into the field for study and instruction under recognized leaders who cannot bring their work to the college. We need something akin to the clinic and hospital service of the medical school. When academic tradition interferes with professional needs, away with red tape. When something can be learned from an expert in a few hours, why refuse to call in the expert or tie it up with a dozen other things in order to make out a two-hour course for a semester? A teachers' college supported by the state should have all the educational resources of the state at its command. Its students should be welcome in any schoolroom and have access to all the information possessed by any principal or superintendent of schools. Its invitation to any teacher in the state to share instruction for an hour or a week should be deemed both a professional honor and a patriotic duty. To one accustomed to the limitations placed upon a private institution, the opportunities open to such a state institution as this seem boundless. C CHAPTER IX COEDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS 1 OEDUCATION is a failure: The Horace Mann This startling headline in a New York daily paper prefaced the announcement of a change in policy with respect to our college schools. The fact is that after twenty-five years of coeducation we tried the experiment of separating the sexes during the last six of the twelve years' course. The kindergarten and first six grades of the elementary school will remain coeducational. Beginning with the seventh grade, the boys go to a school at 246th Street, six miles distant, and the girls remain in the present building at 120th Street. The boys' school has a playground of four acres fitted for their use in all kinds of weather. The girls have the fine gymnasium and swimming-pool formerly shared with the boys. Material equipment, therefore, is about equalized. The special feature of the boys' school is its outdoor lifea country school for boys; the special advantages of the girls' school will be its facilities for teaching the household arts, fine arts, and music. Is coeducation a failure? If a country school is good for city boys, why not for city girls? Can't the household arts and other technical subjects be taught as well in one place as in another? Why separate the boys and 1 A revised reprint from GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, October, 1913, used by courtesy of the publishers. girls unless, perchance, you think coeducation a failure? A matter of expediency. Those who believe that coeducation is a failure will not be changed by any explanation that I can give, but I insist that our action has no bearing whatever on the main question. We have done only what every good school and every wise community would do under similar conditions. When the present school building was erected it was surrounded by vacant blocks. Playgrounds were easily accessible. Now the city hems us in. Moreover, the school was much smaller than now. School life was simpler, and no such demand was made upon us for the technical training of girls as has come everywhere within the past ten years. Our policy is to keep the school to the front and make it in every way as good as we know how. Our present building and equipment represent an investment of upward of $500,000. It is too valuable to abandon, but it can be made into an ideal school for girls. For three years the boys have been going afternoons in good weather to the playground at 246th Street. The time spent on the trains twenty-five minutes each way—is a considerable loss, and in order to get in an hour or two in daylight the school has had to close at two o'clock. Under the new plan the boys will spend the day at the country school, and get their lessons and sports whenever each can be done best. The separation will give ample room for both schools, simplify the program, and make possible a more complete curriculum for each. These are the considerations which led us to change a policy of twenty-five years' standing. They are all matters of expediency, and say nothing of the success or failure of coeducation. What is coeducation? My explanation is intended merely to show that our action was not the result of profound conviction of the right or wrong of coeducation, and most certainly it was not forced by any dissatisfaction with a school of both sexes, nor any inability to accomplish what the school set out to do when it was established. No breath of scandal has ever touched it, and from first to last it has been a big happy family. I assume that what prompts a discussion of coeducation in the high school is the knowledge that the problem which confronts us also confronts many other schools. Our experience is not isolated. Communities which have maintained coeducational high schools for a generation are now raising the question for the first time whether or not it is best to do as they have been doing. Questions which many of us thought settled years ago are coming up to vex us. In the light of recent development in secondary education, how shall they be answered? The first step is to get a clear understanding of what is meant by coeducation. In the minds of some it apparently means that girls should have identically the same schooling as boys. Such a conception may have been justified at a time when it was claimed that girls' intellects were inferior to boys', that a woman should not aspire to do a man's work anywhere-least of all in school and college. But no one who has taught boys and girls together can make that argument and keep a straight face. It is no longer necessary to put boys and girls together in school or college simply to demonstrate that girls are not the inferiors of their brothers. Equipment and efficiency. When coeducation is un derstood to mean identical education for all, the problem is reduced to its lowest terms, and becomes an absurdity. It is long since any one has seriously advocated a curriculum so narrow and impoverished as to be acceptable to all. Even in schools where all must take the same lessons and submit to the same instruction, it does not follow that all pupils get the same mental pabulum. No two pupils get the same reaction, mental or spiritual, from any school exercise. One boy may pick his way laboriously through Caesar's Commentaries and retain just enough to earn a passing mark at the end of the term; another, apparently doing the same task, may be leading an imaginary Roman legion in a conquest of the world. The one is working for a diploma; the other is getting an education. Meeting the pupil's needs. The pedagogical advance in recent years has been directed primarily toward better teaching. There has been great material betterment, to be sure, but fine buildings and improved equipment are worth while only as means of helping the teacher to do more inspiring work. In methods of instruction our teachers are trained to depend less upon the grind and discipline of school-keeping, and more upon teaching in such a way as to secure a wholesome respect for the subject of instruction and, if possible, an abiding interest in it. It is well known that most boys and girls have their likes and dislikes in school subjects. Time was when a schoolboy's soul was saved by the mortification of the flesh. In some places, where the school is too poor to afford a variety, the puritanic argument is still heard, but I do not know of any school that has grown from, say, |