Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/285

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SHORTER ARTICLES AND DISCUSSION.
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will be, and the four years of college life is beginning to assume its proper place in public estimation. To produce, not phenomenal scholars nor well-equipped teachers, but fine, strong, human women—that is the function of those precious four years.

Again I turn to my own class—and as 1 run down the familiar roll from B to W and glance back over the nine years that have made those names part of my life, I see that somewhere, somehow, among the jumble of 'prescribed' and 'elective' courses, we learned therewith the better things, to see largely, to judge temperately, to choose true values. They look but chilly infinitives, written so, but the class knows how they have wrought into the very fiber of our lives and made us the women that we are. And more and

more, as the true function of college lite becomes recognized, as popular expectation ceases to demand in justification of a B.A. anything but 'just woman,' the type which couples intellectual attainment with underdeveloped body will disappear. For some years the importance of proper attention to the physical well-being of school children of both sexes has been impressing itself upon the public, and no one will apply scientific principles to the nurture of her children more intelligently and with less danger of capricious 'fads' than the college bred mother. We do 'want more' of alumnæ's children, and we are going to get them—an efficient and cumulative force toward those wide and beneficent ends which all true culture stands for.

Another Alumna.