Mixed-sex education, also known as coeducation, is the integrated education of male and female students in the same environment. This and single sex education are very popular teaching methods used today around the world. There have been many arguments and studies that examine single sex and/or mixed sex education to argue in favor or against a teaching style.

History

List of Colleges & the year they became Coeducational:

Oberlin College: 1833 (the first school in the nation to be successfully founded as co-educational)
Cornell University: 1870
University of Pennsylvania: 1876
Bucknell University: 1883
American University: 1893
Princeton University: 1969
Yale University: 1969
Colgate University: 1970
Lafayette University: 1970
Brown University: 1971
Lehigh University: 1971
Harvard University: 1972
Dartmouth University: 1972
Holy Cross University: 1972
U.S. Naval Academy: 1976
U.S. Military Academy: 1976
Columbia University: 1983

"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." Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1] In early civilizations, people were educated informally- primarily from within the household. As time progressed, education became more structured and formal. Women had very few rights when education started to become a more important aspect of civilizations. Efforts of the ancient Greek and Chinese societies focused primarily on the education of males. In ancient Rome, the availability of an 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 became a much more widely accepted principle of educational philosophy. 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[2]. After the Reformation, coeducation was introduced in western Europe. This was when particular Protestant groups urged that boys and girls should be taught to read the Bible. The practice became very popular in England's northern parts, in Scotland, and colonial New England, where young children, both male and female, attended dame schools. In the latter half of the 18th century, girls gradually were admitted to town schools. The Society of Friends in England, as well as in the United States, acted like pioneers of coeducation as they were in universal education, and, in Quaker settlements within 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. [3]

The early success and achievement of women at Oberlin persuaded many early women's rights leaders that coeducation would soon be accepted throughout the country. However, for quite a while, women generally were forced to tolerate uncivil behavior from their male classmates. The prejudice of male professors proved more unsettling. Multiple professors had disapproved the admission of women into their classes, citing studies that stated how women were physically incapable of higher education, and some professors found it difficult to acknowledge women's presence once they were admitted.[4] Even today, their have been books, studies, and other arguments claiming that women and men learn much differently than each other because of their brain differences. One of these books is called "Boys and Girls Learn Differently!" by Michael Gurian. [5]

By the end of the 19th century, 70 percent of American colleges were coeducational. In the latter half of the 20th century, multiple institutions of higher learning that had been exclusively for people of one sex became coeducational.

Effects of Coeducation

-According to advocates of coeducation, girls without boy classmates have social issues that may impact adolescent development. Girls may have lower, more traditional aspirations and may choose occupations that tend to be more traditional in nature as opposed to science-related occupations. They argue that the absence of the opposite sex creates an unrealistic environment not duplicated in the real world. -In classes that are separated by gender, male and female students work and learn on the same level as their peers, the stereotypical mentality of the teacher is removed, and girls are likely to have more confidence in the classroom than they would in a coeducational class.