Part 31

Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press, the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production as well as the dissemination of knowledge), Science has brought forth, in every field of human interest and of human value, a mass of facts and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full physical development long before we have caught up, in any degree, with the previous experience of the race. And till we have done that, to some degree, we are not mature.

With this postponement of personal maturity, there is an even greater postponement of what might be called "technical" maturity. The real mastery of a real technique takes longer and longer. The teacher must not only go to college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an assistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture-rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending before him.

What is left undone by Science in keeping us immature is finally accomplished by System.

The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions (and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at some small subdivided job in a large organization of people. The work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate responsibility and remuneration toward the top. In time, from job to job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor duties for minimum pay.

This is just as true of the boy from a "middle class" family as it is of the boy from a "working class" family. There follows, however, a most important difference between them. The "middle class" boy will have to work longer and go farther than the "working class" boy in order to rise to the financial standards of his class. In this respect the "working class" boy will be a man, ready for marriage, long before his "middle class" fellow-worker.

It is among "middle class" boys, then, that the period of infancy is most prolonged. They get a good deal of schooling. The stores of human knowledge are put in their hands, to some extent, and, to some extent, they catch up with the experience of the race. This takes a longer and longer effort, particularly if real mastery of any real technique is attempted. Then, on going to work, they find that System, supplementing Science, has perfected such an organization of the world of work that they must stay for quite a while in the ranks of the organization. They will not soon be earning what is regarded among their friends as a marrying income. In money, as well as in mind, they approach marriage with increasing tardiness. Their prolonged infancy is financial, as well as mental.

They say that college girls marry late. It is true enough. But it isn't properly stated.

The girls in the kind of family which college girls come from marry late.

It can be definitively established by statistics here considerately omitted that the age of marriage of college girls is no later than the age of marriage of their non-college sisters and acquaintances.

College is not a cause. It is a symptom.

Out of the prolongation of infancy in the "middle class" has come the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of the world.

It was by no vagary of chance that the demand of women for the higher education came simultaneously with the change from the old industrial home to the new, more purely domestic home. (It may be a higher, nobler type of home. We are not here discussing that point.)

As the home ceased to provide its daughters with adequate education and with adequate employment, what was their situation? In the "working class" it was simply this: That they went into factories and that their sweethearts married them somewhat later than had previously been the case, because their share as wives in the support of the family was increasingly smaller. But the "working class" man soon reaches his maximum earning capacity in his craft and stays there. His financial infancy is short, compared with that of the "middle class" man. He therefore marries younger.

In the "middle class," however, Science and System began to lengthen the mental and financial infancy of the men to such an extent that the "old maid" of twenty-three became common. What were the girls in the "middle class" to do while the boys were growing up to be men, in mind and in money?

The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick at her and say "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps indoors."

Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went in to a job. The "middle class" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.

Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's colleges.

There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid, blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day makes us veil our eves before the nobility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of the needs, of the women of the times.

But the needs were there, the need to be something, the need to do something, self-respecting, self supporting. The existence of these needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once issued a large supply of teachers.

This goes back to the fountainhead of the higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was running her school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was training young women to TEACH, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school in the United States.

From that time to this most college women have taught school before getting married. The higher education of women has been, in economic effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher.

But isn't it the purpose of the colleges to avoid training their pupils for specific occupations? Isn't it their purpose to give their pupils discipline and culture, pure and broad, unaffected by commercial intention? Isn't that what colleges are, and ought to be, for?

On the shore of this vast and violent controversy we discreetly pause and stealthily sidle off, taking note of just three reefs of solid fact which unsubmergably jut out above the surface of the raging waters.

First. The colleges instruct their pupils in the subjects which those pupils subsequently teach.

Second. The pupils specialize in the subjects which they are going to teach.

Third. The colleges, besides providing the future teachers with subjects, almost always offer to provide them with instruction in the principles of education, and frequently offer to provide them with instruction in the very technique of classroom work.

Our verdict, therefore, which we hope will be satisfactory to counsel on both sides, is that the college is by no means a trade school, but that if the woman who is going to earn her living will choose the one trade of teaching, she can almost always get a pretty fair trade training by going to college.

We are more interested in observing that the amount of trade training which a teacher is expected to take is increasing year by year. In teaching, as in other trades, the period and scope of preliminary preparation continue to expand.