Co-education

“ Co-education, the schooling together of boys and girls until puberty, is a step in the right direction. It familiarises children with each other in quite the best and most innocent manner; it is no more likely to create evil results than the daily life at home of the perfect family of boys and girls meeting under the protection of their own parents. ”

“ If the system were widely adopted and had this effect upon the students everywhere, the results would certainly be very unfortunate. Another critic, equally well informed, said that the real objection to co-education is that the students do little else except fall in love with each other. ”

“ These democratic institutions had the vigor of youth, and were ambitious and struggling. 'Why,' asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, 'should not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain?' It is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of a similar kind, co-education was established in some colleges at their beginning, in others after debate, and by a radical change in policy. ”

“ It could not be stopped without great parental sternness and the danger of deceit, for co-education will go on outside of school if not inside, and the safest way is to let sentiment and study go hand in hand, with teachers and parents to direct and explain the great lesson all are the better for learning soon or late. ”

“ Co-education had its beginning in most parts of the United States in the fact that in the frontier communities there were often not enough boy pupils to support a school nor was there enough money to maintain a separate school for girls; but what began experimentally and as a matter of necessity has long become an integral part of the American social system. So far from losing ground it is continually (and never more rapidly than in recent years) gaining in the Universities as well as in the schools, in private as well as public institutions. ”

“ But perhaps, after all, little can be inferred for the future from the result of four years of co-education in Michigan University, from the intellectual and moral standing of the women who are at the present time students here, or from their physical well-being. We do not assert that there can be; we do not draw inferences, we present facts. We are fully aware that the problem of co-education is in the first stages of its solution; that it will require at least a generation to solve it fully; that faith is not fruition, nor belief, certainty in this experiment, any more than in any other ”

“ Co-education in the United States is not so unpopular as in some other countries, and it is increasing in favor. In all the primary schools, and in most of the high schools, boys and girls study in the same class-room, and girls are admitted as students even in some colleges and universities. ”

“ They welcome co-education as likely to bring with it a healthy radicalism in regard to the older tradition of studies in boys’ secondary schools. They approve it as leading to mixed staffs of men and women teachers, and as the most effectual way of putting girls in a position of reasonable equality with boys in respect of intellectual and civic opportunity. On the other hand, those who oppose co-education in secondary schools rest their case upon the danger of the intellectual or physical overstrain of girls during adolescence ”

“ In these pages, co-education of the sexes is used in its common acceptation of identical co-education.
Let us look for a moment at what identical co-education is. The law has, or had, a maxim, that a man and his wife are one, and that the one is the man. Modern American education has a maxim, that boys' schools and girls' schools are one, and that the one is the boys' school. Schools have been arranged, accordingly, to meet the requirements of the masculine organization. ”

“ The aristocrat's son and the workingman's son will change places, if nature has made the first adapted for the position of the second, and vice versa. Through these schools the country child will always be able to grow up in the country, and need not be sent for educational purposes into the city, provided there are still great cities. Finally boys and girls will enjoy in them all the advantages of co-education, without the particular capacities of each being forced into the uniformity of a common examination system. ”

“ Clarke draws his examples, not from students who have been educated at mixed schools, but from those who have attended ordinary girls' boarding-schools; so that no proof is adduced of any special influence of co-education, unless the general statement that “co-education is intellectually a success, physically a failure,” can be considered as such proof, which we do not believe. ”

“ Hence, whatever other considerations may enter into the co-education problem, this much is clear: if women now, or at any time in the near future, are to have these facilities they must come by some system of co-education, as only institutions now existing for men can furnish them. ”

“ In the Board of Education Special Reports on Educational Subjects, vol. vi. (Wyman & Sons, 1900) , J. H. Badley, writing on The Possibility of Co-education in English Preparatory and other Secondary Schools, is strongly in favour. “In co-education . . . half-heartedness means failure. The more completely both sexes can be brought together upon an equal and natural footing the less the difficulties grow.” In the Board of Education Special Reports, vol. ”

“ Wherever co-education has been tried its effects have been excellent. The presence of female students in medical colleges has had a markedly reformative influence on the manners and moral tone of medical student life, not long ago the opprobrium of civilisation. The advantages to a parent of being able to send his sons and his daughters to one place of instruction, and to the children themselves of the companionship and maintenance of family relations thus afforded, are equally obvious. ”

“ A co-operative effort is now required on the part of the people, as a matter of domestic economy, to establish schools of a higher order, and to provide the professors and apparatus necessary to impart instruction in the higher branches of learning, that our young people may be able to obtain the education they desire at home ”

“ Among those who favor the higher education of girls there are many who believe whole-heartedly in co-education. I had no opportunity of seeing a co-educational college, but I listened to a detailed description of the life in one from a lady who had lived it. ”

“ Society has to give therefore, an equal education to each one of its members; that is to say, it should colocar to each child in the possibility to develop her faculties, to acuire all the knowledges that share her skills and to learn a role following her desire.
To follow this proposition education will have to be imparted in community establishments where each child will have access, where they can simultaneously develop their mind and their muscles, to learn at the same time science and a job. ”

“ But co-education is no panacea, for the sex problems of the individual child in a co-educational school are almost as immediate as those of the child from the segregated school.
IX. This morning I was setting off for Dundee when Willie Marshall entered the compartment. He was dressed in his Sunday best, and I wondered why he was going to Dundee on a Wednesday. ”

“ But throughout the west, co-education was strongly preferred in elementary and secondary schools and in universities on the further ground that it was believed to be more in accordance with the democratic principle of equal educational opportunity for the two sexes. ”

“ I have here less to say against coeducation in college, still less in university grades after the maturity which comes at eighteen or twenty has been achieved; but it is high time to ask ourselves whether the theory and practise of identical coeducation, especially in the high school, which has lately been carried to a greater extreme in this country than the rest of the world recognizes, has not brought certain grave dangers, and whether it does not interfere with the natural differentiations seen everywhere else. I recognize, of course, the great argument of economy. ”

“ The growth of the child in the direction of social capacity and service, his larger and more vital union with life, becomes the unifying aim; and discipline, culture and information fall into place as phases of this growth.
I wish to say one word more about the relationship of our particular school to the University. The problem is to unify, to organize education, to bring all its various factors together, through putting it as a whole into organic union with everyday life. ”

“ Still, English societies do a great deal compared with those of other countries, and notably of France, where the education grant was zero in almost all the societies. [78]
Co-operative education begins among the children, but it also concerns itself with adults. It has for its object special co-operative education organisation, history, services rendered and also general instruction ; to make good co-operators one must first make men. ”

“ Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people, in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs. ”

“ Whatever the subject-matter, its arrangement and presentation should be so ordered as to inspire and enable the child to make a willing and worthy contribution to the life of his community. But the social emphasis in education, if it is to be true to itself and indeed to the general history of mankind, must define society in wider terms than that of the immediate community. ”

“ Under the new system of education the pupils, although separated from the adult community, will, nevertheless, undoubtedly live together among themselves, and so form a separate and self-contained community with its organization precisely defined, based on the nature of things and demanded throughout by reason. The very first image of a social order which the pupil’s mind should be stimulated to create will be that of the community in which he himself lives. ”

“ The spirit of voluntary coöperation for the promotion of the common order, of which I spoke in a previous lecture, has made itself felt in education by the formation of Teachers’ Associations in the various States, and groups of States, and by the foundation of the National Educational Association, a voluntary body incorporated in the District of Columbia, “to [Pg 207] elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of education in the United States.” ”

“ Where it is prevalent, it is a sign that true coeducation that is, education in terms of generous and welcome equality—does not exist. I have rarely found opposition to coeducation on the part of really serious students. ”

“ As attempts in socializing education have met with such success and such enthusiasm among the children that their value as educational tools is established, so giving the people of the community a real share in activities centered in school buildings and employing school equipment, is one of the surest ways of giving them a more intelligent public spirit and a greater interest in the right education of the youth of the land. ”

“ If the parents in the community, whose standards of life are the highest, and whose ideas are the most enlightened, would as a class co-operate in the advancement of common education, the charge that our public schools produce on the whole second-rate acquirements, and second-rate morals and manners, would soon be refuted, and the cause of popular education would cease to be handicapped, as it is at present, by the coolness of the well-to-do class. ”

“ Communities vary as greatly in their characteristics as do children. It is now certain that no formula will provide education for all children. Each new study of community needs makes it more evident that no system will supply education for all communities. It is the business of the educator to study the individual child and the individual community, and then to provide an education that will assist both to grow normally and soundly in all of their parts. ”

“ The coeducationists think it wholesome that in her later teens and early twenties she should be subjected to an impartial judgment, ready to estimate her without swerving, and to tell her as freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother himself is told. Coeducation, as a system, must minimize the different needs of men and women; it appeals to them and provides for them alike, and then allows the natural tastes and instincts of each scope for individuality. ”

“ Co-education.
Co-education in colleges is desirable. Brookings, p. 178: Briefs and references.—C. L. of P. Debates: References.—C. L. of P. Reference lists.
Co-education of the sexes. Askew, 1906, p. 78: Briefs and references.—Askew, 1911, p. 41: Briefs.
Is the co-education of the sexes in higher institutions desirable? Matson, p. 244: Briefs and references.
Coleridge and Wordsworth. See Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Collectivism. See Socialism. [Pg 22]
Colleges and universities.
Are college-bred men, as a class, superior in mental attainments and culture to self-educated men? ”

“ It is very largely a question of reform and development in home education. Clearly, then, husband and wife have great need of intelligent sympathy and counsel in the discharge of their joint, yet partially differentiated, tasks. Hence, it should be the high [246] function of public education to promote this healthy companionship in social duty. Furthermore, American experience appears to show that it can best do so by training young men and women together. Indeed, in this regard the sociological value of coeducation is very important. ”