scholarly journals Umeko Tsuda: a Pioneer in Higher Education for Women in Japan

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Mari Kunieda

This article explores the life and achievements of Umeko Tsuda, who played a pioneering role in higher education for women in Japan in the early twentieth century. In 1871, the Japanese government sent five girls to the United States to study. They were expected to become models for Japanese women when they returned. Six-year-old Umeko Tsuda was the youngest among them, and she remained in the United States for eleven years until she had graduated from high school. We trace her steps historically in order to highlight the experiences which drove her to work to raise women’s status in Japan. The first biography of her, by Toshikazu Yoshikawa, was reviewed by Umeko herself, and in the years since other researchers have analysed Umeko’s life from various viewpoints. Umeko’s writings, speeches, and correspondence with her American host family and friends also reveal her thoughts. As an early female returnee, Umeko developed her ideas of what schools for women should be like. With the moral and financial support of close American and Japanese friends, Umeko started her ideal school in 1900 with only ten students. This Tokyo school was the first private institution for higher education for women in Japan. Thus, Umeko’s determination to help Japanese women become more educated and happier was the foundation of Tsuda University, now offering BAs, MAs, and PhDs in a variety of programmes in Tokyo.

Author(s):  
Philip Gleason

A great many Catholic colleges existed in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century. Exactly how many it is impossible to say with certainty because any answer presupposes agreement on the answer to a prior question: “What should be counted as a college?” The Catholic Directory for 1900 listed 10 universities, 178 “colleges for boys,” 109 seminaries, and 662 “academies for girls.” According to this count, there were no Catholic women’s colleges at that time, although the College of Notre Dame of Maryland graduated its first baccalaureate class in 1899 and is included among the 128 colleges for women listed in U.S. Commissioner of Education’s Report for 1899-1900. The same Report, however, listed only 62 Catholic institutions among the 480 included under the heading: “Universities and colleges for men and for both sexes.” No doubt some Catholic colleges simply failed to provide the information necessary to appear in the Commissioner’s Report. But their failure to do so is in itself significant; and even assuming that is what happened, it still leaves an enormous gap between the Commissioner’s figures and the 188 colleges and universities reported in the Catholic Directory. Moreover, many of the “colleges for boys” could, with equal justice, have been called academies, since elementary- and secondary-level students made up the majority of their student bodies. As the case of Notre Dame of Maryland indicates, Catholic “academies for girls” were beginning to upgrade themselves to collegiate status. Had the word college been more freely applied to non-Catholic institutions for women at an earlier date, a good many of these academies would probably have called themselves colleges long before, for they did not differ all that much from the “colleges for boys” in terms of curricular offerings and age-range of students. While the situation of Catholic institutions was particularly murky, the question “What makes a college a college?” engaged the attention of practically everyone involved in secondary and collegiate education at the turn of the century.


1934 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 281-295
Author(s):  
F. L. Wren ◽  
H. B. McDonough

Prior to the latter part of the nineteenth century the energies of those interested in public education had been primarily directed toward the completion of the educational ladder. Elementary, secondary, and higher education had been placed under public control and to a large extent was financed by public taxation. In 1893 the Committee of Ten reported to the National Educational Association in favor of enriching the course of study in grades below the high school through the introduction of various subjects such as algebra, geometry, foreign languages, and natural sciences but their recommendations made no provisions for adapting these subjects to the abilities and needs of the children of the lower grades. During the early stages this movement for reorganization centered around the approximate equal division of time devoted to elementary and secondary education. The idea of dividing the six-year secondary school into junior and senior departments did not become a prominent one until the latter part of the first decade of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
David S. Guthrie ◽  
R. Tyler Derreth

This chapter explores Presbyterian influences and involvement in higher education. It begins by using Princeton as an historic lens to examine the “Presbyterian ideals” of reason and education, liberty, and differentiation. The Presbyterian regard for freedom of thought and intellectual edification produced denominational schools throughout the history of higher education, especially in the United States, that differed substantially in their overarching philosophies, approaches to learning, curricula, and emphases on Christian piety. The second part of the chapter identifies the proliferating diversity at the intersection of Presbyterianism and the higher education landscape in the twentieth century. It describes differentiation by theology, denominations, geography, and culture. The chapter ends with brief ruminations on the future roles and stability of Presbyterian higher education.


Author(s):  
Patricia Albjerg Graham

When is Schooling Complete? At the beginning of the twentieth century most Americans believed they had “completed” their schooling if they finished the eighth grade. Only 6 percent of young people then graduated from high school. Eighth-grade graduation was a major celebration, particularly in rural neighborhoods, with the newly recognized scholars feted and dressed in their best as the photograph of my father’s 1908 Ottertail County, Minnesota, eighth-grade class illustrates. In 1955 a ninth-grade student in my homeroom, when queried how far her father had gone in school, replied confidently, “all the way.” That meant high school graduation in the Deep Creek, Virginia, neighborhood. By the end of the twentieth century, however, that definition had changed radically. “Completing schooling” now means some college at a minimum, with about 66 percent of high school graduates now attending, and increasingly it has meant acquiring a post-graduate degree. These changing expectations for what is considered sufficient schooling have dramatically altered American views of higher education. Once thought the domain of the very few (less than 2 percent of the age group in 1900) and largely peripheral to the economy, colleges and universities occupied a very different position at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They now appeal to a mass population, and they constitute a crucial link in the economy through their research and development activities. Furthermore, unlike 1900 when few foreigners would ever have considered coming to the United States to study, they now attract both students and faculty from all over the world, including some of the most gifted and ambitious. The range of these institutions from the leading research universities, which remain among the best in the world, to “open enrollment” institutions (with no requirements for admission other than paying the tuition), which provide unparalleled access to higher education, is extraordinary. Today the academic overlap between some of the best high schools and some undergraduate institutions is considerable, with high school juniors and seniors flourishing in college classes.


Author(s):  
Robert B. Archibald

Demographic trends and changes in the perceived value of a degree both can have significant effects on the demand for higher education. Demographic changes in the United States are unlikely to reduce the demand for places in college overall, but falling high school enrollment in the Northeast and Midwest will pressure financially weaker schools in those regions. On average, the payoff to a college degree has grown substantially. The chapter shows that the return to marginal students may also be quite high. Lastly, the evidence from labor markets indicates that a college education is not simply correlated with higher income. It helps cause higher income.


1981 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 450-464
Author(s):  
James L. Ash

An enormous change in the academic study of religion has occurred in the United States during the last half-century as the center of the enterprise has moved from the church-supported college and the seminary to the secular university and the graduate school. Some of this change has been caused by the rise of state-supported higher education, some by the secularizing trend that has shaped all modern American universities, both public and private. The change clearly has resulted in a discipline (if the term may be loosely used) in which not only has the number of practicing religion scholars greatly multiplied, but the scholarship itself also has grown in academic stature, becoming less eulogistic, more critical, and more methodologically congruent with other humanities disciplines.1


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