them. A women's "Annex" to Harvard which was started in 1879 developed by 1894 into Radcliffe College, affiliated with Harvard University. Barnard College for women, which forms a part of Columbia University, began its work in 1889.

In various ways, according to the social conditions and ideals prevailing in different localities, the need for the higher education of women has been met. Coeducation is not popular, or at least not fashionable, in the East; but there are in New York State alone three coeducational universities of over six thousand students each-Cornell, Syracuse, and New York. All the leading universities of the country, East or West, with the exception of Princeton and some Catholic institutions, admit women to summer schools or make other provision for them. At Columbia and Yale women are admitted to the regular graduate course on the same terms as men.

Of the 563 colleges and universities listed in the 1916 Report of the United States Commissioner of Education about sixty per cent are coeducational, twenty-five per cent are for men only, and fifteen per cent are for women only. Of the institutions that exclude women more than a third are Roman Catholic, and many of the others are technical

schools or theological seminaries. Coeducational schools now provide about ninety-six per cent of the elementary education and ninety per cent of the secondary education in the United States. The attendance of women at institutions of higher education has more than doubled since 1893. The trend for three decades is shown by the following figures:

If we regard the high schools as giving a liberal education — and some of them are better than the colleges of a hundred years ago more women than men are being liberally educated. The apprehensions formerly entertained of physical, mental, and moral injury to women through college work have been proved illusory by a half century of experience, and the only questions now under discussion concern the place and the character of such education.

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW EDUCATION

The democracy which proclaims equality of opportunity as its ideal requires an education in which learning and social application, ideas and practice, work and recognition of the meaning of what is done, are united from the beginning and for all. —John Dewey.

WHAT is "the new education?" And why is it called "new"? The second question is perhaps harder to answer than the first. The new education is distinguished by the broadness of its course of study. It is probable that the boy or girl of ten in a good city school is now learning a greater variety of interesting and important things than the average university student of a century ago. Public education began with what may be called the "tool" subjects reading, writing, and arithmetic -- because they are chiefly important as instruments in the acquisition and use of information rather than bodies of knowledge in themselves. Then in the early days of the republic there were added “information" or "content" subjects, such

as geography, history, and natural science. In very recent years what may be called "self-expression" subjects, including music, drawing, cooking, carpentry, and calisthenics, were introduced into the schools as fast as public opinion would permit. All these have their practical side and in a sense are "tool" subjects as truly as the three R's, but they are also designed to provide an opportunity for a motor response which would balance the abstract and bookish studies and give the child who thinks in concrete terms a chance to show practical ability and constructive skill.

More significant than the change in the curriculum is the alteration which took place in the relation between teacher and pupil. The attempt to reduce an active child to a state of passive obedience in which he would offer the least resistance to the information poured into him has largely given place to an attempt on the part of the teacher to entice the dull or shy youngster into activity. The old schoolroom motto was: "Don't speak until you are spoken to!" The new motto might well be: "Tell me what your thought's like."

Finally, the new education postpones the introduction of a new subject until the child can understand its use in his own life. There can be no

question of the soundness of the principle that the form in which instruction is given should always take into consideration the age of the child and his interests at that age, although once in a while the teacher is disconcerted by finding a pupil who advances too rapidly in the scale of evolution and who wants to read Alexander Pope when he "ought" to be enraptured with Indian life as depicted in Hiawatha.

To a great extent the new education is new only in the sense that the school now teaches what once was learned outside its walls. The twentieth century lad who learns at school to swim, to play ball, to build bird-houses, to care for a vegetable garden, or to mend a broken lock, and the girl who studies cooking, sewing, housework, first aid to the injured, and piano practice, may graduate no wiser than the children of a past generation who did all these things on the farm and went to school for a few weeks in winter to learn spelling and copper-plate penmanship. The new methods in education are largely based on principles that have been the commonplaces of educational theorists for generations. But it is not often that the theorist and the practical teacher are one. In America, especially, the new education has come into existence from the