When so much was clear, everyone taking it for granted that the higher work was anchored by the laboratories, etc., the questions were forced upon us: How can we best provide for the Junior College? Shall we plan to develop in the future an indefinite number of quadrangles, in imitation of the central university quadrangle, with dormitories for women on one side, for men on another, and with intermediate buildings for common instruction; or shall we adopt some other principle? The moment this was recognized as a practical and urgent administrative question, some of us saw that we could not do our full duty in answering it unless we reconsidered on its merits, and in all its bearings, the whole traditional machinery of coeducation, which we had inherited. In other words, it was not sufficient to inquire: How can we most conveniently continue to do the thing we are already doing? The more important question was: Is this the best thing possible? Would any changes in our system improve it in the interest of both men and women?

The newspaper advertising of our discussion, as something that grew out of hostility to women, or jealousy of women, or illiberal disposition toward women, was a long shot in the opposite direction from the mark. Whatever may be our deficiencies in other respects, I feel perfectly safe in declaring that the world does not contain an educational institution in which recognition of the equal right of women to all that it offers is more complete than in the University of Chicago. I make this boast without qualification or apology, because when a thing is absolute it can't be any more so. This is not only the fact, but the fact corresponds with the whole animus of the university. Women are no more there on tolerance than the men are. Use of all that the university affords, from the kindergarten in the School of Education to private laboratories for special research, is not a privilege dependent on concession, but the unquestioned right of women on precisely equal terms with men. The trustees and faculty of the university are probably more anxious to guard this equality in the interest of the women than of the men, for they assume that the men would be more aggressive in defending their rights if by oversight or accident they were ever impaired. There has never for a moment been any halting or wavering, or equivocation, in our purpose to develop and improve and realize coeducation. The few individuals in our number who do not believe in the idea have always accepted the fact that the university is irrevocably committed to it, and that they could not change it if they would. The great majority not only accept the fact, but are in cordial sympathy with it, so that they would not change it if they could.

As the newspapers have taken pains to let everybody know, the first step which we have taken, in pursuit of the purpose to perfect our system, has been the establishment of separate Junior Colleges for men and women. They are to be located, the one on the east, the other on the west, of the main quadrangle reserved for higher work, and their nearest

boundaries will be three or four blocks distant from each other.

The ugly

term "segregation" was invented by misinformed outside agitators against what they excited themselves into believing to be our purpose. It is a sneer, with which it is useless to argue. If it is applied to the division between the Junior College and the higher work, it is no more in point. than it would be to use it for the separation between the elementary medical work in lecture-room and laboratory, and the more technical work in clinics. If the epithet applies to the division between Junior College men and Junior College women, the separation is equally of each from the other, and it is only by a freak of the imagination that it can be made. invidious. Each Junior College is in the same sense, and in the same degree, a part of the university that the other is. There are no divisions. of the faculty, but merely temporary shifting in assignment of duties. That is, the professor who gives a course in geometry, or French, or history in one college at one hour of the day, or in one quarter of the year, will offer the same course at another hour of the same day, or in another quarter of the same year, in the other college.

For myself, I do not believe that this will work out as "identical instruction" in the two colleges, and I do not believe that it should. It is a moral impossibility for a teacher who is thoroly alive to give precisely the same instruction to a class of men which he would give to a class of women. He will and should adapt himself to the different mental attitudes of men and women. The more skillful he is, the more will his power to vary his instruction accrue to the advantage of both men and

women.

The division just described between men and women ceases at the end of the sophomore year, or, in our terms, at the completion of the work of the Junior College. Meanwhile, the foundations of a somewhat coherent, sheltered community life will have been laid for both men and women. No Chinese walls, nor barbed-wire fences, nor even hedges will inclose the students in either college. They will have more and better opportunities for meeting each other in perfectly natural ways than the average man and woman of the same age who are not in college. No one who is acquainted with the social tendencies of Chicago is likely to harbor very desperate fears lest our boys and girls may henceforth see so little of each other that their social development will be permanently arrested.

The modification that I have described has been hysterically denounced from one point of view, and almost as hysterically ridiculed from another. On the one hand, it has been claimed that this is merely the beginning of the end of coeducation in the University of Chicago, and so it is regarded as the first move in a campaign for the educational disfranchisement of women. On the other hand, it has been ridiculed as a change. too insignificant to affect coeducation one way or the other. Unlimited scorn has been aimed at the futility of a scheme which merely sandwiches

in two years of separate class work between earlier and later years of association. As to the former charge, I have already shown that our answer might be in baseball language: "Never touched me." To the latter criticism we may properly reply: "Then why these tears? If the effort is so feeble, why waste agitation on it? Why not leave it to expire of inanition?"

Now, the truth is, this measure can never have anything like the radical importance, either for weal or for woe, which its friends have been supposed to claim for it, or which its opponents predict as its consequence. Reactionary it never was, in any shape or degree. On the other hand, we have never thought of it as a cure-all. It is a measure designed to guard the equilibrium of students at a stage when it is peculiarly liable to be disturbed. It is an adjustment, an adaptation, a relief of nervous and mental tension, at a point where there is excessive stimulation.

In a word, what I mean is this: We are in the geographical center of a large city, the focus of a group of states in which there is an enormous increase of families whose children are not compelled by poverty to hurry into bread-winning. The time is apparently approaching when the number of girls who choose college education in the country at large will equal the number of boys. However this may be, in a city like Chicago, and to a lesser degree in the tributary country, the time is fast approaching when girls will enter college in equal numbers with boys, and from closely similar motives. The days when going to college was an ordeal that tried women's souls, and when only the rare few would undertake it, are ancient history. Today in our city colleges we can match the immemorial species "generous youth" with equal numbers of the lately differentiated. "generous maiden." To speak sooth of either type, it means well enough, and will mostly find itself by and by, but just now it frankly does not know what else to do with itself, and college is its line of least resistance. No one who has been a freshman or a sophomore will think hard of me for not stopping long to verify the other scattering specimens in the collection. The aforesaid "generous youths and maidens" come to college very human boys and girls. They have been with other boys and girls before, but they didn't mind particularly. Now they are thrown in with a crowd of new boys and girls, and they begin to take notice. The boy of seventeen or eighteen has grown up by the side of his younger, or even older, sisters, and other boys' sisters, and has probably never wasted a minute on the purely academic question of their possible equality with himself. In the college environment the perspective changes. He is doggedly aware that the girls in his class are sophisticated beyond his years. He has always supposed himself at least as old as anyone of his age. Now, when he hears the girls of his class talk about "high-school kids" he has a guilty feeling that it means him. While he is being guyed and hazed and, if lucky, "rushed," the chasm yawns wider between him and

his girl classmate, who does not even shrink from the presence of the captain of the football team, and has already made a distinct impression upon some of the social stars of the fraternities. Our freshman doesn't feel happy. These girls embarrass him. The only relief they can offer is by electing courses as far ahead of the natural sequence as the rules allow, so as to get into the company of older and more interesting men.

But what of these freshman girls themselves; these eager, impulsive, inexperienced, adventurous maidens that our prosperous American life produces; these heirs-expectant of the world and the fullness thereof; these latest arrivals at the gates of life, equipped with anticipations as omnivorous as they are indefinite; with nerves a-quiver for the next sensation; with serene assurance that their future must be a long crescendo of happiness? What of these on-the-whole most admirable specimens of unfulfilled womanhood that any civilization has ever produced? A man old enough to be a grandfather may be safe in confessing that he would. suspect the mental and moral wholesomeness of the college boy who could live within the horizon of these peerless girls, and not in his secret heart be gloriously in love with them one and all!

But how fares it with these girls in the atmosphere of the big city coeducational college? More than anything else they need poise, repose, standpoint, perspective, purpose. They need long, clear looks at life from its upper side, unconfused by the jostlings of the crowd. What are the chances in this direction, when every nerve is at concert pitch, when ambition for prestige is goaded by the keenest spurs, when the whole air tingles with the excitement of a continuous social function?

I grant you all this is not argument. I am dealing with facts, to be sure, but let us say that my use of them is merely parable. What I mean by it is that things like those which the parable suggests are bound to produce a large amount of distraction of attention, which would wander enough without such provocation. Much of this disturbance is avoidable. Removal of needless causes of it would do just so much toward securing maximum conditions of comfortable, healthy, normal growth, and incidentally of effective college work. Is this a trifle? If any of us think so, we might learn rudimentary psychology from the gymnasium, not to say from the paddock.

But you reply: "After all, you have not proved either that unwholesome conditions exist, or that, if they did, your measure would be a remedy." You are right, and I do not deceive myself in the least about the logical status of the discussion. In the twenty-seven years of intermittent debate in which I have participated on this subject, and particularly in the portion of it which has been carried on among my colleagues during the past two years, I have known of only one absolute demonstration. The one thing established is that, if a person has once had an opinion, either pro or con, upon the subject of coeducation, all the arguments in

the world will never prove anything to the contrary one way or the other. On every subject, with this one exception, reasoning may have some effect. In this case never. The only possible change of view has to come thru collision with new experiences and the sensation of facts arguing for themselves. I have no ambition to fly in the face of Providence by attempting the impossible. I have been content to state our position, and to indicate the spirit in which we are acting. We may be mistaken about our facts. We may be fatuous in our way of treating them. Our purpose is beyond attack.

Speaking again for myself only, it seems to me that in education we have parodied the practice of Judge Lynch; that is, first hang your prisoner, then try him. We first extemporized a coeducation, and then, with uncanonical speed, we canonized it. I believe that the contrast between the naïve coeducation which we stumbled into and that which we shall develop in the future is parallel with the difference between the little purgatory which the memories of my childhood recall under the name of primary school, and the kindergarten which the wisest teachers are perfecting today.

COEDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS

AARON GOVE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, DISTRICT NO. I,
DENVER, COLO.

I believe that the interests of the thousands in the high school are quite as important as are those of the hundreds in the colleges. I am aware that what I am about to say will arouse antagonism, especially on the part of my women friends. They will seem to see an attack on what is commonly called the equality of the sexes. I address myself especially to opposing the present identical education of the high-school boy and girl, without reference to the "co." It matters little where they receive instruction; I am protesting against the identical education that schools. have been led to give to the sexes. Altho the high schools have largely modified their curricula because of the elective courses and of the privilege of equivalents which is one of the blessings of the present time, we have not yet got thru with the notion that the diploma of a secondary school must be the same certificate, whether issued to a boy or to a girl. The equivalent for the boy and the girl ought to include and exclude much of either.

From the homes - and I speak for the high schools-the girls have been compelled to enter school with the brothers, to select the course of study with their brothers, to enter school at the same time in the morning, to attend recitations at the same time, and to receive diplomas at the same time-identical education.