. It necessitates a more
rational system of study, a more profound training, a more intelligent
view of the real character of intellectual life, and of the exercises
required to develop it. It necessitates a concentration of intellectual
effort into four or six hours out of the twenty-four, instead of a
useless diffusion of intellectual peddling over ten or twelve. It
necessitates an extension of the term of years allowed for education,
and the giving up the fashionable notion that a girl is to be "finished"
at seventeen or eighteen, while her brother continues to pursue his
studies until twenty-two or twenty-five. It necessitates, finally, the
most careful individual adjustment to each different case; and to all
its peculiarities, mental, moral, and physical--quite as frequently,
therefore, necessitates the education of girls apart from one another as
apart from boys.

But this necessity is not permanent. Dr. Clarke himself admits that if
the one precaution upon which he insists be observed during the first
years of adolescence, it will become unnecessary when the constitution
is formed. But neither Dr. Clarke nor his reviewers seem to see that
this admission annihilates the only objection made by him to the
co-education of the sexes. For that is especially demanded as the only
means by which women may be enabled to enjoy a technically superior
education, as distinguished from the primary and secondary, and such
education does not begin until eighteen. A university education is too
expensive to be duplicated in any state; it moreover represents the
collective intellectual force of society, and as such cannot rationally
be cut in two. Indeed, as such, cannot logically exclude women from
men's schools, which are thereby left as imperfect and incomplete as
would be the new universities to be constructed exclusively for women.
During the neutral period of childhood, girls and boys should be
educated together, because, as sex does not, properly speaking, exist,
it is absurd to base any distinctions upon it, and the attempt, like all
absurdities, is liable to lead to really disastrous consequences. During
the period of adolescence or of the formation of sex, it is well to
establish a separate education, during which the character of each may
be defined and consolidated. This separation is needed by the moral and
the physical training rather than by the intellectual. Were it, as is
usually assumed, necessary for boys to exerc