Mixed-sex education
In ancient Rome, the availability of education was gradually extended to women, but they were taught separately from men.
The early Christians and medieval Europeans continued this trend, and single-sex schools for the privileged classes prevailed through the Reformation period.
In the 16th century, at the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic church reinforced the establishment of free elementary schools for children of all classes.
[4] After the Reformation, coeducation was introduced in Western Europe, when certain Protestant groups urged that boys and girls should be taught to read the Bible.
The Society of Friends in England, as well as in the United States, pioneered coeducation as they did universal education, and in Quaker settlements in the British colonies, boys and girls commonly attended school together.
In Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, the education of girls and boys in the same classes became an approved practice.
Generally, only schools established by zōng zú (宗族, gens) were for both male and female students.
Tao Xingzhi, the Chinese advocator of mixed-sex education, proposed The Audit Law for Women Students (規定女子旁聽法案, Guī Dìng Nǚ Zi Páng Tīng Fǎ Àn) at the meeting of Nanjing Higher Normal School held on December seventh, 1919.
[7] In recent years, some female or single-sex schools have again emerged for special vocational training needs, but equal rights for education still applies to all citizens.
Indigenous Muslim populations in China, the Hui and Salars, find coeducation to be controversial, owing to Islamic ideas on gender roles.
At the end of World War II, it was temporarily merged with St. Paul's College, which is a boys' school.
When classes at the campus of St. Paul's College were resumed, it continued to be mixed and changed to its present name.
Women at Durham could take the Associate in Science at this time, but were not permitted to take full degrees until 1895 and could not become members of convocation until 1913.
[27][28] Given their dual role as both residential and educational establishments, and that most undergraduate students were not legally adults until the 1970s, individual colleges at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham remained segregated for longer than their parent universities.
[43] As of 2025,[update] two colleges remain single-sex (women-only) at Cambridge: Murray Edwards (New Hall) and Newnham.
Single-sex women's accommodation continues the be available at some other universities, including Aberdare Hall at Cardiff,[46] and the Boughton Wing of St Mary's College, Durham.
Later, in 1862, the first black woman to receive a bachelor's degree (Mary Jane Patterson) also earned it from Oberlin College.
By 1900 the Briton Frederic Harrison said after visiting the United States that "The whole educational machinery of America ... open to women must be at least twentyfold greater than with us, and it is rapidly advancing to meet that of men both in numbers and quality".
[58] Where most of the history of coeducation in this period is a list of those moving toward the accommodation of both men and women at one campus, the state of Florida was an exception.
For example, in 1787, the predecessor to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, opened as a mixed-sex secondary school.
John Jay Shipherd (minister) and Philo P. Stewart (missionary) became friends while spending the summer of 1832 together in nearby Elyria.
They discovered a mutual disenchantment with what they saw as the lack of strong Christian principles among the settlers of the American West.
They decided to establish a college and a colony based on their religious beliefs, "where they would train teachers and other Christian leaders for the boundless most desolate fields in the West".
Women were not admitted to the baccalaureate program, which granted bachelor's degrees, until 1837; prior to that, they received diplomas from what was called the Ladies' Course.
Less common in the 21st century is the noun use of word "coed", which traditionally referred to a female student in a mixed gender school.
[71][72][73][74] If the sexes were educated together, we should have the healthy, moral and intellectual stimulus of sex ever quickening and refining all the faculties, without the undue excitement of senses that results from novelty in the present system of isolation.For years, a question many educators, parents, and researchers have been asking is whether it is academically beneficial to teach boys and girls together or separately at school.
There is evidence that girls may perform less well in traditionally male-dominated subjects such as the sciences when in a class with boys, but other research suggests that when the previous attainment is taken into account, that difference falls away.
[76][77] According to advocates of coeducation, without classmates of the opposite sex, students have social issues that may impact adolescent development.
They argue that the absence of the opposite sex creates an unrealistic environment not duplicated in the real world.
[79] In a 2022 study published in the British Educational Research Journal which examined the Irish educational system, the authors stated that the existing "empirical evidence is somewhat ambiguous, with some studies finding a positive impact of single-sex schooling on education achievement [...] but others finding average null effects";[80] they concluded that after controlling for "individual, parental and school-level factors [...] on average, there is no significant difference in performance for girls or boys who attend single-sex schools compared to their mixed-school peers in science, mathematics or reading.
