Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1886 — “Higher Education” and Health. [ARTICLE]

“Higher Education” and Health.

The more ardent advocates of universal “higher education” for women—in the sense in which “higher education” is usually taken—will hardly be pleased Avith a recent article in tho Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, which draws one or two pointed morals from the physical weakness which too largely prevails among “highly educated” women. While educators generally are apt to insist that the young women graduated from the colleges are no Jess healthy than those who have stayed at home, yet close observation of the class which Dr. Holmes, in his “New Portfolio,” has aptly individualized in “the Terror,” will, in many cases, controvert their sweeping statements. As the Medical and Surgical Journal says: If the girls of the high and normal schools on their way to and from school, or if the freshman classes at our female colleges, recruited from the training schools in different parts of the country, are attentively observed, the query forces itself upon the mind of the thoughtful as to whether our present civilization, which prides itself so much on attempts at intellectual development, is not really as barbaric as

the social state of the fiatbeaded Indians, who attempt to increase their “longheadedness” by squeezing the antero-posterior diameter of the crania. We fear the educator, in his theoretical zeal, has overlooked the most important factor of all—the making of good citizens and good parents. Such a system of education may produce, in some instances, good results and give us future George Eliots, Maria Mitchells, Mary Somervilles, Putnam-Jacobis, etc., yet the records of the nervous wards and the lists of the nervous prostrations show that the success of a few individuals has been bought for the public at the price of many shattered lives of unsuccessful imitators. The Medical and Surgical Journal is far from laying all the blame for this state of affairs at the door of our educational system. In its opinion many ol the evil effects noted are due to unwise parental aspirations—to that code ol etiquette which represents and conventionalizes young girls, compelling them from the sports natural to hearty animal spirits into social and intellectual graces and accomplishments. There is a matter more important than the knowledge of Greek and the differential calculus. The “higher education,” in the sense of a r'gid scientific or classical training, is, and ought to be, an impossibility for the vast majority ol the wives and mothers of humanity. This, however, is far from an assertion that the broadest ethical and intellectual culture compatible Avith physical well being should be grudged or denied them. There are women, of course, to whom the “higher education” is a special object. But such women should not be esteemed as setting the standard of their sex. There is quite as much honor, for women as for men, in other paths of duty. “It is already a long time since the dyspeptic, narrow-chested, pale-faced, weak-eyed inale became an ob ect of interest by becoming a book-worm. A knowledge of Greek no longer condones a want of vigor and vivacity in the male, and we do not believe it ie anymore likely to in the female. Those who run any risk of health by pursuing advanced studies had best no! trifle with the experiment.— Boston Advertiser.