The Classroom Is the Rehearsal Room for Society
The way boys and girls think need not be identical to be complementary.
Education is more than the transmission of knowledge, the passing of examinations or the acquisition of professional qualifications. It is also preparation for life among people who differ from us. Its social and relational dimensions help shape the attitudes with which future adults enter marriage, family life, institutions and the wider community.
This is why the formative years matter.
Single-sex schools can provide excellent academic and moral education. Their existence, therefore, should not be dismissed as educationally deficient. Yet there is a dimension of preparation for adult life that deserves deliberate attention: learning how to understand, respect and cooperate with people of the other sex.
Co-education, when thoughtfully structured, provides an opportunity for this learning to take place naturally and progressively.
The objective is not to make boys and girls think alike. Neither is it to assume that every boy thinks one way and every girl another. Human beings are individuals, and differences within each sex can be as significant as differences between the sexes.
The objective is to allow young people to encounter difference without fear, prejudice or unnecessary mystery.
A boy who grows up assuming that intellectual ability naturally belongs more to boys may have his assumption challenged when a girl in his classroom outperforms him academically. That experience can teach humility more effectively than an abstract lecture.
But the lesson works both ways. A boy may discover that a girl can outperform him in mathematics, while a girl may discover that a boy can outperform her in another discipline. Neither outcome diminishes either person.
The real lesson is that ability belongs to the individual, not to the gender.
Such experiences can teach boys and girls to compete without contempt, cooperate without insecurity, disagree without hostility and recognise excellence wherever it appears.
This is one of the potential strengths of well-managed co-education: reality becomes a teacher of prejudice.
The classroom consequently becomes more than a place where knowledge is acquired. It becomes a rehearsal room for relationships that may later define adult life.
Consider the boy who eventually rises to become a Vice-Chancellor of a university. His academic qualifications may secure the appointment, but his character and relational habits will influence how he exercises authority.
The boy who learned in school to respect the intellectual capacity of girls may carry that disposition into adulthood. As a husband, it may influence how he regards the intelligence and contribution of his wife. As a university administrator, it may influence whether he recognises competence without allowing gender stereotypes to cloud his judgement. As a community leader, it may influence his willingness to listen to perspectives different from his own.
The same continuum applies to the girl.
The girl who learns early that strength, intelligence, leadership and competence are not the exclusive possessions of either sex may become an adult better prepared to work with men without unnecessary fear, prejudice or rivalry.
The child in the classroom is the adult in formation.
This is why the curriculum should be deliberate.
If education is preparing the men and women who will eventually form families, lead institutions and shape communities, then intellectual development cannot be its only concern. Education should also deliberately cultivate respect, empathy, communication, cooperation, healthy competition, humility, responsibility and the ability to resolve differences.
The family makes this especially important.
The family is one of the primary places where society reproduces its values. When relationships within families become deeply dysfunctional, the consequences can travel beyond the household into the next generation and eventually into the community.
A crack in the family can therefore become a crack in the social continuum.
Education cannot guarantee successful marriages or harmonious communities. No curriculum can remove human weakness, incompatibility or conflict. But education can influence the habits of mind with which people enter those relationships.
That is the point at which co-education becomes more than a question of classroom arrangement.
It becomes an opportunity for social preparation.
Boys and girls who learn together under healthy conditions can encounter one another as fellow learners before they encounter one another as husbands and wives, employers and employees, administrators and colleagues, leaders and citizens.
They can discover that difference does not automatically mean opposition.
They can learn that one person’s strength does not require another person’s weakness.
They can learn that cooperation is not surrender and that respect is not inferiority.
Most importantly, they can learn that the opposite sex is not an abstraction, a stereotype or an object of suspicion, but a collection of individual human beings with different abilities, personalities, strengths and weaknesses.
This is not an argument that every school must be co-educational, nor is it a claim that co-education automatically produces better citizens.
It is an argument for deliberate educational preparation for a shared society.
Where boys and girls are educated separately, schools should still deliberately create healthy opportunities for them to develop mutual understanding and respectful cooperation. Where they are educated together, the environment should be intentionally structured so that interaction becomes constructive rather than distracting or harmful.
The ultimate question is not simply:
What kind of school produces the best examination results?
It is also:
What kind of education produces men and women capable of living responsibly with one another?
For the boy in the classroom may become tomorrow’s husband, father, Vice-Chancellor, administrator or community leader.
The girl beside him may become his wife, mother, professor, administrator or community leader.
The qualifications they acquire may determine what positions they occupy.
But the attitudes they acquire while growing up may influence how they occupy those positions.
The classroom is the beginning.
The family is the continuation.
The community is the extension.
And society is the beneficiary.
Therefore, education should not merely teach children how to make a living.
It should deliberately teach them how to live with one another.
