CHAPTER THREE

I. THE GARDEN OF HID TREASURE

Prelude:  Why go to College?

“Why should an Indian girl want a college education?” queried Mary Smith, as she listened to her roommate’s account of the “Lighting of the Christmas Candles.”  “I can see why she would need to learn to read and write, and even a high school course I wouldn’t mind; but college seems to me perfectly silly, and an awful waste of good money.  Why, from our own home high school there are only six of us at college.”

Mary Smith, fresh from “Main Street,” may be less provincial than she sounds.  Her question puts up a real problem.  When only one girl in one hundred has a chance at the Three R’s, is it right to “waste money” on giving certain others the chance to delve into psychology and higher mathematics?  When there is not bread enough to go around, why should some of the family have cake and pudding?

Something less than a hundred years ago, similar questions were vexing the American public.  Those were the days when Mary Lyon fought her winning battle against the champions of the slogan “The home is woman’s sphere,” the days in which the pioneers of women’s education foregathered from the rocky farmslopes of New England, and Mt.  Holyoke came into being.  Mary Smith, who is duly born, baptized, vaccinated, and registered for Vassar, the last requiring no more volition on her part than the first, realizes little of the ancient struggle that has made her privilege a matter of course.

They are much the same old arguments that must be gone over again to justify college education for our sisters of the East.  Rather say argument, in the singular, for there is just one that holds, and that is the possibilities for service that such education opens up.

High schools there must be in India, but who will teach them?  American and English women have never yet gone out to India in such numbers as to staff the schools they have founded, nor would there be funds to support them if they did.  Travel through India to-day and you will find girls’ schools staffed either with under-qualified women teachers, or else with men whose academic qualifications are satisfactory, but who, being men, cannot fill the place where a woman is obviously needed.  What could be more contradictory than to find a Christian girls’ school, supported largely by American money, but staffed by Hindu men, just because no Christian women with necessary qualifications are available?

Hospitals there must be, but where are the doctors to conduct them?  Here again, foreign doctors can fill the need of the merest fraction of India’s suffering womankind.  But the American doctor can multiply herself in just one way.  Give her a Medical College, well equipped and staffed, and a body of Indian girls with a sufficient background of general education, and instead of one doctor and one hospital you will find countless centres of healing springing up in city and small town and along the roadside where the doctor passes by.