to an omnium gatherum. How are we going to do it all? The public will have it. That is why we do it. We of the public high school must look out for what the public

wants.

OLIVER S. WESTCOTT, principal of Robert A. Waller High School, Chicago, Ill.The people will not vote all the taxes we need to satisfy the fulminations of various speakers.

GEORGE W. ROLLINS, master of Public Latin School, Boston, Mass.-For at least twenty-five years the high school has been dipping down into the grammar school. We take pupils at the close of the sixth grade. We may, by this process, save one year.

WILLIAM H. BLACK, president of Missouri Valley College, Marshall, Mo.-We are in danger of making an unnecessary ado about two things. It is very dangerous for a young man to get out of school before the age of twenty-five. Many people have done their best work after forty. A well-mastered life is the all-important thing. That takes time. Quality is important. The quality of the student makes for ability to do qualitative work in the course. It makes no difference so far as the Republic and its great mission are concerned whether we conform to foreign systems or not.

COEDUCATION IN THE HIGH SCHOOL

G. STANLEY HALL, PRESIDENT OF CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, MASS. Men and women differ in their dimension, sense, tissue, organ, in their abilities, in crime, disease; and these differences, which science is now multiplying and emphasizing, increase with advancing civilization. In savagery women and men are more alike in their physical structure and in their occupations, but with real progress the sexes diverge and draw apart, and the diversities always present are multiplied and accentuated. Intersexual differences culminate during the sexual period. Little boys and girls play together, do the same things, in many respects have the same tastes, are unconscious of sex, as too in senescence there is reapproximation. Old men and women become more like each other and are again in a sense sexless.

Divergence is most marked and sudden in the pubescent period — in the early teens. At this time, by almost world-wide consent, boys and girls separate, and lead their lives during this most critical period of inception more or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and culminating in nubility has done its work. The family and the home abundantly recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen brothers and sisters. develop a life more independent of each other than before. Their home occupations differ, as do their plays, games, tastes. This is normal and biological. What our school and other institutions should do is to push distinctions to their uttermost, to make boys more manly and girls. more womanly. We should respect the law of sexual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a very different thing from fatherhood. Neither

sex should copy or set patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and clearly in the great sex symphony.

I have here nothing to say against coeducation in college, still less in university grades after the maturity which comes at eighteen or twenty has been achieved; but it is high time to ask ourselves whether the theory and practice of identical coeducation, which has lately been carried to a greater extreme in this country than the rest of the world recognizes, has not brought certain grave dangers; whether it does not interfere with the natural differentiations everywhere seen in home and society. I recognize, of course, the great argument of economy. We should save money and effort, could we unite churches of not too diverse creeds; could give better preaching, music, improve the edifice, etc. I am by no means ready to advocate the abolition of coeducation, but my purpose today is to sum up in a rough, brief way our account of profit and loss with it.

On the one hand, I believe that each sex best develops some of its own best qualities in the presence of the other; but the question still remains: How much? when? and in what way? Association secures this end. I think that girls and boys are often interested in different aspects of the same topic, and this may have a tendency to broaden the view-point of each and bring it into sympathy with that of the other; but the question still remains whether one be not too much attracted to the sphere of the other. No doubt some girls become a little less gushy and sentimental, their conduct more thoughtful; their sense of responsibility for one of woman's great functions, which is bestowing praise, is increased. There is much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated; they are made more urbane; thoughts of sex are made more healthful. In some respects boys are stimulated to good scholarship by girls, who in many schools and topics excel them. We should ask, however, what nature's way is at this stage of life; whether boys, in order to be well verified later, ought to be so boisterous and even rough as to be at times unfit companions for girls; or whether, on the other hand, girls, to be best matured, ought not to have their sentimental periods of instability, especially when we venture to raise the question, whether for a girl in the early teens, when her health for her whole life depends upon normalizing the lunar month, there is not something unhygienic, unnatural, not to say a little monstrous, in school associations with boys when she must suppress and conceal her instincts, feelings, and instinctive promptings, and these times which suggest withdrawing, stepping aside to let Lord Nature do its beautiful, magnificent work of efflorescence. It is a sacred time of reverent exemption from the hard struggle of existence in the world, mental effort in the school. Medical specialists, many of the best of whom now insist that she thru this should be, as it were, "turned out to grass," or should lie fallow so far as intellectual efforts go, one-fourth the time no doubt, often go too far; but their unanimous voice should not entirely be disregarded.

It is not of this, however, that I would speak, but of the effects of too familiar relations, and especially of the identical work, treatment, and environment of the modern school.

We have now at least eight good and independent statistical studies which show that the ideals of boys from ten years on are almost always those of their own sex, while girls' ideals are increasingly of the opposite sex, or also of men. That the ideals of pubescent girls are not found in great and noble women of the world, or in their literature, but more and more in men, suggests a diversity "between the ideals adopted and the line of life best suited to the interests of the race," and also that we are not furnished in our public schools with adequate womanly ideals in history or literature. The new love of freedom and fame which women have lately felt has produced a reaction toward the other extreme, which inclines girls to abandon the home for the office. "It surely can hardly be called an ideal education for women that permits eighteen out of one hundred college girls to state boldly that they would rather be men than women." More than one-half of the schoolgirls in these censuses choose V male ideals, as if those of femininity are disintegrating. A recent writer, in view of this fact, states that "unless there is a change of trend we shall soon have a female sex without a female character." In the progressive feminization of our schools most teachers, perhaps naturally and necessarily, have more or less masculine ideals, and this does not encourage the development of those that constitute the glory of womanhood. every age from eight to sixteen girls named from three to twenty more ideals than boys." All these facts indicate a condition of diffused interests and lack of clear-cut purposes, and a need of integration.

“At

When we turn to boys, the case is different. In most public high schools girls preponderate, especially in the upper classes; and in many of them the boys that remain are practically in a girls' school, sometimes taught chiefly, if not solely, by women teachers, at an age when strong men should be in control more than at any other period of life. Boys need a different discipline and moral regimen and atmosphere. They also need a different method of work. Girls excel them in learning, memorization, excepting studies upon suggestion or authority, but are often quite at sea when set to make tests and experiments that give individuality, which is one of the best things in boyhood, a chance to express itself. Girls preponderate in high-school Latin and algebra, because custom and tradition, and perhaps advice, incline them to it. They preponderate in English and history classes more often, let us say, from inner inclination. The boy sooner grows restless in a curriculum where form takes precedence over content. He revolts at much method with meager matter. He craves utility; and when all these instincts are denied, without knowing what is the matter, he drops out of school; when if a robust tone and a true boy life prevailed, such as is found at Harrow,

Eton, and Rugby, he would have fought it thru and done well. This feminization of the school spirit, discipline, and personnel is bad for boys. Of course, on the whole perhaps they are made more gentlemanly, at ease, their manners improved; and all this to a woman teacher seems excellent; but something is the matter with the boy in the early teens who can be truly called "a perfect gentleman." That should come later, when the brute and animal element have had opportunity to work themselves off in a healthful normal way. They still have football to themselves, and are the majority perhaps in chemistry, and sometimes in physics; but there is danger of a settled eviration.

The segregation which even our schools are now attempting is always in some degree necessary for full and complete development. Just as the boys' language is apt to creep in and to roughen that of the girls, so girls' interests, ways, standards, and tastes, which are crude at this age, often attract boys out of their orbit. While some differences are emphasized by contact, others are compromised. Boys tend to grow content with mechanical memorata work, and, excelling on the lines of girls' qualities, fail to develop those of their own. There is a little charm and bloom rubbed off the ideal of girlhood by close contact, and boyhood seems less ideal to the girls at close range. In place of the mystic attraction of the other sex that has inspired so much that is best in the world, familiar comradery brings a little disenchantment. The impulse to be at one's best in the presence of the other sex grows lax, and each comes to feel itself seen thru, so that there is less motive to indulge in the ideal conduct which such contact inspires, because the call for it is incessant.

This disillusioning weakens the motivation to marriage, sometimes on both sides. When girls grow careless in their dress and too negligent of their manners-the best school of morals-and when boys lose all restraint which the presence of girls usually enforces, there is a subtle deterioration. Thus I believe, altho of course it is impossible to prove, that this is one of the factors of a decreasing percentage of marriage among educated young men and women.

At eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches this maturity, when her ideas of life are amazingly keen and true; when, if her body is developed, she can endure a great deal; when she is nearest, perhaps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. We have lately in this country and Europe had a dozen books, of a more or less naïve or else confessional character, written by girls of this age, showing the first glorious inflorescence of womanly genius and power. In our environment, however, there is little danger that, this age once well past, there will slowly arise a slight sense of aimlessness or lassitude, unrest, uneasiness, as if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall for a door to which the key was not at hand. Thus some lose their bloom and, yielding to the great danger of young womanhood, slowly lapse to an anxious state

of expectancy, or they desire something not within reach; and so the diathesis of anxiety slowly supervenes. The best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic to read, as I have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of girl graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turning a little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, or trying to find something to which they can devote themselves—some cause, movement, occupation, where their glorious capacity for altruism and selfsacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost imperceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. It is everywhere overborne by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. The apple of intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great a cost of health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. They wish to know a good deal more of the world and to perfect their own personalities, and they would not marry, altho every cell of their bodies and every unconscious impulse point to just that end. Soon-it may be in five or ten years or more-the complexion of ill-health is seen in these notes; or else life has been adjusted to independence and self-support.

But I must be brief. What should be done? We can, at least, enlarge the elective system and wait for spontaneous interest and needs to declare themselves even yet more fully; but we must not forget that this has its limits. Already we have the complaint that where one sex preponderates in a subject it tends to be avoided by the other. Again, we can multiply high schools for girls, and study and utilize their conclusions and experiences to fit them to their nature and needs, as boys' schools have been adjusted to theirs. Already we have suggestions of a girls' botany, biology, and chemistry, emphasizing different methods and topics from those that prevail today. Again, we can investigate the suggestion of two kinds of schools for girls: one for those who wish to follow the principle of training for a support, leaving motherhood, if it comes, to take care of itself; and the other, for those who would be trained first for motherhood and home life, which come to the vast majority of women, developing a curriculum on this basis, which is as different from the agenic and agamic principle as one sex is from the other. At all events, we must utterly eradicate the now prevalent idea of intersexual competition. There is no war of sex against sex, and by imagining one, woman has brought great hardship upon us.

Lastly, we must pass beyond the purely personal type of discussion of this topic to which men, and especially women, are too prone. If statistics show that the majority of college women do not marry, and that those who do marry have few children, it is irrelevant to detail the case of Mrs. A. who bore twelve children, reared them all to maturity, and died herself at the age of eighty-six. If anthropology shows that in general