Center for Labor Education & Research, University of Hawaii - West Oahu: Honolulu Record Digitization Project

Honolulu Record, Volume 10 No. 7, Thursday, September 12, 1957 p. 5

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Through A Woman's Eyes
Should Girls Go to College?
By Amy Clarke

You may not have noticed that whenever a male columnist runs out of ideas, he turns to that ever-good subject, the so-called inferiority of women.

Scientific findings proving he's wrong don't bother him a bit. Like the bore who insists on relating dirty jokes, this type of columnist is determined to sneer at women, and sneer he does.

The latest to go in for this irresponsible scribbling is the Advertiser's Henry Aurand, who last week devoted his column to a letter reportedly received from a college professor on the Mainland.

The gist of this 'letter" was that it is waste time to give girls a college education; they may get good marks but it's all superficial; they don't really know what it's all about.

It would take a good deal of substantiated proof to convince me of that.

I know men lawyers and doctors who haven't read a book outside their own field since they left college; and I know housewives who read everything from Thorstein Veblen to ancient Japanese literature in between the ironing and dinnertime.

Of course some college girls are frivolous, with no real intellectual curiosity; but this is a long way from proving that all girls are incapable of absorbing higher education.

If male students do better than girls, there is a reason for it, and the reason is not mental superiority.

In most countries today—and most of all in our own—intellectual development is not considered of prime importance for women.

From babyhood on, our little girls are taught by a thousand influences, conscious and unconscious, inside the home and outside it, that the successful woman is the one who is attractive to men.

Commercial advertising, the movies, TV, popular female singers (and the songs they sing) all are obsessed with the same garish sexuality.

As the perceptive girls look around them they cannot help observing that many intelligent, well-educated men marry girls who are inferior in intellectual capacity.

The obvious conclusion is that it doesn't pay for a girl to be too "brainy."
But there is another side of the picture.

Mr. Aurand's "professor" claimed to teach liberal arts at a private university.

This course of study is most often chosen by students who are not sure what they are going to do when they leave the university.

Unlike either more technical courses of study (law, medicine, science), the graduating student is not equipped to immediately enter a profession.

The students who have a serious purpose in educating themselves usually cannot afford the luxury of an extra year or so in college studying ancient literature, drama and dead languages.

There are therefore likely to be more dilettantes, aimless students in these liberal arts courses than in the other branches of learning.

Which brings us to the composition of the college class itself. In spite of the great increase in scholarships in the last 10 years, the overwhelming majority of all college students come from the upper middle and wealthy classes.

This is most true in the small private colleges.

My acquaintance includes dozens of gifted men and women who had to do without higher education because of financial hardships. Even today, scholarships are not the complete answer; and they are given most often in the scientific field.

How great a loss it is to the country to cut off these bright young minds from further training, while cramming the colleges with students whose fathers' bankrolls had more to do with their admittance than their zest for learning.

Some day perhaps we'll have a country where higher education will be free to those who merit it.

Maybe this will mean screening out girls like those Mr. Aurand's professor teaches, who go to college merely to collect a couple of initials, a sorority pin and eligible men.

There are too many talents being wasted today to worry about the duds.

p /> I do not say that at odd hours a patient must be given the regular hot dinner or supper. Few people would expect this.
 
But what is so complicated about opening and heating a can of soup, making some toast, or preparing instant coffee or tea? Why cannot a night nurse do these simple things after the kitchen to closed? Is it just too much trouble?

It is only common humanity to feed the hungry. If our hospitals are too big, too complex, too impersonal to do these small kindnesses for the sick, something is very wrong.