Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls by Edward Hammond Clarke
page 77 of 105 (73%)
page 77 of 105 (73%)
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they have stronger bodies, a reproductive apparatus more normally
constructed, and a catamenial function less readily disturbed by effort, than their student sisters, who are not only younger than they, but are trained to push "brain-activity to an extreme." Give girls a fair chance for physical development at school, and they will be able in after life, with reasonable care of themselves, to answer the demands that may be made upon them. The identical education of the sexes has borne the fruit which we have pointed out. Their identical co-education will intensify the evils of separate identical education; for it will introduce the element of emulation, and it will introduce this element in its strongest form. It is easy to frame a theoretical emulation, in which results only are compared and tested, that would be healthy and invigorating; but such theoretical competition of the sexes is not at all the sort of steady, untiring, day-after-day competition that identical co-education implies. It is one thing to put up a goal a long way off,--five or six months or three or four years distant,--and tell boys and girls, each in their own way, to strive for it, and quite a different thing to put up the same goal, at the same distance, and oblige each sex to run their race for it side by side on the same road, in daily competition with each other, and with equal expenditure of force at all times. Identical co-education is racing in the latter way. The inevitable results of it have been shown in some of the cases we have narrated. The trial of it on a larger scale would only yield a larger number of similar degenerations, weaknesses, and sacrifices of noble lives. Put a boy and girl together upon the same course of study, with the same lofty ideal before them, and hold up to their eyes the daily incitements of comparative progress, and there will be awakened within them a stimulus unknown before, and that separate study does not |
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