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MURIEL DRAPER

OCTOBER 12, 1937

I am glad you are with me.

It is thrilling to be on a program such as this one--thrilling but overwhelming, because I am the last person to speak with authority about College Education for women...at least from the point of view of personal experience, my own education having terminated abruptly at the age of thirteen.

It seems that I was not the ideal pupil, and the teachers of the Haverhill High School, where I was then pursuing--somewhat erratically to be sure-- my studies, held what might be called a mass meeting to decide what might prove the best way of dealing with me.

The decision they arrived at was not to deal with me at all-- just to send me home.

My parents were as puzzled as they were distracted. I really wasn't a very wicked child, and they were not at all prepared for such a sudden turn

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in the course of my education. In conference with the teachers, they learned that
the root of the trouble was a habit of asking upsetting questions in class---

The how and the what never quite satisfied me. I always wanted
to know why... When the teachers, quite rightly and honestly couldn't answer, or quite
wrongly and dishonestly wouldn't, they found my questions caused a disturbance, a
restlessness in the work of the classroom, which made it difficult for them to
maintain the necessary discipline.

Now, I think that asking these questions may have been just my
unscrupulous way of trying to conceal my disability to concentrate, but I am sure that
the asking of questions is one of the integral parts of an education...

I don't mean the kind of question where the person who asks is so elated by his or her way of asking it that they pay no attention to the answer and, therefore, don't really hear it-because they are lost in self-admiration---nor yet the kind of questioning and answering that is just stirring the water until it is thick, which merely brings about what has been called a "re-arrangement of one's prejudices"... I mean the kind of questions that spring truly from the desire to know the what, the how, and the why of our civilization and our relation to it as individuals. This kind of asking and answering helps us feel that we are neither unique nor isolated and that

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what is known of our still incomplete history as human beings gives us a frame of re-
ference in which to adjust our relations to a changing world. This is surely one of
the great aims of all education.

Methods of education have developed rapidly since my short term at
the Haverhill High School--not yet quite fast and far enough, alas, to keep up with the
changing world everywhere and at once, and it is no longer wicked or perverse to
question the "absolute validity of the ultimate," to doubt the so-called "eternal
verities," or whatever pompous phrase was used to describe the intellectual concepts
of the universe which--- in spite of the brilliant advances of the physical sciences
in the nineteenth century, still cling stubbornly to life in the early decades of the
twentieth century. We are now beginning to challenge the absolute with the relative.

Science has taught us to re-examine what we have inherited from
the past, and young students who are really scientifically educated are less liable
to be ruled by the destructive characteristics of infantile revalry and aggressive
aquisitiveness. May I say here that what I mean by Science is simply the organization
of knowledge, and the distribution of it over the world and its people.

It interested me to find that one of the leading advocates of this
kind of education and knowledge... who has written stupendous books and brilliant articles

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whom we constantly influence.

As we discover new laws, we discard the outmoded virtues based on the old, and our mutual suspicions and secretiveness abate somewhat. Dean Woodworth has spoken of the revolutionary change in the world attitude toward true education of women in the last hundred years--what they may and may not do, to say nothing of what the can and cannot do, and it does give one a sense of excitement and triumph in the fluency of life to realize that true human nature does change, and that its traditions, moral codes and working customs do change with it.

Indeed, one doesn't have to go as far back as a hundred years to realize the difference in attitude. My son, Paul Draper, went to an excellent co-educational school in New York when he was a small boy, a school then just beginning its illustrious career. In due course of time I was summoned by the headmaster of the school to one of those interviews I felt in my bones boded ill. Alone with him in his monastic office I heard the alarming news that my son was going to the Devil fast, first because he had played truant and confessed to it, secondly, because he had been seen kissing a very attractive little girl! I recovered from this shattering news, and he recovered from his demoralizing experience... He has not gone to the devil--

In the fifteen years that have passed since then, more and more

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people---teachers, students, professors, manufacturers, scientists and presidents---
have realized, and acted on the realization, that men and women can, if they are going to
grow up at all, grow up together and work together. Only so will we lead ourselves out
(the very word educate means just that) of a world built up upon assumptions of
perpetual scarcity, ignorance and hatreds into one of plenty, wisdom and peace.

And now may I ask you a question?

Are you still with me?

I Really need to know.