Part 235

"When to a few daring minds the conviction came that education was a right of personality rather than of sex, and when there was added to this growing sentiment the pressing demand for educated women as teachers and as leaders in philanthropy, the simplest means of equipping women with the needful preparation was found in the existing schools and colleges. … In nearly every State west of the Alleghanies, 'Universities' had been founded by the voluntary tax of the whole population. Connected with all the more powerful religious denominations were schools and colleges which called upon their adherents for gifts and students. These democratic institutions had the vigor of youth, and were ambitious and struggling. 'Why,' asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, 'should not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain?' It is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of a similar kind, co-education was established in some colleges at their beginning, in others after debate, and by a radical change in policy. When once the chivalrous desire was aroused to give girls as good an education as their brothers, Western men carried out the principle unflinchingly. From the kindergarten to the preparation for the doctorate of philosophy, educational opportunities are now practically alike for men and women. The total number of colleges of arts and sciences empowered by law to give degrees, reporting to Washington in 1888, was three hundred and eighty-nine. Of these, two hundred and thirty-seven, or nearly two-thirds, were co-educational. Among them are nearly all the State universities, and nearly all the colleges under the patronage of the Protestant sects. Hitherto I have spoken as if co-education were a Western movement; and in the West it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. But it originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training, in Massachusetts. Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836, three years after the foundation of co-educational Oberlin, and in the very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large hope of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for young men just two hundred years before. Ipswich and Abbot Academies in Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. It has been the dominant sentiment in the East that boys and girls should be educated separately. The older, more generously endowed, more conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the dormitory system, have remained closed to women. … In the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women's colleges which are the richest in endowments and students of any in the world were founded and set in motion. These colleges—Vassar, opened in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885—have received in gifts of every kind about $6,000,000, and are educating nearly two thousand students. For the whole country the Commissioner of Education reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior instruction of women, with more than twenty-five, thousand students. But these resources proved inadequate. There came an increasing demand, especially from teachers, for education of all sorts. … In an attempt to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began twelve years ago [in 1879] to provide a few women with instruction from members of the Harvard faculty. … Barnard College in New York is an annex of Columbia only in a sense, for not all her instruction is given by Columbia's teaching force, though Columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. The new woman's college at Cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to, Adelbert College, though to a still greater extent she provides independent instruction."

_A. F. Palmer, Review of the Higher Education of Women (Woman and the Higher Education, pages 105-127)._

"The Cleveland College for Women, Cleveland, Ohio, was first opened for instruction in 1888 as a department of Western Reserve University. At the same time the trustees of the university decided to receive no more women into Adelbert College. That the success of the new school might be assured, the faculty of Adelbert College generously offered their services for a term of years as instructors. During the first year twenty-three young women were admitted, but two of whom were in the regular courses. During 1889-90 the number of students increased to thirty-eight. … In 1887 Evelyn College, an institution for women, was opened at Princeton, N. J. Its location at this place gives the institution very great advantages, inasmuch as the use of the libraries and museums of the College of New Jersey, popularly known as Princeton College, are granted to the students."

_U. S. Commissioner of Education, Report, 1889-90, volume 2, page 744._

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"The latest report of the United States Commissioner of Education contains over two hundred institutions for the superior education of women. The list includes colleges and seminaries entitled to confer degrees, and a few seminaries, whose work is of equal merit, which do not give degrees. Of these more than two hundred institutions for the education of women exclusively, only 47 are situated within [western states]. … Of these 47, but 30 are chartered with authority to confer degrees. … The extent to which the higher education of women is in the West identified with co-education, can be seen by comparing the two statements above given. Of the total 212 higher institutions receiving women, and of the total 195 such institutions which confer the regular degrees in arts, science, and letters, upon their graduates, 165 are co-educational. … Among colleges characterized from birth by a liberal and progressive spirit may be mentioned 'The Cincinnati Wesleyan Woman's College.' This institution was chartered in 1842, and claims to be 'the first liberal collegiate institution in the world for the exclusive education of women.' … The West is committed to co-education, excepting only the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, and the Protestant Episcopal sects,—which are not yet, as sects, committed to the collegiate education of women at all,—and the Presbyterian sect, whose support, in the West, of 14 co-educational colleges against 4 for the separate education of young men, almost commits it to the co-educational idea. … In 1853, Antioch College was opened at Yellow Springs, Ohio. It was the first endeavor in the West to found a college under Christian but non-sectarian auspices. Its president, Horace Mann, wrote of it: 'Antioch is now the only first-class college in all the West that is really an unsectarian institution.' … Antioch was from the first avowedly co-educational."

_M. W. Sewall, Education of Women in the Western States (Woman's Work in America, pages 61-70)._

"Most people would probably be ready to say that except for the newly founded Woman's College in Baltimore and Tulane University [State university of Louisiana], the collegiate education of women does not exist in the South. But as matter of fact, there are no less than one hundred and fifty institutions in the South which are authorized by the Legislatures of their respective States to confer the regular college degrees upon women. Of these, forty-one are co-educational, eighty-eight are for women alone, and twenty-one are for colored persons of both sexes. The bureau of education makes no attempt to go behind the verdict of the State Legislatures, but on looking over the catalogues of all these institutions it is, as might have been expected, easy to see that the great majority of them are not in any degree colleges, in the ordinary sense of the word. Not a single one of the so-called female colleges presents a real college course, and many of the co-educational colleges are colleges only in name."

_C. L. Franklin, Education of Women in the Southern States (Woman's Work in America, pages 93-94)._

EDUCATION: A. D. 1816-1892, Froebel and the Kindergarten.

"Frœbel (Friedrich Wilhelm August) was born April 21, 1782, at Oberweissbach, in the principality of Schwanburg-Rudolstadt. His mother died when he was so young that he never even remembered her; and he was left to the care of an ignorant maid-of-all-work, who simply provided for his bodily wants. … Not until he was ten years of age did he receive the slightest regular instruction. He was then sent to school, to an uncle who lived in the neighborhood, … He pronounced the boy to be idle (which, from his point of view, was quite true) and lazy (which certainly was not true)—a boy, in short, that you could do nothing with. … It was necessary for him to earn his bread, and we next find him a sort of apprentice to a woodsman in the great Thuringian forest. Here, as he afterward tells us, he lived some years in cordial intercourse with nature and mathematics, learning even then, though unconsciously, from the teaching he received, how to teach others. … In 1801 he went to the University of Jena, where he attended lectures on natural history, physics, and mathematics; but, as he tells us, gained little from them. … This … was put an end to by the failure of means to stay at the University. For the next few years he tried various occupations. … While engaged in an architect's office at Frankfort, he formed an acquaintance with the Rector of the Model School, a man named Gruner. Gruner saw the capabilities of Frœbel, and detected also his entire want of interest in the work that he was doing; and one day suddenly said to him: 'Give up your architect's business; you will do nothing at it. Be a teacher. We want one now in the school; you shall have the place.' This was the turning point in Frœbel's life. He accepted the engagement, began work at once, and tells us that the first time he found himself in the midst of a class of 30 or 40 boys, he felt that he was in the element that he had missed so long—'the fish was in the water.' He was inexpressibly happy. … In a calmer mood he severely questioned himself as to the means by which he was to satisfy the demands of his new position. About this time he met with some of Pestalozzi's writings, which so deeply impressed him that he determined to go to Yverdun and study Pestalozzi on the spot. He accomplished his purpose, and lived and worked for two years with Pestalozzi. His experience at Yverdun impressed him with the conviction that the science of education had still to draw out from Pestalozzi's system those fundamental principles which Pestalozzi himself did not comprehend. 'And therefore,' says Schmidt, 'this genial disciple of Pestalozzi supplemented his system by advancing from the point which Pestalozzi had reached through pressure from without, to the innermost conception of man, and arriving at the thought of the true development and culture of mankind.' … His educational career commenced November 13th, 1816, in Greisheim, a little village near Stadt-Ilm, in Thuringia; but in 1817, when his Pestalozzian friend, Middendorf, joined him … the school was transferred to the beautiful village of Keilhau, near Rudolstadt, which may be considered as his chief starting-place. … Langenthal, another Pestalozzian, associated himself with them, and they commenced building a house. The number of pupils rose to twelve in 1818. Then the daughter of war-counselor Hoffman of Berlin, from enthusiasm for Frœbel's educational ideas, became his wife. She had a considerable dowry, which, together with the accession of Frœbel's elder brother, increased the funds and welfare of the school. In 1831 he was invited by the composer, Schnyder von Wartensee, to erect a similar garden on his estate, near the lake of Sempach, in the canton Luzern. It was done. Frœbel changed his residence the next year, from Keilhau to Switzerland. In 1834 the government of Bern invited him to arrange a training course for teachers in Burgdorf. In 1835 he became principal of the orphan asylum in Burgdorf, but in 1836 he and his wife wished to return to Germany. There he was active in Berlin, Keilhau, Blankenburg, Dresden, Liebenstein in Thuringia, Hamburg, (1849,) and Marienthal, near Liebenstein, where he lived until his decease in 1852, among the young ladies, whom he trained as nurses for the kindergarten, and the little children who attended his school."

_H. Barnard, editor, Papers on Froebel's Kindergarten: Memoir._

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"The child thinks only through symbols. In other words, it explains all it sees not by the recorded experience of others, as does an adult, but by marshaling and comparing its own concept or symbol of what it has itself seen. Its sole activity is play. 'The school begins with teaching the conventionalities of intelligence. Froebel would have the younger children receive a symbolic education in plays, games, and occupations which symbolize the primitive arts of man.' For this purpose, the child is led through a series of primitive occupations in plaiting, weaving, and modeling, through games and dances, which bring into play all the social relations, and through songs and the simple use of number, form and language. The 'gifts' all play their manifold purpose, inspiring the child, awakening its interest, leading the individual along the path the race has trod, and teaching social self-control. The system has its palpable dangers. The better and more intricate the tool, the more skill needed in its safe use. … The kindergarten requires trained hands. With trivial teachers its methods may easily degenerate into mere amusement, and thwart all tendency to attention, application, or industry. Valuable as it is in its hints for the care and development of children, its gay round needs to be ballasted with the purpose and theory uppermost in Froebel's mind when he opened his first school in a German peasant village, down whose main street a brook tumbled, and through whose lanes the halberdier still walked by night and sang the hours. It is idle to suppose that Froebel founded a perfect system, or to insist on all the details of the professional kindergartner's creed. Here as elsewhere, and aforetime, it has taken only forty years from the founder's death for faith to degenerate into religion and sect. But the central purpose he had in view must be steadily maintained. He sought his ends through play, and not through work. It is as dangerous for this method to harden into an approach to the primary school as it is for it to soften into a riot of misrule, and lax observance of order. … Switzerland, then the only republic in Europe, was the first country to adopt Froebel's method, though in some Swiss towns the kindergarten is still supported by private associations. France, another republic, has more children beginning school under an adaptation of Froebel than all the rest of the world put together. It was Froebel's own opinion that 'the spirit of American nationality was the only one in the world with which his method was in complete harmony, and to which its legitimate institutions would present no barriers.' The figures given below of the growth of the kindergarten in this country are the best possible proof of the truth of Froebel's prescient assertion. … In 1870 there were in this country only five kindergarten schools, and in 1872 the National Education Association at its Boston meeting appointed a committee which reported a year later recommending the system. Between 1870 and 1873, experimental kindergartens were established in Boston, Cleveland, and St. Louis, public attention was enlisted by the efforts of Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the most important worker in the early history of the kindergarten in this country, and the system began a rapid growth. Taking private and public kindergartens together, the advance of the system has displayed this most rapid progress:

1875 1880 1885 1891-2 Schools. 95 232 413 1,001 Teachers. 216 524 902 2,242 Pupils. 2,809 8,871 18,780 50,423

Down to 1880, these figures, outside of St. Louis, relate almost altogether to private schools. By 1885 the public kindergartens were not over a fifth in number of the schools, and held not over a fourth of the pupils. In the figures last given in this table there are 724 private kindergartens with 1,517 teachers and 29,357 pupils, and 277 public kindergartens with 725 teachers and 21,066 pupils, so that the latter have now 27 per cent. of the schools, 33 per cent. of the teachers, and 42 per cent. of the pupils. … Yet great as is this advance, the kindergarten as yet plays but an infinitesimal part in our educational system as a whole. … Of the sixteen American cities with a population of over 200,000 in 1890, only four—Philadelphia, Boston, Milwaukee, and St. Louis have incorporated the kindergarten on any large scale in their public-school systems. Four more—New York, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Buffalo—have kindergarten associations organized to introduce the new method as a part of free public education."

_T. Williams, The Kindergarten Movement (The Century, January, 1893)._

EDUCATION: A. D. 1865-1883. The Higher Education of Women in England.