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This diagram shows graphically the rank of each State and Territory according to the rates of illiteracy in 1890:

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This beggarly array does not fill up the dark outlines of the picture. These short schools are in many cases inefficient and inadequate, and the graduates of high schools, even, are three years behind the German graduates in the amount of knowledge acquired and in mental development. This inferiority is largely attributable to the shorter terms of school years, to the want of professional teachers, and to the small enrollment. In Prussia, under a compulsory law, 91 per cent are instructed in the public elementary, or people's schools, or only 945 of the children subject to the law were unjustly withheld from school. It is lamentable that in many cases a teacher in primary schools need not know much more than he is required to teach, and that knowledge may be confined to the text-book. This deficiency in teacher training is, with political and sectarian influence, the most vulnerable point in our school system. The lack of proper supervision and inspection of schools is traceable to this same pestiferous influence, and hence the officers charged with this duty remain too short a time in their places to be qualified for their work. Rotation in

office, narrow partisanship, inefficiency, are the direct fruits of making school offices not places of trust, but spoils of political victory. Our system of public instruction has acquired such dimensions, ramifies so minutely into every family and neighborhood, concerns so greatly every interest of the State, that its administration should be vested in officers of the highest intelligence and patriotism, of administrative skill and ability, of thorough acquaintance with school and educational questions. The state superintendent should remain in office long enough to be thoroughly familiar with the duties of his exalted position, and should be an expert, capable of advising executive and legislature, and school officers and teachers, and in full and intelligent sympathy with the educational problems that are so important and numerous. Greatly blessed is a State and are the children who have at head of school affairs such men as Mann, Sears, Dickinson, Draper, White, Ruffner, and our peerless Harris.

The statistics of defective schools and consequent illiteracy teach their own sad lessons. The calamities which, in the inevitable order of events, must result from having so large a portion of the people in ignorance, need not be elaborated, but they should fill every patriot with alarm and impel to the adoption of early and adequate remedies as an antidote for what is so menacing to free institutions and to general prosperity. While ignorance so abounds, how can we hope for purity in elections and safety from demagogism, immorality, lawlessness, and crime?"Whatever children we suffer to grow up among us we must live with as men; and our children must be their contemporaries. They are to be our copartners in the relations of life, our equals at the polls, our rulers in legislative halls, the awarders of justice in our courts. However intolerable at home, they can not be banished to any foreign land; however worthless, they will not be sent to die in camps or to be slain in battle; however flagitious, but few of them will be sequestered from society by imprisonment, or doomed to expiate their offenses with their lives."

Perhaps the argument most likely to reach the general public is the close relation between public free schools and the increased productive power of labor and enterprise. The political economy which busies itself about capital and labor, and revenue reform and free coinage, and ignores such a factor as mental development, is supremest folly; for to increase the intelligence of the laborer is to increase largely his producing power. Education creates new wealth, develops new and untold treasures, increases the growth of intellect, gives directive power and the power of self-help; of will and of combining things and agencies. The secretary of the board of educa tion of Massachusetts in his last report makes some valuable statements and sugges tions. No other State is giving as much for education, and yet each inhabitant is receiving on an average nearly seven years of two hundred days each, while the average given each citizen in the whole nation is only four and three-tenths of such years. While the citizens of Massachusetts get nearly twice the average amount of education, her wealth-producing power as compared with other States stands almost in the same ratio. This increased wealth-producing power means that the 2,500,000 people produce $250,000,000 more than they would produce if they were only average earners. And this is twenty-five times the annual expenditure for schools. The capacity to read and write tends to the creation and distribution of wealth, and adds fully 25 per cent to the wages of the working classes. It renders an additional service in stimulating material wants and making them more numerous, complex, and refined. We hear on every hand louder calls for skilled labor and high directive ability. It is a lack of common business sagacity to flinch from the cost of such a wealthproducing agency. This question is not, How can we afford to do it? but, Can we afford not to do it?

All experience shows only one means of securing universal education. Private and parish schools educate only about 12 per cent of the children, and if they could educate all there would remain insuperable objections to them in the way of management, classification, efficiency and support. Our institutions and rights demand free schools for all the people, and they must be established and controlled by the State, and for their support combined municipal, county, and State revenues are needed. Eightyseven per cent of the children of the Union are now in public schools. In 1890 the entire costs for school purposes were estimated at $143,110,218, toward the payment of which the local school tax contributed $97,000,000. While furnishing education is a legitimate tax on property, whether the taxpayer takes advantage of the public schools or not, the history of education in the United States shows that with State revenues should be combined local taxation. This insures immediate interest in the schools, better supervision, greater rivalry, and, on the whole, better results.

The schools in Alabama are handicapped by a clause in the constitution limiting local taxation to an extremely low figure. If by general agreement among the friends of education the removal of this restriction could be separated from party politics, and local taxation could be brought to the support of schools, there would soon be an era of educational and material prosperity. What a commentary it would be on the capacity of our people for self-government, on their catholic patriotism, on the

subordination of private wishes to the public good, if, under the advice and leadership of those selected as fittest persons for the executive chair, the whole subject of free and universal education should be elevated to the plane of organic law, and be as sacred and irremovable as any of the fundamental muniments of liberty.

Yours, truly,

CALIFORNIA.

J. L. M. CURRY.

EDUCATING GIRLS.

[Communicated to the Boston Sunday Journal by President David Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford Junior University.]

The subject of the higher education of young women at present usually demands answers to these three questions:

1. Shall a girl receive a college education?

2. Shall she receive the same kind of a college education as a boy?

3. Shall she be educated in the same college?

First. Shall a girl receive a college education? The answer to this must depend on the character of the girl. Precisely so with the boy. What we should do with either depends on his or her possibilities. Wiso parents will not let either boy or girl enter life with any less preparations than the best they can receive. It is true that many college graduates, boys and girls alike, do not amount to much after the schools have done the best they can with them. It is true, as I have elsewhere insisted, that "you can not fasten a $2,000 education to a 50-cent boy," nor to a 50-cent girl, either. But there is also great truth in these words of Frederic Dennison Maurice: "I know that nine-tenths of those the university sends out must be hewers of wood and drawers of water. But if we train the ten-tenths to be so, then the wood will be badly cut and the water will be spilt. Aim at something noble; make your system of education such that a great man may be formed by it, and there will be manhood in your little men of which you do not dream."

It is not alone the preparation of great men for great things. Higher education may prepare even little men for greater things than they would have otherwise found possible. And so it is with the education of women. The needs of the times are imperative. The noblest result of social evolution is the growth of the civilized home. Such a home only a wise, cultivated, and high-minded woman can make. To furnish such women is one of the noblest missions of higher education. No young women capable of becoming such should be condemned to a lower destiny. Even of those seemingly too dull or too vacillating to reach any high ideal of wisdom, this may be said, that it does no harm to try. A few hundred dollars is not much to spend on an experiment of such moment. Four of the best years of one's life spent in the company of noble thoughts and high ideals can not fail to leave their impress. To be wise, and at the same time womanly, is to wield a tremendous influence, which may be felt for good in the lives of generations to come. It is not forms of government by which men are made or unmade. It is the character and influence of their mothers and wives. The higher education of women means more for the future than all conceivable legislative reforms. And its influence does not stop with the home. It means higher standards of manhood, greater thoroughness of training and the coming of better men. Therefore, let us educate our girls as well as our boys. A generous education should be the birthright of every daughter of the Republic as well as of every son.

Second. Shall we give our girls the same education as our boys? Yes and no. If we mean by the same an equal degree of breadth and thoroughness, an equal fitness for high thinking and wise acting, yes, let it be the same. If we mean to reach this end by exactly the same course of studies, then my answer must be no. For the same course of study will not yield the same results with different persons. The ordinary "college course" which has been handed down from generation to genera tion is purely conventional. It is a result of a series of compromises in trying to fit the traditional education of clergymen and gentlemen to the needs of men of a different social era. The old college course met the special needs of nobody, and therefore was adapted to all alike. The great educational awakening of the last twenty years in America has come from breaking the bonds of this old system. The essence of the new education is individualism. Its purpose is to give to each young man that training which will make a man of him. Not the training which a century or two ago helped to civilize the masses of boys of that time, but that which will civilize this particular boy. One reason why the college students of 1895 are ten to one in number as compared with those of 1875, is that the college training now given is valuable to ten times as many men as could be reached or helped by the narrow courses of twenty years ago.

In the university of to-day the largest liberty of choice in study is given to the

student. The professor advises, the student chooses, and the flexibility of the courses makes it possible for every form of talent to receive proper culture. Because the college, of to-day helps ten times as many men as that of yesterday could hope to reach, it is ten times as valuable. The difference lies in the development of special lines of work and in the growth of the elective system. The power of choice carries the duty of choosing rightly. The ability to choose has made a man out of the college boy, and transferred college work from an alternation of tasks and play to its proper relation to the business of life. Meanwhile, the old ideals have not risen in value. If our colleges were to go back to threshing the cut straw of medievalism-in other words, to their work of twenty years ago-their professors would speak to empty benches. In those colleges which still cling to those traditions these benches are empty to day or filled only with idlers. This to a college is a fate worse than death.

The best education for a young woman is surely not that which has proved unfit for the young man. She is an individual as well as he, and her work gains as much as his by relating it to her life. But an institution broad enough to meet the varied needs of varied men can also meet the varied needs of the varied woman. Intellectual training is the prime function of the college. The intellectual needs of men and women are not different in many important respects. The special or professional needs so far as they are different will bring their own satisfaction. Those who have had to do with the higher training of women know that the severest demands can be met by them as well as by men. There is no demand for easy or "goody-goody" courses of study for women except as this demand has been made or encouraged by men.

There are, of course, certain average differences between men and women as students. Women have often greater sympathy, greater readiness of memory or apprehension, greater fondness for technique. In the languages and literature, often in mathematics and history, women are found to excel. They lack, on the whole, originality. They are not attracted by unsolved problems, and in the inductive or "inexact" sciences they seldom take the lead. In the traditional courses of study, traditional for men, they are often very successful. Not that these courses have a special fitness for women, but that women are more docile and less critical as to the purposes of education. And to all these statements there are many exceptions. In this, however, those who have taught both men and women must agree. The training of women is just as serious and just as important as the training of men, and no training is adequate for either which falls short of the best.

Third. Shall women be taught in the same classes as men? This is, it seems to me, not a fundamental question, but rather a matter of taste. It does no harm whatever to either men or women to meet those of the other sex in the same class rooms. But if they prefer not to do so, let them do otherwise. Considerable has been said for and against the union in one institution of technical schools and schools of liberal arts. The technical character of scientific work is emphasized by its separation from general culture. But I believe better men are made where the two are not separated. The devotees of culture studies gain from the feeling reality and utility cultivated by technical work. The technical students gain from association with men and influences whose aggregate tendency is toward greater breadth of sympathy and a higher point of view.

A woman's college is more or less distinctly a technical school. In most cases its purpose is distinctly stated to be such. It is a school for training for the profession of womanhood. It encourages womanliness of thought as something more or less different from the plain thinking which is often called manly.

The brightest work in women's colleges is often accompanied by a nervous strain as though the students or teachers were fearful of falling short of some expected standard. They are often working toward ideals set by others. The best work of men is natural and unconscious, the normal product of the contact of the mind with the problem in question. On the whole, calmness and strength in woman's work are best reached through coeducation.

At the present time the demand for the higher education of women is met in three different ways:

1. In separate colleges for women, with courses of study more or less parallel with those given in colleges for men. In some of these the teachers are all women, in some mostly men, and in others a more or less equal division obtains. In nearly all of these institutions the old traditions of education and discipline are more prevalent than in colleges for men. Nearly all of them retain some trace of religious or denominational control. In all of them the Zeitgeist is producing more or less commotion, and the changes in their evolution are running parallel with those in colleges for

men.

2. In women's annexes to colleges for men. In these, part of the instruction given to the men is repeated to the women, in different classes or rooms, and there is more ED 9541

or less opportunity to use the same libraries and museums. In some other institutions the relations are closer, the privileges of study being similar, the differences being mainly in the rules of conduct by which the young women are hedged in, the young men making their own regulations.

It seems to me that the annex system can not be a permanent one. The annex student does not get the best of the institution, and the best is none too good for her. Sooner or later she will demand it, or go where the best can be found. The best students will cease to go to the annex. The institution must then admit women on equal terms or not admit them at all. There is certainly no educational reason why women should prefer the annex of one institution if another institution equally good throws its doors wide open for her.

3. The third system is that of coeducation. In this relation young men and young women are admitted to the same classes, subjected to the same requirements, and governed by the same rules. This system is now fully established in the State institutions of the North and West, and in most other colleges of the same region. Its effectiveness has long since passed beyond question among those familiar with its operation. Other things being equal, the young men are more earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized than under monastic conditions. The women do their work in a more natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than when isolated from the influence and society of men. There is less of silliness and folly when a man ceases to be a novelty. There is less attraction exerted by idle and frivolous girls when young men meet also girls industrious and serious. In coeducational institutions of high standards frivolous conduct or scandals of any form are unknown. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility. Many professors have entered Western colleges with strong prejudices against coeducation. These prejudices have in no case endured the test of experience. What is well done has a tonic effect on the mind and character. The college girl has long since ceased to expect any particular leniency because she is a girl. She stands or falls with the character of her work.

It is not true that the standard of college work has been in any way lowered by coeducation. The reverso is decidedly the case. It is true, however, that untimely zeal of one sort or another has filled our Western States with a host of so-called colleges. It is true that most of these are weak, and doing poor work in poor ways. It is true that most of these are coeducational. It is also true that the great majority of their students are not of college grade at all. In such schools often low standards prevail, both as to scholarships and as to manners. The student fresh from the country, with no preparatory training, will bring the manners of his home. These are not always good manners, as manners are judged in society. But none of these defects are derived from coeducation, nor are any of these conditions in any way made worse by it.

A final question: Does not coeducation lead to marriage? Most certainly it does, and this fact need not be and can not be denied. But such marriages are not usually premature. And it is certainly true that no better marriages can be made than those founded on common interests and intellectual friendships.

A college man who has known college women is not drawn to women of lower ideals and inferior training. He is likely to be strongly drawn toward the best he has known. A college woman is not led by mere propinquity to accept the attentions of inferior men. Among some thirty college professors educated in coeducational colleges, as Cornell, Wisconsin, Michigan, California, whose records are before me, twothirds have married college friends. Most of the others have married women from other colleges, and a few chosen women from their own colleges, but not contemporary with themselves. In all cases the college man has chosen a college woman, and in all cases both man and woman are thoroughly happy with the outcome of coeducation. It is part of the legitimate function of higher education to prepare women as well as men for happy and successful lives.

CONNECTICUT.

THE TENDENCY OF MEN TO LIVE IN CITIES.

[Address of President Kingsbury, of the American Social Science Association. Read September 2, 1895.]

Two or three years since I wrote this title as a memorandum for a paper which I wished to prepare when I should find time sufficient to make some necessary investigations, statistical and otherwise. I knew of nothing, or almost nothing, written on the subject, except by way of occasional allusion. I made many inquiries in various directions, personally and by letter, of those who would, I thought, be likely to give me information; I examined libraries and catalogues-and all this with very trifling results. To-day, when I again take up the theme, so much has been written

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