Why Go to College? An Address

by Alice Freeman Palmer

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

32 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2001

About the author

President of Wellesley College, 1882-87. Wife of Harvard philosophy professor George Herbert Palmer.

Reviews

[Susan Molloy · Rating 5 out of 5]

✔️Published in an unknown year, but it has to be between 1887-1902.
🖊 My review: Ah! for the better days of higher education! I enjoyed reading this. Alice Freeman Palmer (1855-1902) was President of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887. 🔥 The dénouement is inspiring. 💫 What I like best is the intelligence of this address and the truthfulness. 📌 I would read this again, of course.
🤔 My rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
🟣 Media form: Kindle version.
🟢 Media form: Project Gutenberg .
🔲 Excerpts:

🔸 I have seen girls change so much in college that I have wondered if their friends at home would know them,—the voice, the carriage, the unconscious manner, all telling a story of new tastes and habits and loves and interests, that had wrought out in very truth a new creature.

🔸 James Russell Lowell talk to college girls, he said,—for he was too ill to say many words—"I have only this one message to leave with you. In all your work in college never lose sight of the reason why you have come here. It is not that you may get something by which to earn your bread, but that every mouthful of bread may be the sweeter to your taste."

🔸 "Do you use your college studies in your business?" I asked. "Oh, no!" he answered. "But I am another man in doing the business; and when the day's work is done I live another life because of my college experiences. The business and I are both the better for it every day." How many a young girl has had her whole horizon extended by the changed ideals she gained in college!

🔸 "The world is so full of a number of things, That I think we should all be as happy as kings," is the opinion of everybody who knows nature as did Robert Louis Stevenson.

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[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Pre-eminently the college is a place of education. That is the ground of its being. We go to college to know, assured that knowledge is sweet and powerful, that good education emancipates the mind and makes us citizens of the world. No college which does not thoroughly educate can be called good, no matter what else it does'.

Despite massively outdated gender views (of course) some extremely valid points. And for its period, the aspiration to spread the word about young women being able to access education and vouchsafing its values no matter what they might be listed could never have been a bad thing.