Co-education

Imagine being asked to spend twelve or so years of your life in a society which consisted only of members of your own sex. How would you react? (Of course all of us have experienced such conditions!) You wouldn't feel too happy about it.
In my opinion no one can put up with that situation unless there was something definitely wrong with them. It is very surprising to me that parents or education authorities impose such abnormal conditions on youngsters.
Any discussion of this topic is bound to question the aims of education. To me the main aim of education is to equip young people with all they need to take their place in adult society. Now adult society is made up of both men and women, so how can a segregated school prepare young people for this purpose? Anyone entering adult society after years of segregation can only be in for a shock.
I believe a co-educational school offers children nothing less than a true version of society in miniature; therefore, it's comparable to real society on a small scale. Boys and girls have the opportunity to get to know each other; they learn to live together from earliest childhood, and they are put in a position where they can compare themselves with each other in terms of academic ability, athletic achievement and many of the extra-curricular activities which are part of school life.
Co-education disproves the theory that boys are cleverer than girls or vice-versa. In a co-educational school, everything falls into its proper place. Having classes together is an excellent idea and is successful in most schools. This way, boys become aware of girls' abilities and vice-versa; a spirit of co-operation and competition thrives in the co-educational system.
Girls and boys at a self-conscious age take extra care of themselves. Growing up together and sharing activities will widen the students' talents and a healthy atmosphere pervades in all co-educational schools. The spirit of co-operation that grows between boys and girls makes it easier later on to adjust in a mixed society. However, when boys and girls are separated, they feel they are poles apart. Boys and girls get involved in rivalry instead of constructive competition.
We know that adolescence is a critical age. Teenagers experience a lot of physical and emotional changes. Their characters are not stable yet; they need time so that their final characters take shape. Naturally if they are in a segregated school they might easily form illusions about the opposite sex; for example, boys might think that girls are mysterious creatures or girls might imagine that boys are romantic heroes. Such illusions can be dangerous when later boys and girls want to form relationships and work together. In my opinion the greatest advantage of co-education is that it prevents boys and girls from forming such illusions about each other. Under co-education teenagers are disillusioned very soon; as a result, co-education helps teenagers to form a realistic attitude toward the opposite sex and a healthy attitude toward life. Another advantage of co-education is that it prevents sexual deviation. If not exposed to a co-educational environment, there are will be some disadvantages. A male-only school has homosexuality rate of 63%, more than a public school open to all genders with a 14% rating. This is one of the faults with not having mixed schools.
Some parents prefer to send their children to single-sex schools in order to minimize their contact with the opposite sex, and therefore, to some extent prevent their children from its aftermaths (again, of course in our country there's no other choice, but let's imagine we were in a position that we were allowed to choose.) First of all, it's important to understand that just by sending your child to an all-girls or all-boys school doesn't stop them from seeking out the opposite sex. You can minimize contact when your child is in school, but you can't stop your children meeting others through extra classes, the neighborhood, or through friends. If your child meets someone with whom she shares chemistry, and if she makes the decision to contact such person, there's little a parent can do.
On the other hand, when you send your child to a co-educational school, your child will have exposure to the opposite sex from the outset; hence, your child will not only feel more comfortable in the company of the opposite sex, but will also be able to handle advances better. This way, boys don't grow up believing that women are airy goddesses , more like book illustrations to a fairy-tale than human beings. After all, there are no goddesses with freckles, pigtails, piercing voices and inky fingers, and there are no romantic heroes with knobbly knees, dirty fingers and unkempt hair.

In conclusion, when the time comes for young people to leave school and enter society, they are fully prepared to do so as well-adjusted adults. They've had years of experience in coping with the problems that men and women face.

On the other hand, if you examine the Western sociologists and what they have discovered through their research, their studies more or less negate the positive aspects of co-education. In fact, the increasing achievement level of female students has been attributed to the increase on single-sex classes. Single-sex classes along with a female teacher, provides a positive role model for the students, not only in traditionally female-dominated subjects like humanities, but also in subjects like science and engineering. The latter subjects, which were traditionally considered as "male domains" are now being characterized by increasing female achievement levels. Single-sex classes increases the confidence of female students, according to this interpretation, and results in a more positive attitude to science and technology subjects.

A psychologist working on the study of individuals, Michelle Stanworth, who carried out her study "Gender and Schooling," discovered that interaction in the classroom affected the female students in a very negative way: they got less attention of the teachers, were discouraged from class participation and lacked self-esteem considerably. Her conclusion was determined by interviews with teachers. When asked about whom they give the most attention to, the teacher named a male student two and a half times as often as a female student. Most of the teachers felt that it was much more difficult to remember the names of the female students of the class. Discouragement in class participation was determined through the response of the pupils who reported that the male students were four times more likely to join a class discussion, twice as likely to seek help from the teacher and twice as likely to be asked questions. And finally, girls' underestimation of their ability was discovered when the pupils were asked to rank themselves in terms of their ability, and teachers were asked to rank their students accordingly. In 9 out of 24 cases in which there was a discrepancy between the two rankings, girls had placed themselves lower than their teacher's estimate and all but one boy placed themselves higher than the teacher's rank (!).

The above mentioned studies do point towards the fact that mixed-sex classrooms are disadvantaging female students in many ways. Of course the above studies have been criticized as well. But we can't ignore the fact that if the wider society is characterized by patriarchal relations, such relations tend to reflect themselves in the classroom as well, which, as I said in the beginning, is considered as a miniature form of the society as a whole.