o college for some time to come. Our schools, too,
show as high an average of work for girls as for boys, but this must not
be wholly put down to equal resources. Girls, on the average, are more
anxious for approval than boys are, and if work is assigned them, in
spite of disadvantages they are quite as likely to do it as boys are.

Nor are we to suppose that the best average education for the present
girls would show just the same average in direction as the best average
education for boys.

Oberlin, the oldest experiment in co-education at college, arranges its
plans with especial reference to the average differences between the
quantity and direction of the school-work at present demanded for men
and women. It has its "Ladies' Course," as well as its University
Course. The young women are allowed to pursue the University Course,
though out of the four or five hundred young women who are in
attendance, those who have taken degrees give only an average of about
two in a year. At Antioch there was a large range of optional subjects,
and among them was Greek, which the Western young men were about as much
disposed to omit as the young women. The curriculums of the Western high
schools have also a wide optional margin.

The growing educational sentiment is setting aside the old idea that it
is well for all boys to pursue the same line of study, independent of
tastes, and past and prospective circumstances in life; and another
still more pernicious notion is sure soon to give way, that boys and
young men, of whatever physical and brain power, are to be put through a
definite course of study in just the same time. No one thinks it much of
a guarantee for a man's scholarship that he holds an A.B. or an A.M.
degree. This only assures us that he has spent four years at some
institution that has a right to confer these degrees. When our system of
schools and colleges is sufficiently flexible to meet the varying needs
of boys and young men, we shall not find that it lacks anything to adapt
it to the varying needs of boys and girls, or men and women. Men furnish
us with examples through the whole scale of physical power and mental
aptitude, and so do women.

The best girls will at least have no difficulty in carrying on three
subjects of study, while the best boys carry on four; and girls not only
can, but as a rule do, remain longer at school than the boys. It would
be well, too, to give more credit to the specialties of girl