THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE AND ENGLISH GIRLS.
THE University of Cambridge is in embarrassment. Women are asking to eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table, and the Dons are in difficulty and in danger of being churlish. The question now before them is whether or not their scheme of local examination shall be extended to girls :—and the ancient corporation—it is curious, by the way, how modern particles can be moulded by antique traditions into a body which retains not only the dignity but the prepossessions of antiquity,—is under- stood to be chiefly exercised in spirit by the harassing doubt whether it be not contrary "to the general fitness of things" that the University should interfere with any matters relating to girls. In fact there is no other ground substantial or unsubstantial to allege. We can well understand that the University might hesitate long about sanctioning a curriculum which should be understood to set up a standard for a good general female educa- tion. They have not the elements for judging what course of study is best adapted to train and discipline and strengthen the minds of average women, and, in the absence of such knowledge, to set up a standard like that set before University graduates of the other sex, might do more harm than good. Miss Cobbe indeed and the more ambitious of the advocates of female education, will not hear of any separate general training for women at all. Miss Cobbe said recently in a clever but exceedingly hasty letter to the Times :—" A separate court and a different standard of education for women, even if more judiciously fitted for them, will never give them the same motive for effort, because its rewards will never be of the same value, and it will never bring them up to the same attainments, or cure their besetting sin of mental slovenliness, but rather, on the contrary, perpetuate that sentiment which is the bane of all female study—art and literature—the notion that a mediocre achievement is very good—for a woman." "Why a com- mon standard of general education set before women only, should have less stimulating influence over women, than a common
standard of general education set before men only, has had over men, Miss Cobbe does not explain. If the exclusion of women from men's intellectual field of general education has not made men slovenly, we do not see why the exclusion of men from women's field should have that effect upon women. But whether it be so or not is not the question. If you once set up for women a standard of intellectual culture not the best fitted to train and mature women of average endowments you- fail in your main purpose, which is not to stimulate women to pull against men at a disadvantage on a field
that was chosen with only men in view,—but to educate the female intellect to the same degree of perfection in its own sphere as the
masculine attains in that which has been chosen twits appropriate training-ground. Miss Cobbe is so ambitious for an unmeaning equality as to miss the very essence of her case. But the Cambridge local examinations do not profess either to force women's minds into the training regarded as most suitable to men, or to determine what the new standard for women should be. On the contrary, these examinations would offer the very best means for forming such a standard, because out of a large number of studies they per- mit the candidate within certain elastic limits to select his (or her) own subject for examination, and only test how far the knowledge acquired on these subjects is thorough or the reverse. This would be the best of all means for ascertaining the subjects on which girls exhibit the largest amount of taste, capacity, and originality,—and also could not fail to test to a considerable extent their predominant deficiencies. In this manner the very experience that is most wanted before any course of general education for girls could be prescribed as the most effective, would be gained. We should have an experiment on a large scale applied by some of the ablest teachers of the time, and in the meantime, without prejudging the most important of the questions at issue, a very effective spur would be given to thoroughness of instruction in all branches of girls' education.
The only real obstacle, then, which the University of Cambridge feels is the vague apprehension that it is unbecoming to mix them- selves up in the alien question of female learning. A minor excuse has indeed been started that the examiners for the local exami- nations have already too much to do, and could not undertake more work. But this is obviously a plea of the same nature as "Not at home." We happen to know that almost all of the Cambridge examiners who were engaged in the recent experiment are on the side of adopting it into the system. One who had a very laborious department, certainly that in which the girls failed most conspicuously, arithmetic, has we believe expressed his wil- lingness to undertake it again. So that in fact the only substantial objection in the Senate is the vague one with which we started,-- that it is "contrary to the general fitness of things" for the Uni- versity to interfere with the teaching of girls. The old gen- tlemen who have started this somewhat shadowy difficulty have, however, hit upon a really formidable defence,—precisely because it throws into the form of objection which most appeals to English caution and reserve—the objection to meddling in another province of duty than your own—a mere conservative prejudice against a seeming novelty. Still if any one attempts to penetrate beyond the apparent modesty of the plea he soon finds that it is a wreath of mist. It might have been a plausible objection to the whole scheme of local examinations that the University's proper duty is to test the training which its own colleges have given,—that it is an educating and not a mere examining machine, and that it does not profess to gauge the teaching of others, but only to give and then gauge its own. Such a view of duty would at least have been plausible. But that has been long given up. The University has admitted its special opportunities for improving, by testing, the general education of the country. It has gone out into the highways and hedges to see how it could— not feed the people but help them to know good food from bad,— and now it suddenly hesitates and questions itself whether its wish and desire to test the quality of the people's food were not by some law of nature and fitness of things limited to the food of one sex. Suppose the other sex -were all habitually fed on indigestible confectionary, — the trifle or tipsy-cake of the mind, — would it not be utterly contrary to "the fitness of things" for the University to bring this fact to light ? If the University really thinks so, it must be because they regard knowledge and intellectual capacity in a girl as something different in kind (though called by the same name) from knowledge and intellectual capacity in a boy. A commission self-appointed to inquire into the health of children of the middle class would never suddenly stop to ask itself if it was part of its object to report on the health of girls, for the mere idea of such a distinction in kind between the health and sickness of one sex and
of the other—though such a distinction has really more meaning in physical than in intellectual matters—that the same qualifications would not qualify to deal with both, would be absurd. And if there- fore the Universities,when once embarked on the effort of testing the general education of the middle classes, fancy it "contrary to the fitness of things" to test the teaching of girls, it can only be because they have some vague impression that a girl's knowledge of fractions, or Latin grammar, or French composition, and her grasp of the theory of each, must be something different in kind, and requiring to be probed and valued by different methods, from a boy's knowledge of the same subjects. Otherwise they would never think of being driven back from their work by the mere bugbear of costume,—by the fact that the knowledge to be tested belongs to persons in Innalins or silks instead of tweeds or broad- cloths.
But perhaps the objection about which the Cambridge Senate is debating is not that women's knowledge and intelligence is different in kind from men's, but that it is of indefinitely less importance since the business of the world is conducted by men, and only the business of the nursery, drawing-room, and kitchen by women. This is scarcely a ground tenable by a University,— which professes to hold general education, or the training of the intellect into its most perfect form and strength, to be far above professional education, and which trains those who are born for learned leisure with certainly no less care than those who are doomed to toil. And in fact the more true it is, if it is true, that women are not likely to turn their education to any professional use, not likely to use it in scientific achievements or even artistic success, the more instead of the less proportional importance it becomes that their general education should be thorough,—just as previous acquirements become of far more importance to the blind than to those who are less closely shut up with their own memo- ries. If women have intellects at all, and do not use them in the bustle of the world, those intellects depend still more on the world of ideas than men's, which are burnished in the conflicts of life. "I am sure," says Miss Emily Davies, in her able and graphic plea for a better plan of secondary instruction for girls, "that busy people, and especially busy men, have a very faint and feeble con- ception of what dulness is. They overtax their own brains, and by way of compensation they have invented the doctrine of vicarious rest, according to which men are justified in wearing themselves out, so long as women can be kept in a state of wholesome rust. We hear a great deal of the disastrous effects which would follow if women were to abandon the habits of elegant leisure by which the balance is supposed to be redressed. The otium BIKE diynit ate of drawing-rooms presents itself to men's minds in enviable contrast with the bustle and turmoil of an active career. They 'hearken what the inner spirit sings,—there is no joy but calm.' And they think dulness is calm. If they had ever tried what it is to be a young lady they would know better ; "—certainly if Miss Davies's estimate of a young lady's life be correct,—fortunately for us it is impossible to test it,—women must assuredly be want- ing in invention. The late Archbishop of Dublin said he could never hear of more than one invention made by a woman, and that was an improvement in the manufacture of soda water by a Miss Thwaites. But if so there is all the more need for cultivation of the intellect. The better you succeed in showing that a woman has no better employment for her leisure than intellectual pursuits the -greater is the importance to her of intellectual memories and tastes. It would be a curious plea for a University to make for declin- ing to test intellectual acquirements that their chief value is likely to be for their own sakes, and not as levers to move the world. If Universities have a function in life at all, it is to teach the value of truth as an end. The world needs no Universities to teach it the value of truth as a means.
Holding firmly, then, that the true standard of general education for women has still to be sought, and believing with some con- fidence that it will prove to be a different standard from that most suitable for men,—it seems to us clear that the Universities can- not exclude women from the middle-class local examinations in a list of alternative subjects, without stultifying themselves and de- clining to receive the very experience out of which a true standard of general education for girls might best be constructed. The Uni- versity of Cambridge probably believes (as we do) in intellectual gender,—the gender, that is, of intellectual capacity ; but we trust it does not believe that the laws of thought or language, mathe- matics, classics, or history, admit of different tests in minds of different gender,—or that it can be less the duty of a University to see that knowledge is sound and thorough in the daughters of the people than in the sons.
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