COEDUCATION

COEDUCATION, the practice of educating male and female students in the same institution, is the dominant mode at all levels of education in the United States. The custom began in the colonial period, when New England colonies legally obligated parents to teach reading and writing to boys and at least reading to girls. While much of this education took place in the home, many towns also funded primary schools. Elsewhere, subscription schools were open to male and female students whose parents contributed to the schools' operating costs. Female education expanded after the American Revolution, when the ideology of republican womanhood supported elite women's arguments that educated wives and mothers were essential to an enlightened citizenry. By the early nineteenth century, a few chartered academies admitted girls on an equal basis with boys; others allowed girls restricted use of their facilities. Although coeducational secondary schools had appeared by the 1840s, people generally maintained that girls (as well as most boys) required no education beyond elementary school. Paradoxically, rising female attendance necessitated more elementary school teachers, which eventually opened up educational opportunities for women.

Oberlin College (founded in Ohio, 1833) provided the first model of coeducational college education. Other small religious colleges adopted coeducation for financial reasons. In 1855 the University of Iowa became the first public institution to establish coeducation, followed by state universities in Wisconsin (1865), Kansas (1869), and Minnesota (1869). Both private and public schools frequently denied women full use of facilities or unrestricted attendance in classes. Several prestigious universities resisted coeducation, opting instead for coordinate colleges like Harvard and Radcliffe. Most of these institutions adopted full coeducation by the mid-1970s. In the 1990s, women seeking admission to The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute, the only remaining public men's colleges, forced the courts to consider whether excluding women from universities promotes harmful and archaic stereotypes about men and women. Conversely, some single-sex colleges see coeducation as restricting freedom of choice and threatening their existence.

Although coeducation prevailed in the early 2000s, some asserted that it has had mixed results for precollegiate boys and girls. By the early 1990s, the American Association of University Women reported that girls did not receive the same quality or quantity of education as boys because male students demanded more disciplinary attention from their teachers. By 1994 some school districts had established single-sex math and science classes for girls to improve their performance on standardized tests. Studies in the late 1990s found that boys, whose emotional development often lags behind that of girls, can also benefit from a single-sex environment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Howe, Florence. Myths of Coeducation: Selected Essays, 1964–1983. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Kaestle, Carl F. Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Tyack, David, and Elisabeth Hansot. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

Myrna W.Merron/s. b.

See alsoEducation, Higher: Colleges and Universities ; Education, Higher: Women's Colleges ; Schools, Single-Sex ; Women's Educational Equity Act ; Women's Studies .