From a talk delivered at the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA)
The most wonderful and most striking page in the history of human civilization these four centuries past is the story of woman's progress. And now, after all this progress, we stand asking: has woman today reached the utmost of what she ought to reach, so that she may halt at this point, saying: “Eat, my soul, and take your pleasure, for you have many good things. The doors of the schools and colleges have been opened to you; you have bent over study and learning, and drunk in the various sciences for so many years, and you have won diplomas such as your sisters in the generations before you never won — what more, then, do you ask?” Do not some of these women imagine that merely by passing through the stage of learning and study on the school bench they have attained the desired goal beyond which there is nothing left to seek — since the world counts them educated and cultured — and so they stop at this point?
A professor, in one of his books treating the subject of education, posed this question: “Who is the cultured person, and what are his distinguishing marks?” And he answered it himself, saying: The mark of the cultured person is not the amount of his information. Nor is it the academic degree conferred upon him by the college or the university that graduated him. Nor even is it that bright light in his eyes — the light of knowledge and understanding. No, culture is none of all these. Rather, the cultured person is the one who has acquired a “habit of mind.” He who reads only what is easy, or what does not go beyond the subjects already familiar to him, is not to be counted cultured, however great
the quantity of information with which he stuffs his brain. The cultured person is he who keeps on reading the books that stir him to thought and add knowledge to his knowledge and understanding to his understanding.
Even if we find this writer's theory extreme, no two people will disagree over its central idea: that the educated, cultured person is one who, however old he grows, always feels the need to grow and to climb the ladder of knowledge until he reaches the summit.
As for the mind, there is no limit to its growth. Its horizon stretches and widens, as long as a person is alive, in the measure that we give it room to widen and grow.
To whichever of us has imagined that, her bodily growth having ceased, she has entered a state of mental stagnation, I say: beware of your inevitable fate; forestall its grievous consequence by keeping company with people of thought and of intellectual daring — perhaps the germ of life will pass from them to you, and you will preserve yourself from intellectual death.
As for the capacity of adults to learn, it is one of the established facts of education that the adult has capacities for learning surpassing those of the young. To verify this theory numerous experiments have been carried out — among them one conducted by the learned Professor Thorndike, the great educator at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York, upon a group of adults of twenty-two and another group of adults of forty-two. He found that the difference in speed of learning between the first group and the second was very slight; and after this experiment he established that what the child learns in two years takes the adult only a few weeks to master. After this, can there be any doubt that the adult can not
only learn new things, but can do so more quickly than the child? Into the wastebasket, then, with the theory that says the grown person cannot memorize and learn because his mental growth has ceased.
And what I say concerning mental growth applies to spiritual growth. Do not be content, young woman, with knowing spiritual principles; persevere in meditation until your personality is made complete in you. And know that the failure of this side of your personality to grow — I mean the spiritual side — causes deformity, imbalance, and disharmony in your life. You become like a body some of whose limbs have grown while the rest have remained the limbs of a child. How many and many a girl has the understanding of adults in every respect except the spiritual!
Among the clearest signs of maturity and growth is “facing the truth,” without dawdling or evasion, however bitter that truth may taste. Evasion is the enemy of progress, and it belongs to the nature of children; a philosopher has said, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.” The adult, then, who avoids what he does not like and what is hard for him, or who rebels and rages against it, is as one returning to the childhood that flees from difficulties, when he ought to be able to face the problems that confront him in his life. This evasion may put on the dress of reluctance, or of fear of stepping beyond a certain post or position to another that demands heavier responsibility and greater effort; so the individual contents himself with what he has attained, persuading himself that his present position accords with his desires and inclinations. Of this kind is the young man or young woman who does not strive to improve her work or to devise a better way of doing it.
Stagnation and the failure to grow may put on yet another dress and