6. The course should include, not only objects which can be made accurately thru the use of ordinary testing tools but frequent work which develops appreciation of curves and exercises the sense of form thru both sight and touch.

7. Special importance must be attached to neatness, accuracy, and finish, and to the development of independence.

COEDUCATION At the university OF CHICAGO

ALBION W. SMALL, PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

I understand that my invitation to discuss this subject was virtually a request to explain the recent action of the University of Chicago in modifying certain administrative details. In accepting the invitation, however, I speak solely from my own individual standpoint. I am not authorized to represent either the university or any official policy of the university. I happen to have voted with the majority in our recent action, and the members of that majority, of course, in a certain general way, think alike about the matter. At the same time, as in all such cases, the action adopted represents compromise and concession even between the members of the majority. The view of no single person appears precisely. I speak of the case, therefore, as it looks to me individually, without attempting to calculate how nearly I may voice the views of anyone else.

It would be immodest to thrust forward a local incident as deserving the attention of a body like this, if it really were nothing more than a local incident. It has value, not because in itself it decides anything of general validity, but because it is a single experiment under conditions which may or may not exist elsewhere, and it is worth what it is worth as a contribution to the theory and practice of education, merely so far as similar circumstances exist. Accordingly, I must say very distinctly that my paper relates to one situation only, and to the practical conclusions which have been reached by the people dealing with that situation. With a single fundamental exception, to be spoken of in a moment, the conclusions are not regarded as necessarily applicable in detail anywhere else. We have had no revelation of a new educational gospel. We have made no claim that our newly adopted working policy has any bearing upon high schools. Whether it has or not I shall omit to inquire, as that part of the subject belongs properly to the gentleman who follows me. I am presenting merely a single case and the conclusions which it has forced upon the persons most responsible.

In the first place, it is safe to assume that impressions which members of this body may have gathered from the press about our experiment are thoroly out of true. Nothing that has been published, with the exception of extracts from the president's latest quarterly statement, gives an approximately correct idea of the action itself or of the considerations

that led to it. The reason for this is easily stated. No question ever roused intenser interest in the university faculty than the one that I am discussing. This interest early spread beyond university circles. The daily papers got inklings of it, and of course tried to get more. Versions of what was going on were furnished by unauthorized reporters, and the papers published them with liberal garnishings of their own. The majority of our faculty did not believe the case belonged in the newspapers while it was in process of decision. Not by formal agreement, but by natural reaction against a public agitation which we felt to be unfortunate, we found ourselves uniformly refusing to argue our case in print. The opposition had a monopoly of the newspaper field. Before the discussion had gone far, fanciful accounts of what the proposition must involve, and what its friends must really be aiming at, had been set adrift in the newspaper current. They have been floating in the stream of reportorial gossip and editorial comment ever since. Statements have. been published denying the correctness of the rumors, but the positive arguments of the majority have been presented to the public only in versions prepared from the opposite point of view. They have consequently been in a large degree fictitious. Like all other mythologies, this folklore is much more entertaining than the truth. It will doubtless be a long time before the commonplace reality supplants the fictions. that preoccupied the public mind. My task, however, is principally a dull recital of the literal facts. It is hoped that the truth may not fail utterly to command the attention which wild rumor provoked.

The first proposition which requires emphasis is that the new administrative measure at the University of Chicago was devised and supported and carried by men who believe in coeducation. They do not merely accept it as a necessary evil. Most of them have always believed in coeducation. All of them expect that they always will believe in it. It is a curious fact that, while the minority was composed chiefly of persons who regarded themselves as the only real friends and defenders of coeducation, the men who are outspoken opponents of coeducation voted with that minority. They said: "The proposal will not abolish coeducation, so we do not believe in it." There would have been no majority for the measure if it had abolished, or tended to abolish, coeducation, or if it contained any concealed opposition to coeducation. The men who actively promoted the change did so on the ground that it is a constructive measure, destined in our particular case to make coeducation stronger than ever before. We believe that our attitude on the matter will contribute, at least indirectly, to improvements in the administration of coeducation everywhere.

My second main proposition is that coeducation is not like the form of a geometrical figure, yesterday, today, and forever the same. Our opponents at once pounce upon this formula and make it the key to their plan of

campaign. They reply: "This is a quibble, a subterfuge, a word-juggle. It shows that you do not mean what you say when you profess friendship for coeducation. There is only one proper meaning for coeducation, viz., instruction first, last, and all the time to men and women sitting side by side in the same room." To people occupying the traditional position the detail thus magnified is the citadel of women's intellectual rights. Weaken this stronghold, they argue, and you surrender all the educational opportunity for women that the struggles of the last century have secured.

To this I reply that we absolutely refuse to recognize anybody's right to identify the principle of coeducation with the purely accidental detail. of promiscuity in classification. If coeducation amounted to nothing more than this, belief in it would be formalism of the most mechanical and superstitious sort.

The fallacy of this merely dialectic method of deciding the merits of the case may be shown by an analogy. Making coeducation consist essentially in the form or quantity of association between male and female students is parallel with the notion that marriage is one unchanging and unchangeable form of association between a man and a woman. Not to notice ruder forms of marriage, and considering monogamy alone, we have, as a matter of fact, all the variations in the form of the monogamous union, from marriage under early Roman law, in which divorce was at the absolute discretion of the husband, to marriage under the canon law, which recognized no divorce whatever. We have marriage according to the Code Napoleon, which denies to the wife who has earned money and deposited it in a savings bank the right to draw it without her do-nothing husband's permission; and marriage according to the Kaiser, in which Kinder, Küche, and Kirche measure the tether of woman's liberty. At the other extreme we have marriage according to our western American republics, which consists of a union between an acquiescent man, as silent partner, and, as party of the second part, a woman whose voice is never silent in the streets, so long as there is a public reform to be agitated or a political election to be contested. Accordingly, a very large part of what Mrs. Browning calls "the social spasm and crisis of the ages" is the problem, not of stereotyping the conjugal union in an inflexible form, but of realizing that spirit of association between husband and wife which will make each most valuable to the other, and both most useful to society.

Coeducation

A similar problem is at the heart of the case before us. is something profounder than mere adherence to a local tradition of mechanical arrangement among pupils getting their schooling. Coedu cation is a stage and a phase in the apprenticeship of men and women. for their appropriate life-functions. What are the conditions most conducive to the passing of this stage into the most highly adapted and

adaptable manhood and womanhood ? Are we to assume that this tremendous question is the one solitary detail which is settled beyond revision for all time among the innumerable open problems of educational theory and practice? The University of Chicago, at any rate, declines to accept any such snap-judgment. We have no quarrel with separate colleges, either for men or for women. They undoubtedly have a mission, and perhaps a limited number of them will always be desirable. We believe, nevertheless, that as a rule association, not isolation, is the normal condition during the years of preparation for manhood and womanhood. The terms of association, however, should not be rigidly prescribed a priori, but should be flexible according to the dictates of experience. It should be possible to regulate the association as circumstances of time and place and individual needs require. This demand reduces the item of co-instruction to the rank of one among the many details which the development of coeducation must utilize for what they are worth. It is as foolish to make a specific, or a shibboleth, or a fetich, out of one accident of the educational program as out of another.

For myself and now I do not know whether this formula would be acceptable to my colleagues or not-I define coeducation as instruction, under a single management, of males and females, upon equal terms, under conditions which promise to prove in the long run most advantageous to all concerned. That is, coeducation is, like education in general, a progressive revelation, and selection of means according to the revelation. The only essential specifications added to the generic term "education" to form the special concept "coeducation" are, first, affirmation of the equal claims of men and women to all opportunities of education, and, second, endeavor by the same educator, whether state, or church, or private corporation, or individual, to furnish equal educational privileges to the males and females of a given constituency. It is most fortunate that the charter of the University of Chicago was deliberately framed so as to provide for this flexible conception.

Third: So far as I am aware, no published statement, with the exception of Dr. Harper's report, just alluded to, has been within respectable guessing distance of the actual grounds for our action. It has been charged that the aim was to diminish the number of women in the university. This neither is, nor has it ever been, nor is it likely to be, the desire of any individual who has actively interested himself in our movement. On the contrary, we not only expect, but hope, that the number of women in our student body will rapidly increase, and it is the policy of the university to promote that increase as diligently as, it attempts to increase the number of the men. Without partiality for men or for women, the University of Chicago will not, by its own fault, be second to any institution in providing educational opportunities for both.

Again, an ingenious guesser has contributed to one of our most influ

In

ential American weeklies the interpretation that our move has been in response to a demand of the male students for the exclusion of women, and he treats this supposed fact as a cardinal symptom of the times. reality, to the best of my knowledge and belief, no sign of opposition to the old system ever reached the faculty from the students. So far as their feelings were concerned, the inherited system was rather conspicuously satisfactory. This is, of course, in marked contrast with familiar. cases in New England colleges founded for men but afterward opened

to women.

Once more, it has often been said that some serious moral problems must have been met, some grave misconduct must have been detected, to account for disturbing the status quo. Again, I may reply that for myself I have never had personal knowledge of a single case of immorality, either at Chicago or elsewhere, which was fairly chargeable to coeducation. If any member of the Chicago faculty has had a different experience, he has never put it in evidence in any argument of which I have knowledge. Immorality, in the usual sense, has never been a factor in the case. It is immoral to scrawl letters with a pen, when one can afford a typewriter. It is immoral to waste time running errands, when one can afford a telephone. In that sense alone has our problem been concerned with morals; i. e., we think we have discovered a more excellent way, and it would be immoral not to adopt it. Our action has not been prompted by anything that would usually be classed as sins of commission on the part of students. It is rather a provision against sins of omission on the side of the university.

Now, to state the facts positively: The movement in question was occasioned immediately, not by any speculative theory about coeducation, but by reaching a point in the growth of the university at which it became. an inexorable necessity to recognize an axiom of physics, namely, two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Our lecture halls, laboratories, and departmental libraries were overcrowded. They were wanted by both graduates and undergraduates. Enlarged accommodations were imperative. Unless we were to proceed without system, and regardless of the future, the question was forced upon us: Looking ahead as far as we can, what principle of assigning ground space for the needed buildings will best provide for all the interests of the university? Time would not permit rehearsal of the many considerations which had to be weighed, and it is not necessary for the present purpose. It soon became. clear to everyone, however, that the four blocks to which the university had been confined would be needed for the higher work alone, and should be reserved accordingly. This meant, in other words, that removal of all freshman and sophomore work that is, in our terms, the Junior College from our present base of operations, and provision for it elsewhere, was judged to be the wisest method of relieving our overcrowded condition.