more plastic to woman's great work of creating in him all the wide range of
secondary sex qualities which constitute his essential manhood. In all this, the
pedagogic fathers we teach in the history of education are most of them about as
luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or as methods of
other countries are coming to be in solving our own peculiar pedagogic
problems. The relation of the academically trained sexes is faintly typified by
that of the ideal college to the ideal university, professional or technical school.
This is the harmony of counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic
amphimixis. For the reinstallation of the humanistic college, the time has come
when cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she does
so and helps to evolve a high school and an A.B. course that is truly liberal, it
will not only fit her nature and needs far better than anything now existing, but
young men at the humanistic stage of their own education will seek to profit by
it, and she will thus repay her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-
universitize the college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest
dangers.
But even should all this be done, coeducation would by means be thus justified.
If adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or even feminized stage
of psychic development in which they are peculiarly plastic to the guidance of
older women who have such rare insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy
and patience with all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis,
when they seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will
forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living out more fully this
stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is abridged or dwarfed, it by no
means follows that intimate daily and class-room association with girls of their
own age is necessary or best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert
his own manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react
against general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are older than boys
at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship and comparisons incline
him to take premature refuge in some one talent that emphasizes his psycho-
sexual difference too soon. Again, he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl
classmate of his own age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone
to violate the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband
to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests, as maturity begins
to decline to age, and in those of their offspring. Thus the young man with his
years of restraint and probation ahead, and his inflammable desires, is best
removed from the half-conscious cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more
insistent with constant girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years