Furthermore, we are discussing colleges of "liberal" studies, not technical schools. Into the former have strayed many students who belong in the latter. The tragic thing about their errantry is that presidents and faculties, instead of setting them in the right path, try to make the college over to suit them. The rightful heirs to the knowledge of the ages are despoiled. The most down-trodden students are those who cherish a passion for the intellectual life. Among these are as many women as men. If domestic science were confined to separate schools, as all applied sciences ought to be, we should have nothing but praise for a subject admirably conceived, and often admirably taught. In these schools it may be studied by such High School graduates as prefer to deal with practical rather than with pure science, and, in a larger way, by such college graduates as wish to supplement theory with practice for professional purposes. But in liberal colleges domestic science is but dross handed out to seekers after gold. Against its intrusion into the curriculum no protest can be too stern.
Faith in this study seems to rest upon the belief that the actual experiences of life can be anticipated. This is a fallacy. There is no dress rehearsal for the rôle of "wife and mother." It is a question of experience piled on experience, life piled on life. The only way to perform the tasks, understand the duties, accept the joys and sorrows of any given stage of existence is to have performed the tasks, learned the duties, fought out the joys and sorrows of earlier stages. In so far as "housekeeping" means the application of principles of nutrition and sanitation, these principles can be acquired at the proper time by an active, well-trained mind. The preparation needed is not to have learned facts three or five or ten years in advance, when theories and appliances may have been very different, but to have taken up one subject after another, finding how to master principles and details. This new subject is not recondite nor are we unconquerably stupid. To learn as we go--_discere ambulando_--need not turn the home into an experiment station.