THE
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
DECEMBER, 1902.
| THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN.[1] |
By President DAVID STARR JORDAN,
LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY.
THE subject of the higher training of young women may resolve itself into 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?
As to the first question: It 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. No parent should let either boy or girl enter life with any less preparation than the best he can give. It is true that many college graduates, boys and girls alike, do not amount to much after the schools have done all they can. It is true also that higher education is not a question alone of preparing great men for great things. It must prepare even little men for greater things than they would otherwise have found possible. And so it is with the education of women. The needs of the time are imperative. The highest product of social evolution is the growth of the civilized home, the home that only a wise, cultivated and high-minded woman can make. To furnish such women is one of the worthiest functions of higher education. No young women capable of becoming such should be condemned to anything lower. Even with those who are in appearance too dull or too vacillating to reach any high ideal of wisdom, this may be said—it does no harm to try. A few hundred dollars is not much to spend on an experiment of such moment. Four of the
- ↑ Abstract of an address before the Federation of Woman's Clubs, Los Angeles, May 5, 1902.
