results of the college discipline, we may say that we look to the college to give its students, by direct teaching, some command of fact and some idea of a method. It teaches indirectly a more or less perfect code of morals and manners, different from that taught in the community in some respects, and in some respects better and higher.

There is much besides that the college does not and cannot do, that is, nevertheless, expected of it. A common demand is, that the college shall implant by direct teaching what it now teaches indirectly. Proposals have been made from time to time that the colleges should establish chairs of manners, chairs of moral advice, chairs of preparation for wifehood and motherhood, chairs of instruction in dress, in polite letter-writing, and so on. The demand is unreasonable, since human nature will never be taught those things in that way. Manners and morals are not matters of definition and command, but of assimilation and imitation.

One of our unfounded expectations from the wide diffusion of college training is of a great and general increase in originative mental power. Under the proper discipline any given individual will find himself acquiring more complete possession and use of the powers with which nature endowed him at birth ; but experience seems to show that no amount of training can add to that original stock. It is a common complaint that with the increase in attendance at our woman's colleges, there is no corresponding increase in original mental product. The same may be said of the college for men. Mankind seems to be pretty constantly divided into the relatively small class of the inventive-minded, the relatively great class of the adoptiveor imitative-minded, while below both is a deficient class, which must always be smaller than the two upper classes if society is to hold together, which will not or cannot either imitate or invent. It is the first class that produces great and original work for the delight and instruction of mankind ; and unfortunately its limits are so narrow that any considerable extension of educational opportunities is sure to pass far beyond them. It is the inevitable result, then, that original production falls proportionately behind the spread of education. The good, however, done by education is none the less real. The college may never make genius out of mediocrity; but it is no small nor worthless achievement to enable mediocrity to appreciate and make use of the fruits of genius.

Another unfounded expectation is, that the college can turn out a uniform product in its graduates, notwithstanding the differences and deficiencies in home and school training. The college graduate is supposed by the community to be possessed of a definite amount of learning and culture by the mere fact of passing four years under college training. The college graduate is in reality the product of two sets of forces, — the character and acquirements she comes to the college with on the one hand, and the influences of the college-life on the other : each is equally determinate of the product. If habits of indolence, selfishness, intolerance, and narrowness of view have been encouraged at home, the influences of college-life have just so much the more to contend against; if the home and the immediate surroundings have failed to give the student the beginnings of acquaintance with the fine, the beautiful, and the liberal in life, the college has just so much the more to supply. If the student comes ill-trained and untrained from the preparatory school, other conditions being equal, the college cannot do so much for her as for her well-trained classmate.

Great as the influence of the college is, it cannot do everything. It cannot, apparently, add to the brain capital of the individual ; it can only help to a better use of it. It cannot supply everything left unprovided by home and school ; it can only begin where they leave off, and go as far as time will allow it in erecting its structure. It cannot create character out and out by rule and precept ; it can only form and guide it by spirit and example.

Chapter II. The Preparation

AS the mental and moral outfit a stu- -t~V- dent possesses when she enters the college has so much to do with her after success there, it will be found as desirable to make provision for suitable preparatory training as to secure for the student the advantages and opportunities of the college itself. A fruitful subject of discussion is the outer form and method of that preparation, — how many subjects shall be covered in the preparatory school; how much time shall be given to each, and in what relative proportion ; what may the colleges properly require in their entrance examinations ;

what steps should be taken toward uniformity of standard in entrance requirement? While we are waiting, however, for the well-organized and perfected educational system that is hoped for as the result of the researches and labors of our professional educators, may not something be done, under actually existing conditions of college and school machinery, toward making the preparation for college not only effective for the purpose it is meant to serve, but a natural and pleasant process for the student who undertakes it ?

In this work both home and school may find something to do, and home and school must act in harmony in their task. Parents in our country are inclined to think that they, personally, can do little toward their children's education. They are, in many cases, trying to secure for their children much more of educational advantage than they themselves have enjoyed ; and so, in the feeling of helplessness that arises as the child gets farther and farther away from them in the path of learning, they turn all matters of its education over to the paid teacher, especially trained for the task, as the only possible source of instruction.

Even to the teacher, however, parents do not grant full power and control in those matters. A common prepossession of the parent is that the child is of a rare and unusual nature, which is manifested either in a supposed native brilliancy that is more than a match even for the teacher's powers, or in a sensitive temperament so peculiar in its gifts that the teacher does not understand it or sympathize with it. There is also an impression afloat that the play of mind is an exhausting and dangerous process in itself, which will consume the unfortunate victim to the habit like a raging fire, if allowed to gain full headway.

The result of all this is, that the preparatory teacher too often finds that he has to deal with a child untaught and undisciplined at home, who feels above the necessity of discipline at all, who is taken out of school early and sent back late, who is excused on frequent occasions for health's sake, and, when at home, is enticed from lessons at every opportunity. So thoughtless, indeed, and so apparently lacking in all notion of what is useful and proper in the school discipline, is the average parent, that the teacher dreads the idea of co-operation, and asks only to be let alone in his work. If, however, parents could and would co-operate with the teacher properly, the results would be far beyond what are generally secured now. Parents can be of assistance in the process of the child's education, though they may know little or nothing of the technical detail of its studies. In the first place, the parent is responsible for the child's character, a factor that enters largely even into purely intellectual progress. It will make a great difference with the child's advancement in the school, as well as in life in general, whether it has or has not been taught a regard for duty and discipline, and a respect for the opinions of those who are older, and know more than it does. The parent, and especially the mother, can establish habits of order, of obedience, and of truthfulness ; she can teach a disregard of petty aches and pains that will tend to build up in the child a sturdy manliness or womanliness ; she can turn the child's mind away from itself as the chief centre of interest, — the first requisite, perhaps, to a true mental and moral growth. The child may learn from her that effort is the natural condition of life ; that mental effort is no abnormal and dangerous process, but a normal and healthful one, and that nothing really good may be expected without effort, either mental or physical. None of these lessons may be left entirely to be taught by paid teachers ; the task is beyond their power and province to accomplish.

Any parent of average common-sense and good intention, whether " well educated " in the conventional sense or not, can do much even for the strictly intellectual development of the child. The mother is with the child through those early years when mind and muscle, all a-tingle with expanding power, reach out on every side in very wantonness of unspent energy, trying, experiencing, and co-ordinating, until the random play of mental and physical activity is reduced to the orderly, purposeful system of thought and expression. The habits of mental action that are formed during this process show their influence for good or evil throughout life. It is consequently a most important function that the mother has to perform, coming before the work of the teacher in point of time, and of relative value also, — to guide and direct this process so that it may have its best effect. The important matter in this guidance is to make the child's mind do its own work, and thus gain a strength and vigor that the supported mind, like the bandaged muscle, never can acquire.

After the child has learned to talk, a great part of this tentative and planless mental activity shows itself in the form of asking innumerable questions. " What is this ? " " What is that for ? " " What makes this do so ? " are oftenrepeated queries by means of which the child tries to adjust itself to a new and untried world. If not properly controlled, however, this mode of activity becomes a more random and aimless play of mind than it began, degenerating into a well-known affliction that we may call the " question habit ; " which, far from being the sign of exceptional mental activity and health parents usually imagine it, is in reality a symptom of disease, — a species of mental influenza, betokening a mind too flabby and nerveless to set up the proper reactions within itself.