poses of growth that won the opportunity of education; it was rather because the democratic State needed common schools, and women as the natural teachers of the race must go out from the hearthside training of children into the more formal and better organized system of modern education. The first reasons were, therefore, those of social thrift rather than of justice to women, as was shown so obviously in the inauguration of normal schools. As a distinguished gentleman said, when urging an appropriation for a State normal. school before a legislative committee (in the fifties of the nineteenth century): "Gentlemen, we have all observed the fine manner in which the best and most cultivated women are educating their own children, and by utilizing this gift of women we may put two females in every school to teach at half the price we now pay one inferior male." 1 On that basis women. entered their first educational opportunity above the grammar grades and "female finishing school."

This small crumb of education, and the opening of high schools and academies of a better grade, together with the industrial changes wrought by the invention of power-driven machinery, combined to make it more and more clear that women must be counted in as persons, as well as a class of social servants, and must "emerge," along with all other submerged "masses,' into individuality. Democracy means the liberation and development of a wider and wider range of human power. When democracy touched the feminine ideal

1See Women in Our Public Schools, A. G. Spencer, History of Rhode Island Public Schools.

it began "to suffer a sea change into something new and strange.' It began to be seen that the incapacity to have a "history" or to contribute to history might not be the supreme and only excellence in women. It began to be perceived that much power of achievement in women waited for the liberation of opportunity, as was the case in the restricted classes of men. The feminine ideal began to include not only ability to meet the demands of a social function, but capacity to share as a person in the larger life of the world of thought and of action. Then came, in a rush of practical answer to the demands of this new ideal, the opening of colleges and universities and technical schools to women, and the entrance of prepared women, not without friction and cruel suffering in many cases, but the successful entrance of women into the learned professions. The upmost reach, both in attainment and in security, in this educational opportunity for women is shown to-day in the United States in the coëducational State universities. These both crown our democratic system of free schools for the people, and also guarantee, past all whim of change, the right of women to equal schooling with men.

Women, as a matter of course, were at first admitted to institutions of higher learning, which had in all cases been fitted for men, and the demands of social life upon men; and they had to join on as best they might, whether the orders of the educational leaders made it easy or hard for them to keep step. Women, however, began to go to college just at the moment when education itself was entering upon the most pro

found transformation to which any system of inherited ideal and practice has ever been subjected. The culture of the schools of the past, the "liberal education" of the colleges, was intended for a select class of people who were to be "leaders." The type has been correctly defined as "classic"; which word in educational fields signifies far more than the learning of Greek and Latin. It means also, and more vitally, a system of education fibred upon a conception of education as the need of only a small class in the community. This classic education was intended for the training of ministers, lawyers, doctors, librarians, writers, and teachers in college. All technical preparation for work, even in these vocations, was left to apprenticeship to masters in the several arts; the training was, therefore, wholly "general."

In the nineteenth century a terrible iconoclast entered the Temples of Learning, and right and left he knocked the ancient gods off their pedestals. His name we call Science. Then commenced a vast enlargement of the curriculum. Then it began to be said "that no man could be truly educated who knew nothing of the Universe in which he lived or of the Facts that this new teacher bade us worship as the 'God of things as they are.'" Then the new teacher turned his attention from destroying ancient idols to serving as a magician of practical utility; and "pure science" joined forces with "applied science" to revolutionize the world of material and industrial and artistic effort. Then the practical American people began to say: If it is right for us to spend the people's money for the education

of ministers and lawyers and doctors, of writers, statesmen and teachers, it is right for us to spend the people's money also for the training of leaders in scientific achievement, for securing higher efficiency in industries, for the perfecting of mechanic arts, for the development of every form of human endeavor and the perfection of every sort of human ability, the outcome of which may be of social value. Then began the struggle between the classicists and the scientists, the end of which is not yet. Women, be it noted, came into the opportunity of higher education just at the moment when "the still air of delightful studies" was being rudely assailed by the voices of these disputants, each standing for the new or the old in college ideal. "New people," those who are just "arriving," are always most conservative and orthodox because least secure of their position; and hence the women's colleges at first gave, and many of them still give, most loyal adherence to the classic "faith once delivered to the (educational) saints." Not for worlds would some of them open their curriculum to questionable scientific courses on the same terms with mathematics, languages and the other inherited "courses leading to a degree."

The State universities, as was natural for the people's schools, first began to give full response to the people's needs that education should be democratized along with governmental forms. The charge of "utilitarianism" brought against the enlarged vocational tendencies of the modernized college and university is quite absurd, when we consider that all the old classic

education was distinctly a preparation for a few vocations. The only difference is that we are now trying to fit for many, instead of few vocations, and for a range of vocations which takes in others than those of distinctly literary nature. Very few people have ever been to college just "for the fun of it." They went in the past to get ready for leadership along lines defined by the then social need. They will go more and more to get ready for the vastly wider range of leadership that the present and the future social need defines.

In the rapid changes in curriculum induced by this movement for the democratizing of higher education the "special needs of women" began to be discussed, and efforts began to be made for supplying those needs in so far as they appeared clear to the educational leadership. The new feminine ideal, with its double demand both for women as developed persons, and for women as serviceable functionaries in the family life, began to write itself out in courses of study. The still widespread and dense confusion of mind as to which element in the feminine ideal should have first place and which should have right of way in preparation for life has made the whole approach to education for girls and women a confused and awkward process.

Beginning with the general needs of all little girls we at once, as in all elements of the "woman problem," reach into the deep places of the "human problem." The school and the feminine ideal are a part of "education and the larger life." This fact makes the present confusion as to the basic reasons for sending girls