Coeducation

Susan Laird

Coeducation refers to the practice of educating both sexes in the same setting. In its thinnest sense, this term coined in the nineteenth-century in the United States, need not signify that both sexes teach, or that the curriculum represents or addresses both sexes, or even that both sexes learn together rather than apart within that setting. The only requirement this otherwise vaguely descriptive term signifies in both popular and professional usage is both sexes' presence as learners in a setting, perhaps not even in nearly equal numbers, nor with nearly equal value. This theoretically naive way of discussing coeducation may owe some of its currency even among professional educational theorists to John Dewey's strong polemical advocacy for coeducation in a 1911 Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ) article where he asserted the absurdity of developing a theory of coeducation. Yet he demonstrates the need for subtler coeducational thought when his own LHJ ...

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