Coeducation

Mixed-sex education, also known as mixed-gender education, co-education or coeducation (abbreviated to co-ed or coed), is a system of education where males and females are educated together. Whereas single-sex education was more common up to the 19th century, mixed-sex has since become standard in many cultures, particularly in Western countries. Single-sex education, however, remains prevalent in many Muslim countries. The relative merits of both systems have been the subject of debate.

The first co-educational institution of any form is Dollar Academy, a junior and senior school for males and females from ages 5 – 18 in Scotland, United Kingdom. It was founded by a legacy left by John McNabb, a successful merchant trader, who died in 1802, but it took 16 years for his request to be fulfilled and the original school opened in 1818. From the outset the school admitted both boys and girls of the parish of Dollar and the surrounding area. The school continues in existence to the present day with around 1,250 pupils.

The first co-educational college founded (one that accepts women as well as men) was Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Oberlin, Ohio. It opened on December 3, 1833, with 44 students, including 29 men and 15 women. Fully equal status for women didn't come until 1837, and the first three women to graduate with bachelor's degrees did so in 1840. The college became 'Oberlin College' in 1850. It has been widely discussed that girls without classmates have social issues that may impact adolescent development because girls may have lower, more traditional aspirations.

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.

In early civilizations, people were educated informally: primarily save within the household. As time progressed, education became more structured and formal. Women often had very few rights when education started to become a more important aspect of civilization. Efforts of the ancient Greek and Chinese societies focused primarily on the education of males. 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 late 19th and early 20th centuries, coeducation grew much more widely accepted. In Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, the education of girls and boys in the same classes became an approved practice. 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. The concept of universal elementary education, regardless of sex, had been created. 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 practice became very popular in northern England, Scotland, and colonial New England, where young children, both male and female, attended dame schools. In the late 18th century, girls gradually were admitted to town schools. 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. The new free public elementary, or common schools, which after the American Revolution supplanted church institutions, were almost always coeducational, and by 1900 most public high schools were coeducational as well.

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