improprieties and scandal as a part of co-education
That word is with regard to the common belief in the danger of
improprieties and scandal as a part of co-education. There is some
danger in this respect; but not a serious or unavoidable one.
Doubtless there would be occasional lapses in a double-sexed college;
and so there are outside of schoolhouses and seminaries of learning.
Even the church and the clergy are not exempt from reproach in such
things. There are sects, professing to commingle religion and love,
who illustrate the dangers of juxtaposition even in things holy. 'No
physiologist can well doubt that the holy kiss of love in such cases
owes all its warmth to the sexual feeling which consciously or
unconsciously inspires it, or that the mystical union of the sexes
lies very close to a union that is nowise mystical, when it does not
lead to madness.'[31] There is less, or certainly no more danger in
having the sexes unite at the repasts of knowledge, than, as Plautus
bluntly puts it, having he wits and she wits recline at the repasts of
fashion. Isolation is more likely to breed pruriency than commingling
to provoke indulgence. The virtue of the cloister and the cell
scarcely deserves the name. A girl has her honor in her own keeping.
If she can be trusted with boys and men at the lecture-room and in
church, she can be trusted with them at school and in college. Jean
Paul says, 'To insure modesty, I would advise the education of the
sexes together; for two boys will preserve twelve girls, or two girls
twelve boys, innocent amidst winks, jokes, and improprieties, merely
by that instinctive sense which is the forerunner of matured modesty.
But I will guarantee nothing in a school where girls are alone
together, and still less when boys are.' A certain amount of
juxta-position is an advantage to each sex. More than a certain amount
is an evil to both. Instinct and common sense can be safely left to
draw the line of demarcation. At the same time it is well to remember
that juxtaposition may be carried too far. Temptations enough beset
the young, without adding to them. Let learning and purity go hand in
hand.
