NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13939, 22 December 1908, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

CO-EDUCATION IN AMERICA. The Educational Review, New York, reprints the Times article on this subject, calling attention to the great preponderance of women teachers, in America, a preponderance that has considerably increased of late, and shows every sign of continuing to do so. "Women are the teachers of the American youth. tor children this may be not a bad thing, the writer thinks; but for boys of 18 or so to be taught by women not much older than themselves, it is an altogether different matter; and men seem to have confided to the writer that they now recognise that having been at that period of their lives under women teachers has wrought them serious injury. Few serious teachers of either sex do anything but deplore the excessive preponderance of women on the teaching staffs of secondary schools and higher classes in elementary schools. Evidently the writer thinks that coeducation of adolescents, not mere boys and girls, is very difficult, since the one sex develops so much more rapidly than, and so differently from, the other. In American high schools the girls usually greatly outnumber the boys (the reverse being the case in the few English coeducational schools), and the courses of study become inevitably adapted more to girls than to boys:—"The boys are in a minority; and, a<: the irrepressible tendency to imitate the majority asserts itself, they become an inferior copy of girls, winning a gill's gentleness and sensitiveness, but not the proper strength of either sex. Tried by a woman's and by a girl's standards, the boys prove inferior; and when at last they enter upon their full heritage they are irreparably wounded in their dignity, and have lost the- faith in themselves of which, in order to play a man's part in life, they have the utmost need. There is no greater danger to character than this." This the writer thinks tends to give the majority of boys in later life a certain moral slackness, a deficiency in moral courage, which makes, it easy for a corrupt minority to ride roughshod over them. In other words, - a woman alone 'cannot teach a boy to become man. ; - : '■■■■ '"' ;'•*'*" '■ THE RELIGION OF A CHINESE "'. REFORMER. Mr. Charles Johnston contributes to the Hibber Journal a most interesting account of "A Chinese Statesman's View of Religion." The Chinese * statesman ;is the famous Cantonese reformer, Kang Yu Wei. Mr. Johnston says that Kang Yu Wei " declared that ; he.>had always been a close student of religions; that he had studied and ; translated ,'■ the two thousand texts of Buddhism; : and that he found the great ' humane principles of religion in Buddhism and Christianity alike. He further ' told me that he always visited in the spirit of a pilgrim the centres or shrines of religious tradition; that he had sought relics of Martin Luther at Eisenach ; and that, on a recent visit to Spain, he found in a monastery near Toledo much the same , spirit of devout silence that had struck him in the lamaseries of Tibet. I asked Kang Yu Wei, who has studied the Gospels profoundly, what seems to him the most striking quality in the character of Jesus. He answered, somewhat to my "surprise, as we generally lay • the emphasis elsewhere, that what appealed to him most, •in the personality of Jesus, was his couragethe manliness which could. so quietly and tiauntlessly. face the hatred of so many of his fellowcountrymen, the fierce enmity of -the powerful Pharisees, and,, above all, the certainty of death, and of the outward failure of his mission; the courage which undertook a work so constructive, the valour which could make, and could ask from others, such large sacrifices. The positive attitude of authority and power, maintained, by one who was, outwardly, a homeless wanderer, seemed to Kang V'u Wei the dominant note in the character of Jesus. His courage stood first; next to courage came His love. And Kang Yu Wei had been deeply impressed by the fact that the . love of Jesus, profound, abundant, and all-embracing as it was, was yet wholly free from weakness and sentimentalism; could, t indeed, be terribly stern on occasion, as when He scourged the money-changers ' from the Temple. Kang Yu Wei recognised that a large part in the development of Western history, of the modern State with its ideas of civil rights, of individual liberty, of humanity, is to be attributed to the personality and teaching of Jesus, and this quite independently of our view of His spiritual standing. Jesus is the greatest single factor in the development of the Western world. He insists that the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are cardinal doctrines of the Confucian system. I was struck by the curious resemblance of this belief to that oxpressed by Goethe, who also held that not all souls are equally immortal; that full immortality is the prize and crown of heroic endeavour, of noble virtue, of undaunted self-sacrifice."