It is not this, however, that I have chiefly in mind here, but the effects of too familiar relations and, especially, of the identical work, treatment, and environment of the modern school.
We have now at least eight good and independent statistical studies which show that the ideals of boys from ten years on are almost always those of their own sex, while girls' ideals are increasingly of the opposite sex, or those of men. That the ideals of pubescent girls are not found in the great and noble women of the world or in their literature, but more and more in men, suggests a divorce between the ideals adopted and the line of life best suited to the interests of the race. We are not furnished in our public schools with adequate womanly ideals in history or literature. The new love of freedom which women have lately felt inclines girls to abandon the home for the office. "It surely can hardly be called an ideal education for women that permits eighteen out of one hundred college girls to state boldly that they would rather be men than women." More than one-half of the schoolgirls in these censuses choose male ideals, as if those of femininity are disintegrating. A recent writer,[3] in view of this fact, states that "unless there is a change of trend, we shall soon have a female sex without a female character." In the progressive numerical feminization of our schools most teachers, perhaps naturally and necessarily, have more or less masculine ideals, and this does not encourage the development of those that constitute the glory of womanhood. "At every age from eight to sixteen, girls named from three to twenty more ideals than boys." "These facts indicate a condition of diffused interests and lack of clear-cut purposes and a need of integration."