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CO-EDUCATION 219
ignored by the man on the top of the bus ; distrusted
even by some members of the Parents' National Educational
Union, who generally favour experiments. Why f
Because it is a school where adolescent boys and girls
are prepared together for life's problems and demands ;
associating with each other freely and naturally during
the slippery years, as they have for long done through
childhood and will do at the Universities. Why is it that
the easy-going, tolerant Englishman when he catches the
word co-education still shakes his head ?
I am not quite sure of the answer to this question ;
except that it is our way to give some simple reason against
a new idea brought to our notice, which !s rarely, if ever,
the fundamental objection ; and to get at the latter is
far from easy, because the objector himself has not
formulated it, and is often wholly unconscious of it.
Possibly men are still infiuenced by unsavoury memories
of their own boyhood, when, as many records testify, the
only educational principle generally observed was laissezaller--neglect,
in short. If the public conscience was so
dead a.s to permit horrible cruelty towards little children,
it is not strange that schoolboys were neglected and the
life in the big boarding-schools was coarse and barbarous.
It was taken for granted that it must be so, and this idea
lingers. But, then, why expose our daughters to the
same very undesirable and indeed debasing experiences f
Why, indeed t But supposing Nature, as we call her,
provides in girlhood an antidote to the coarser strains of
the boy-temperament ! Who are we that we should fancy
ourselves justified in forgoing the safeguard f Again, as
aJready emphasized, even in the boys' schools there has
come about an unmistakable " cleansing of public
opinion," as Plato calls it. Imsgine, then, the conditions
when with a small and manageable number of boys and
girls in nearly equal proportions, a headmaster and his
wife, real pastors of the flock, establish such a s:onfidential
relation with the pupils that no one of them could for
a moment doubt the willingness, the wisdom, and the