1871 | Education
Education
Japan reorganizes her ministry of education to promote universal, compulsory, fee-paid education.
Keio University opens at Shiba Mita in Tokyo under the direction of educator-author Yukichi Fukuzawa, now 37. Japan's first private college, the university will be certified as such in 1890.
Smith College is established at Northampton, Massachusetts, near Amherst. The late Sophia Smith inherited a fortune from her brother Austin in 1861, having outlived five other siblings, and when she died last year at age 73 left $393,105 to endow a college for women that will open in 1875. Deaf beginning at age 40, Smith had planned originally to found a school for deaf mutes, but after such a school was started by someone else in 1868 she decided instead to endow a college for women (see 1875).
Newnham College has its beginnings in Merton Hall, opened in the village of Newnham outside Cambridge for women who come to attend lectures in preparation for the new examination (see 1869). Millicent Garrett Fawcett, now 24, is one of the founders, as is Liverpool-born educator and feminist Jemima Clough, now 51, who begins with five students and will remain principal of the college until her death in 1892. Students are allowed to study for as short or as long a period as they wish, and to take what exams they like or none at all, an arrangement condemned by Emily Davies, who says women should be offered no such "soft" options and makes Greek compulsory. Newnham Hall will be built in 1875, and by the end of the decade half of Newnham's students will be taking the tripos (final examinations) in mathematics or the classics, but many women will hate the school because it repudiates the accepted role of a middle-class woman and is thought to violate the laws of God, of health, and of social conduct.