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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 education has since become standard in many cultures, particularly in western countries. Single-sex education remains prevalent in many Muslim countries. The relative merits of both systems have been the subject of debate.
The world's oldest co-educational school is thought to be Archbishop Tenison's Church of England High School, Croydon, established in 1714 in the United Kingdom, which admitted boys and girls from its opening onwards. This has always been a day school only.
The world's oldest co-educational both day and boarding school is Dollar Academy, a junior and senior school for males and females from ages 5 to 18 in Scotland, United Kingdom. From its opening in 1818, 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 to be founded was Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Oberlin, Ohio. It opened on 3 December 1833, with 44 students, including 29 men and 15 women. Fully equal status for women did not arrive until 1837, and the first three women to graduate with bachelor's degrees did so in 1840. By the late 20th century, many institutions of higher learning that had been exclusively for men or women had become coeducational.
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."Coeducation." (n.d.): Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia. Web. 23 October 2012. 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 . 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."coeducation". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 23 October 2012. 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.
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. He also proposed that the university recruit female students. The idea was supported by the president Kuo Ping-Wen, academic director Liu Boming, and such famous professors as Lu Zhiwei and Yang Xingfo, but opposed by many famous men of the time. The meeting passed the law and decided to recruit women students next year. Nanjing Higher Normal School enrolled eight Chinese female students in 1920. In the same year Peking University also began to allow women students to audit classes. One of the most notable female students of that time was Chien-Shiung Wu.
In 1949, the China was founded. The Chinese government pursued a policy of moving towards co-education and nearly all schools and universities have become mixed-sex. 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 people and Salar people, find coeducation to be controversial, owing to Islamic ideas on gender roles. On the other hand, the Muslim Uyghur people have not historically objected to coeducation.
The world's oldest co-educational school is thought to be Archbishop Tenison's Church of England High School, Croydon, established in 1714 in the United Kingdom, which admitted 10 boys and 10 girls from its opening, and remained co-educational thereafter. This is a day school only and still in existence.
The Scottish Dollar Academy was the first mixed-sex both day and boarding school in the UK. Founded in 1818, it is the oldest both boarding and day mixed-sex educational institution in the world still in existence. In England, the first non-Quaker mixed-sex public boarding school was Bedales School, founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley and becoming mixed in 1898. The first non-denominational co-educational day school in England was The King Alfred School, in North West London, which was officially opened by Millicent Garrett Fawcett on 24 June 1898. Ruckleigh School in Solihull was founded by Cathleen Cartland in 1909 as a non-denominational co-educational preparatory school many decades before others followed. Many previously single-sex schools have begun to accept both sexes in the past few decades: for example, Clifton College began to accept girls in 1987.Christine Skelton, ed. Whatever happens to little women?: gender and primary schooling (London:. Open University Press, 1989)
The first higher-education institution in the United Kingdom to enrol women and men on equal terms was the University of Bristol (then University College, Bristol) in 1876. The University of London was the first British university to admit women to degrees alongside men, in 1878, but was an examining board rather than a teaching institution at that time. The federal Victoria University was established in 1880 and was authorised to grant degrees to men and women, and from 1883 Owens College (then the only college of the university; now the University of Manchester) admitted women. Durham University College of Science (now Newcastle University) had allowed women to study alongside men from its foundation in 1871, but the first women did not enrol until 1880. 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. The Scottish universities were opened to women by the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889, with the first women being admitted in 1892, although women remained barred from studying medicine until 1916. At Oxford, women were admitted to membership of the university and to degrees from 1920, while at Cambridge this did not occur until 1948. Women at Cambridge continued to have to take examinations in different rooms from the men until 1956.
Accommodation at universities became mixed much later than education, starting in the 1960s with the plate glass universities. At Sussex (1961), the halls of residence were single sex, while the halls at Essex (1965) were mixed but with floors segregated by sex. At the first Lancaster colleges, Bowland and Lonsdale (1964), floors were mixed but segregated by area, while in Lancaster's third college, Cartmel (1968), segregation was only by corridor.
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. The first to become mixed were post-graduate colleges and societies, whose students were legally adults, starting with Oxford's Nuffield College from its establishment in 1937. The first mixed Cambridge college was the post-graduate Darwin from its foundation in 1964; similarly, Durham's Graduate Society (now Ustinov College) was mixed from its opening in 1965. Until 1970, students under 21 were not legally adults and universities and colleges acted in loco parentis. After the age of majority was reduced to 18 in 1970, restrictions on mixed student residences began to be lifted. In 1972, Churchill, Clare, and King's colleges became the first previously all-male Cambridge colleges to admit female , while the first mixed undergraduate colleges at Durham, also in 1972, were Collingwood College, which was founded that year and was also the first British university residence to have mixed-sex corridors, and the originally all-male Van Mildert College. The first five undergraduate colleges at Oxford (Brasenose, Hertford, Jesus, St Catherine's, and Wadham) became mixed in 1974. The last all-male colleges became mixed in 1988, including Magdalene College, Cambridge, Hatfield College, Durham and St Chad's College, Durham; the last all-male colleges at Oxford having become mixed in 1986. St Benet's Hall (now closed), a permanent private hall rather than a college, was the last institution at Oxford to become mixed, admitting postgraduate women from 2014 and undergraduates from 2016.
The last women's college in Durham, St Mary's, became mixed in 2005. At Oxford, the last women's college, St Hilda's, became mixed in 2008. 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, and the Boughton Wing of St Mary's College, Durham.
The University of Iowa became the first coeducational public or state university in the United States in 1855, and for much of the next century, public universities, and land grant universities in particular, would lead the way in mixed-sex higher education. There were also many private coeducational universities founded in the 19th century, especially west of the Mississippi River. East of the Mississippi, Wheaton College (Illinois) graduated its first female student in 1862. Bates College in Maine was open to women from its founding in 1855, and graduated its first female student in 1869. Cornell University and the University of Michigan each admitted their first female students in 1870.
Around the same time, single-sex women's colleges were also appearing. According to Irene Harwarth, Mindi Maline, and Elizabeth DeBra: "women's colleges were founded during the mid- and late-19th century in response to a need for advanced education for women at a time when they were not admitted to most institutions of higher education." Notable examples include the Seven Sisters colleges, of which Vassar College is now coeducational and Radcliffe College has merged with Harvard University. Other notable women's colleges that have become coeducational include Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Ohio Wesleyan Female College in Ohio, Skidmore College, Wells College, and Sarah Lawrence College in New York state, Pitzer College in California, Goucher College in Maryland and Connecticut 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". 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. In 1905, the Buckman Act was one of consolidation in governance and funding but separation in race and gender, with Florida State College for Women (since 1947, Florida State University) established to serve white females during this era, the campus that became what is now the University of Florida serving white males, and coeducation stipulated only for the campus serving black students at the site of what is now Florida A&M University. Florida did not return to coeducation at UF and FSU until after World War II, prompted by the drastically increased demands placed on the higher education system by veterans studying via GI Bill programs following World War II. The Buckman arrangements officially ended with new legislation guidelines passed in 1947.
Nonetheless, mixed-sex education existed at the lower levels in the U.S. long before it extended to colleges. For example, in 1787, the predecessor to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, opened as a mixed-sex secondary school. Its first enrollment class consisted of 78 male and 36 female students. Among the latter was Rebecca Gratz who would become an educator and philanthropist. However, the school soon began having financial problems and it reopened as an all-male institution. Westford Academy in Westford, Massachusetts has operated as mixed-sex secondary school since its founding in 1792, making it the oldest continuously operating coed school in America. The oldest continuously operating coed boarding school in the United States is Westtown School, founded in 1799.
Oberlin College and the surrounding community were dedicated to progressive causes and social justice. Though it did reluctantly what every other college refused to do at all, it was the first college to admit both women and African Americans as students. 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. The initial 1837 students were Caroline Mary Rudd, Elizabeth Prall, Mary Hosford, and Mary Fletcher Kellogg.
The early success and achievement of women at Oberlin College persuaded many early women's rights leaders that coeducation would soon be accepted throughout the country. However, for quite a while, women sometimes were treated rudely by their male classmates. The prejudice of some male professors proved more unsettling. Many professors disapproved of the admission of women into their classes, citing studies that claimed that women were mentally unsuited for higher education, and because most would "just get married", they were using resources that, they believed, male students would use better. Some professors simply ignored the women students.
By the end of the 19th century 70% of American colleges were coeducational, although the state of Florida was a notable exception; the Buckman Act of 1905 imposed gender-separated white higher education at the University of Florida (men) and Florida State College for Women. (As there was only one state college for blacks, the future Florida A&M University, it admitted both men and women.) The white Florida campuses returned to coeducation in 1947, when the women's college became Florida State University and the University of Florida became coeducational. In the late 20th century, many institutions of higher learning that had been exclusively for people of one sex became coeducational.
However, some argue that at certain ages, students may be more distracted by the opposite sex in a coeducational setting, but others point to this being based on an assumption that all students are heterosexual. 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. 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. Some studies show that 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.Mael, F. (1998). Single-sex and coeducational schooling: Relationships to socioemotional and academic development. Review of Educational Research, 68(2), 101–129. American Educational Research Association. 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"; 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."
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