That's nothing. There is an elephant in the zoo that can count up to
ten, yet I refuse to reckon myself his inferior.
Tabulated results spread over years, and the actual experience of
those who teach show that in the whole domain of mathematics and
physics women are outclassed. At McGill the girls of our first year
have wept over their failures in elementary physics these twenty-five
years. It is time that some one dried their tears and took away
the subject.
But, in any case, examination tests are never the whole story. To
those who know, a written examination is far from being a true
criterion of capacity. It demands too much of mere memory,
imitativeness, and the insidious willingness to absorb other people's
ideas. Parrots and crows would do admirably in examinations. Indeed,
the colleges are full of them.
But take, on the other hand, all that goes with the aesthetic side
of education, with imaginative literature and the cult of beauty.
Here women are, or at least ought to be, the superiors of men.
Women were in primitive times the first story-tellers. They are
still so at the cradle side. The original college woman was the
witch, with her incantations and her prophecies and the glow of
her bright imagination, and if brutal men of duller brains had not
burned it out of her, she would be incanting still. To my thinking,
we need more witches in the colleges and less physics.
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