coeducation, especially in the high school, 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, and whether it does not interfere with the natural
differentiations seen everywhere else. I recognize, of course, the great argument
of economy. Indeed, we should save money and effort could we unite churches
of not too diverse creeds. We could thus give better preaching, music, improve
the edifice, etc. I am by no means ready to advocate the radical abolition of
coeducation, but we can already sum up in a rough, brief way our account of
profit and loss with it. On the one hand, no doubt each sex develops some of its
own best qualities best in the presence of the other, but the question still remains,
how much, when, and in what way, identical coeducation secures this end?
As has been said, 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 both 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, especially girls
to that of boys. No doubt some girls become a little less gushy, their conduct
more thoughtful, and their sense of responsibility greater; for one of woman's
great functions, which is that of bestowing praise aright, is increased. There is
also much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated; they are made more
urbane and their thoughts of sex 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 is nature's way at this stage of life?
Whether boys, in order to be well virified later, ought not 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 feelings and instinctive promptings at those times which suggest
withdrawing, to let nature do its beautiful work of inflorescence. It is a sacred
time of reverent exemption from the hard struggle of existence in the world and
from mental effort in the school. Medical specialists, many of the best of whom
now insist that through this period she 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.