Education for What?

Written on Cambridge snowbanks, they say, is the message, "Dr. Binger lies." It is not so, but if you read his article in the current Atlantic expecting an explanation of the pressures college puts on girls, you will be disappointed. Binger has a sharp, clinical eye, and his descriptions of disturbed girls will remind Harvard men of any number of 'Cliffies, but rereading shows that they are familiar because these problems are faced by college men and college women, undergraduates and secretaries. If Binger thinks the problems of girls trying to find love are especially acute for students, he has some proving to do, and he errs if he thinks that "an identity crisis ....occurs at some time and in varying intensity in practically every girl during her career in college" is news to a culture saturated with identity and crises.

It is not so important that social and academic crises occur as that the problems implicit in higher education for women become very important when things are not going well. It matters very much, therefore, that a girl faces conflicts between academic achievement and social life, that she seeks a connection between what she is doing and her future life, and that the academic world pressures her to intellectualize all experience.

Binger observes that women seek husbands avidly in college, and that this aim is so important that girls conceal it not only from others but from themselves. And he proceeds to assess the effects of young men's failure to provide the security and approbation the girls need.

But he ignores the evolution of women's education since the time when participants were expected to be pioneers making their own place in society, and apparently does not see that the growing popularity of higher education for women has destroyed the sense of a frontier without creating places in society for educated girls.

He therefore does not observe that if girls want to get married and see no relation between their education and their futures, college becomes a ritual, a pointless set of hurdles to be overcome, and an utterly artificial investment of emotion into classes of activity with little significance to the girl. He does not conclude that this unreality might be the reason that so many girls seem to be grinds, interested in grades because they never find greater scope or meaning in education.

He also does not recognize the dilemma of intelligent girls forced to complete academically with men who, on the whole, are not as bright. Too, the need at once to succeed and to seem not to work creates a real tension for many who must work hard to do well.

Implicit in the search for identity is an uncertainty about what they can themselves bring to an emotional relationship. Trained neither as housewives nor as party-givers, not expecting marriage to be mere division of labor, they are confused about just what they are preparing for. Emotion is intellectualized to a point where romantic ideals are not enough, but not rationalized so far that they no longer demand emotional warmth--indeed, they now want more because they have been robbed of the security of traditional roles.

But Binger is not concerned with these pressures, primarily, it seems, because he sees crises in terms of interpersonal relations rather than institutional conflicts. And even though he never says very much about the effect education should have on its victims, he shows an acute sense of the defects of any solution a girl may find. For half a page he explores the hazards of steady relationships, then he says,

The foregoing description is of one kind of behavior, but of one only.... There are, of course, "popular" girls who have a different date every night, and like to keep lots of boys on the string; idealistic, old-fashioned girls, perhaps with a religious upbringing, who want to keep themselves pure for the great love to come; shy, immature girls who do not date....

His suggestions have an almost pathetic air. He wants girls to have a chance to talk to "reasonably mature adults." But almost every therapist and educator alive thinks this would be good--how is it to be achieved? Elsewhere he informs us that, "We have no sure formula to prevent the kind of depress on I have described in this article.... But we can encourage self-acceptance and a sense of identity."

His approach becomes doubly unfortunate when he says, "It seems to me that educators have at least the responsibility of looking facts in the face. If they relax parietal rules sufficiently to permit girls to go to boys' rooms and remain there until late, then they should realize what the consequences are likely to be." He sounds like a prig, but I do not think that he intends to suggest that the need for emotional engagement will vanish if the most obvious opportunities are removed. Rather, he is speaking for the mental health movement that maintains the necessity of treating emotional problems as part of education, and he seems to be trying to say that the college must be directly responsible for the psychological effects of its actions.

Because I am deeply sympathetic with this outlook, I find the failure of his article to present an analysis of the real pressures exerted by college both disappointing and annoying. Administrators know that undergraduates have problems: unless psychiatrists articulate a clear connection between these difficulties and the educational process, showing that the pressures do not play only on girls of college age, they will build increasing immunity to their own pleas for more careful planning of college experience.