All
this is not justified, either by experience or physiology. The
gardener may plant, if he choose, the lily and the rose, the oak and
the vine, within the same enclosure; let the same soil nourish them,
the same air visit them, and the same sunshine warm and cheer them;
still, he trains each of them with a separate art, warding from each
its peculiar dangers, developing within each its peculiar powers, and
teaching each to put forth to the utmost its divine and peculiar gifts
of strength and beauty. Girls lose health, strength, blood, and nerve,
by a regimen that ignores the periodical tides and reproductive
apparatus of their organization. The mothers and instructors, the
homes and schools, of our country's daughters, would profit by
occasionally reading the old Levitical law. The race has not yet quite
outgrown the physiology of Moses.
Co-education, then, signifies in common acceptation identical
co-education. This identity of training is what many at the present
day seem to be praying for and working for. Appropriate education of
the two sexes, carried as far as possible, is a consummation most
devoutly to be desired; identical education of the two sexes is a
crime before God and humanity, that physiology protests against, and
that experience weeps over.
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