University Education of Women: A Lecture Delivered at University College, Liverpool, in May, 1896 (Classic Reprint) - Tapa dura

Excerpt from University Education of Women: A Lecture Delivered at University College, Liverpool, in May, 1896

The subject on which I have undertaken to speak is one of wide scope, and which admits of very varied treatment, but time will prevent our going into it in great detail this evening. I propose to consider it briefly under four heads: (i) what University education is; (2) what women should seek it; (3) what Opportunities they have of obtaining it; and (4) whether further developments on other lines than the present are needed.

John Stuart Mill speaking of University education in 1867, in an address at St. Andrews which produced a considerable effect at the time, said that a University is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings. If this were strictly true, and if our actual Universities succeeded in any reasonable degree in carrying out this ideal, there could surely be no question that all men and all women whose circumstances made it possible should seek a University education. It must be right for all to be, as human beings, as capable and cultivated as their opportunities allow, and unless the intellects of men and women were different in kind - unless the intellectual difference between them were more fundamental than that between one man and another - it might be assumed that the same methods would tend to produce capability and cultivation in one sex as in the other.

But it hardly seems that J. S. Mill's view of University education was completely in harmony with the facts, even at the time it was put forward; and the development of University study, in the generation that has elapsed since his address was dblivered, has been in the opposite direction. At the age at'. Which men come to the Universities, the necessity of deciding. On a profession and preparing specifically for it has usually come so near to them, except in the case of some persons of inde pendent means, that they. Cannot reasonably be expected to neglect the need of special preparation for after careers in the (pursuit of general culture. In France, Germany, and other Continental countries, University education taken as a whole has not for generations been in the main a general education. In those countries general education for the majority finishes at school, and a comprehensive leaving examination from school admits to the academic courses, which are differentiated and selected mainly with a view to the career to be pursued in life. In France this is very definitely seen. The degree of Bachelie'r és-lett'res or sciences is conferred, on the result of examination, usually when the boy leaves school at seventeen or eighteen. The young graduate then enters on what would here correspond to a University course under a faculty of Medicine, or of Law, or of Letters, or of Science; or, if sufficiently clever, may obtain admission to the Ecole Normale or the Ecole Polytechnique.

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