Five Latin students at The Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore have launched a campaign to rid the Great Seal of Maryland of a sexist motto.
In a class exercise, the students, all in their fourth year of Latin, translated the wording on the seal: “Scuto bonae voluntatis tuae coronasti nos,’' or “With the shield of thy good will thou hast crowned us.’' No problem there.
Then they noticed at the bottom of the seal a less prominent sentence in Italian: “Fatti maschii parole femine,’' which translates as, “Deeds masculine, words feminine.’' The phrase derives from the motto of the Calvert family, according to the Maryland Historical Society.
But the students, all sophomores, decided that “fatti’’ can be “femine,’' too, and protested to Gov. William Donald Shaefer, Senators Paul S. Sarbanes and Barbara A. Mikulski, and State Delegate Anne S. Perkins, asking that the phrase be dropped from the seal.
“Every law that is passed in the State of Maryland is stamped with these demeaning words, suggesting that women talk and men act,’' the students wrote.
The campaign’s initiators include Jenny Corso, Kelly Just, Su Lee, Laura Monfried, and Rachel Rosen. Their teacher is Mary Shoemaker.
Latin has been taught at Bryn Mawr since its founding, and was heavily promoted by the school’s first headmistress, the classicist Edith Hamilton, whose books attempted to popularize Latin and Greek studies. Some of her works are still in use in schools, including Mythology and The Greek Way.
Quaker educators will gather at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., this week for the First International Congress on Quaker Education.
The meeting, sponsored by the Friends Council on Education, the Friends Association for Higher Education, and Guilford College, will assess the present state and the future of Quaker education.
The April 7-10 conference will include a keynote address by Ernest L. Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, titled “A Challenge to Quaker Education.’' For more information, contact Damon D.
Hickey, conference coordinator, Guilford College, (919) 292-5511.
The statistics on school systems compiled by the federal government between 1870 and 1930 do not incorporate accurate information on Roman Catholic schools, according to David Baker, a professor of sociology at The Catholic University of America.
Mr. Baker is re-evaluating data on Catholic schools from that period for a two-year, $80,000 study funded by the National Science Foundation.
He plans to compare census data with enrollment figures and compile a more accurate portrait of enrollment for each diocese in the country. Other researchers will be able to use the study’s results, he said, to analyze the influences on the growth of educational systems.
The Howe Military School in Howe, Ind., a boarding school for boys since 1884, will admit its first female boarders next fall.
The school will be one of only three precollegiate military schools in the country that accept women for a boarding, cadet program, school officials said. The academy currently accepts girls as day students, and nine of the its 189 students this year are girls.
The Governor Dummer Academy of Byfield, Mass., celebrated the 225th anniversary of its founding on March 1, with speeches, banquets, fireworks, a chapel service, concert, and symposium--and fundraising.
Once the oldest boys’ boarding school in the country, until it became coeducational in 1971, the college-preparatory school used the commemoration to announce a capital campaign to raise $13.8 million over the next three years.
Several state officials spoke at the ceremonies, including the former president of the Massachusetts Senate, Kevin Harrington, and Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Murphy, who urged students to become involved in social issues.
The school was founded by Lieutenant Governor William Dummer in 1763 in what was then the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Of the first class of 27 boys, 16 served in the U.S. Congress and two later became presidents of Harvard University.--K.G.
