WOMEN AT THE UNIVERSITIES AND UNIVERSITY TEACHING AS A PROFESSION

When a girl is about to leave school at the age of seventeen or eighteen, she is often as little able to determine what profession she wishes to adopt, as is her brother in similar case.  If she is intelligent, well-trained and eager to study, her natural impulse is to go to college, and to get there, it is still usually the line of least resistance to say that she wishes to become a teacher.  When there are pecuniary difficulties in the way, the decision must be taken still earlier.  The unfortunate child in the elementary school used to be compelled to make her choice at the age of twelve or thirteen, often to find later on, when the first barriers of pupil-teaching and King’s Scholarship were surmounted, that she was not really suited to her profession or that continued study was uncongenial.  Even now, when the system is different and better, children are bound too early by a contract they find it hard to break.  It cannot be too often insisted that every intelligent child who is worthy of a junior or senior scholarship, is not therefore of necessity predestined to the profession of teaching—­a profession so arduous, so full of drudgery and of disappointment that it should be entered by those only who are sure of their mission, and full of the spirit that makes learning and teaching a lasting joy.

There should be other paths from elementary and secondary school to the University than that which leads to the teacher’s platform.

Moreover, granted that the desire to teach is a real one, and that the girl has aptitude, it ought still to be unnecessary to choose a particular branch of the profession before she has become an under-graduate.  A University career means, among other things, the discovery of new powers, new interests, and opportunities; sometimes it brings with it the painful conviction that aspiration has outstripped capacity.  The bright girl who has excelled at school, may find that she is unfitted for independent honour work:  she is not necessarily worse on that account, but she must substitute some other plan for her ambition to become a “specialist.”  The slow plodder who could never trust her memory at school, may, at College, discover unsuspected powers of investigation and co-ordination which mark her out for some branch of higher study.  The University, the first contact with a more independent and larger life, is the “testing-place for young souls”:  students should enter its portals as free women, the world all before them where to choose.  In many cases not until the first degree is taken, has the proper time come to determine finally the profession which is to be adopted.  This is the ideal—­for most people admittedly a far away one at present.  But even now, the would-be teacher should not be asked to decide earlier than this on the particular branch of the profession which she is to enter.  The average pass graduate