Youth_ Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene - G. Stanley Hall

Some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies and men's careers than others.
Coeducation, too, generally means far more assimilation of girls' to boys' ways
and work than conversely. Many people believe that girls either gain or are more
affected by coeducation, especially in the upper grades, than boys. It is
interesting, however, to observe the differences that still persist. Certain games,
like football and boxing, girls can not play; they do not fight; they are not
flogged or caned as English boys are when their bad marks foot up beyond a
certain aggregate; girls are more prone to cliques; their punishments must be in
appeals to school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly sensitive; it is hard
for them to bear defeat in games with the same dignity and unruffled temper as
boys; it is harder for them to accept the school standards of honor that condemn
the tell-tale as a sneak, although they soon learn this. They may be a little in
danger of being roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude and
unique language, almost a dialect in itself, prevalent among schoolboys. Girls
are far more prone to overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and idle. Girls are
content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into them by recitations, etc.,
and to merely accept, while boys are more inspired by being told to do things
and make tests and experiments. In this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer
speaks of a certain feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these
schools soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing classes the
voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the other. In many
topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in different aspects of the same
theme, and therefore the work is broadened. In manual training, girls excel in all
artistic work; boys, in carpentry. Girls can be made not only less noxiously
sentimental and impulsive, but their conduct tends to become more thoughtful;
they can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their praise aright and thus
influencing the tone of the school. Calamitous as it world be for the education of
boys beyond a certain age to be entrusted entirely or chiefly to women, it would
be less so for that of girls to be given entirely to men. Perhaps the great women
teachers, whose life and work have made them a power with girls comparable to
that of Arnold and Thring with boys, are dying out. Very likely economic
motives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on its merits only.
Finally, several writers mention the increased healthfulness of moral tone. The
vices that infest boys' schools, which Arnold thought a quantity constantly
changing with every class, are diminished. Healthful thoughts of sex, less
subterranean and base imaginings on the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality
on the other, are favored. For either sex to be a copy of the other is to be
weakened, and each comes normally to respect more and to prefer its own sex.