Coeducation: An Inquiry into One Point

This is a discussion of coeducation, treated by two young people, a young woman and a young man — Miss Salam Khoury and Mr. Mustafa Awji — both in their second year of law. Miss Khoury defended the affirmative side, and Mr. Awji defended the negative side.

We could have wished the pages of The Woman's Voice were ample enough to publish both articles in full, for the sound study and sound guidance they contain; but we have preferred to present them to the readers of "The Woman's Voice" in summary, without losing their essential benefit.

The Editorial Desk

The school in our country is in urgent need of renewal — of embracing the modern educational doctrines that keep pace with the spirit of the age and accord with what is demanded by every nation that shakes off the dust of lethargy and stagnation and strives toward a sound and elevated life.

The view of the family today differs from what it was fifty years ago, when the man held absolute sovereignty over his wife and children. Woman was not then his companion in every field, as is the case today; it was natural, then, that education should differ according to sex, its aim being to create qualities in the man different from those in the woman.

Today, however, woman has advanced into all professions and occupations and has demonstrated a competence no less than man's; so man has acknowledged her worth and her capacities, and has ended by granting her her rights in many countries. It has therefore become necessary for girls and boys to follow the same educational methods, in order to secure a rising generation balanced and uniform in mentality. And coeducation is the surest of ways to reach this goal — not in the universities alone, but in the elementary schools as well, in accordance with the educational principle which says: "The personality of neither sex is completed except through contact with the other sex."

Coeducation is applied in most advanced countries, such as America, Germany, England, Sweden, and Norway, and its spread is on the increase because of its abundant benefits, the chief of which are:

1 - Competition between the sexes leads to diligence.

2 - Winning the admiration of the other sex begets desire and longing for learning.

3 - The girl endowed with the same culture as the boy can, in emergencies, take his place in all occupations — and this has its great economic benefit.

Mingling on the benches of learning is natural; separating the sexes is unnatural. Moral firmness is drawn from complying with human nature, not from opposing it. Mingling under sound supervision is a positive refiner, while separation with preaching is a negative refiner that has become barren of benefit, rejected by the modern foundations of education.

The girl is by nature emotional, rich in gifts of imagination. If she grows up in a non-mixed school, she gives her fancies free rein, nourishes them with romantic reading, and creates of the young man another young man resembling the youth of her dreams; and when she leaves her prison for the world, she collides with the bitter truth, suffers, and shrinks into herself, sad and melancholy. The young man inclines to reality from his childhood; he is material rather than spiritual in his emotion, and if this emotion is suppressed as a result of non-mixed education, it intensifies and grows and seeks to show itself in unseemly moral forms. Coeducation turns the emotions, by their nature, into a firm friendship built on respect, love, and understanding.

The old educational method is negative and individual, aiming at the destruction of instinct; the modern method is positive and social, aiming at the straightening of emotion and at a sense of the individual's responsibility toward the other sex.

And this is Mr. Awji's point of view:

The lecturer began his talk with a graceful and charming proviso: that most minds had no doubt inclined to support his colleague in her opinions, which made his task of convincing the audience of the soundness of his own view hard and arduous. But he did not despair; despite the awkwardness of his position, he proceeded to divide his talk into two points.

The first: a discussion of the idea from the standpoint of its application.
And the second: whether the idea of coeducation has any foundation to rest upon. He said:

Scholars are agreed that the girl, between the age of four and fifteen, surpasses the boy in her bodily and mental growth; the boy, in this stage of his life, passes through an unruly childhood and false pretensions that run through the course of his growth, until he settles and his gifts begin to overflow; and then it appears to onlookers that the girl's lead halts relatively, and the man's turn comes to devour the distances the girl traversed in his bygone days of heedlessness.

It is a mistake to bring the boy and the girl together before the age of adolescence, because of the difference in temperaments and in physiological transformation, which widen the gulf of understanding between the two.

The Frenchman Buffon explained the slowness of men by saying: "Since men are larger and stronger than women, it was necessary that the time of their growth be longer than the time of women's growth."

And Cabanis said: "Woman is quicker than man both in growth and in decline; no sooner does she come to youth than she begins to crumble; and between her passage from the age of youth to the age of senility there is no interval worth mentioning."

Hence we see that from this side there results a vast distance between the nature of boys and that of girls, which leads to the creation of a different field for each of them to grow up in.

Now perhaps it will be said to me that this experiment has succeeded in the West — so why should we not try to apply it in our society?

I answer: what has proved true among others may not be taken as a rule for us to walk by, because the difference in nature and in environmental and social upbringing creates a total disparity which makes of the idea of coeducation a voice that can never produce harmony; and, as has been said: what is wanted of the cloud is not the rains — the fruits are what is hoped for from it.

The girl has her mission in society; and it is a mission that differs from the young man's; and the difference of mission requires the creation of a different learning, one that prepares the girl to perform her task and the young man his; and the difference of learning leads inevitably to a difference in the methods of imparting this learning. Hence:

The girl has her school; and the boy has his.

For the girl's mission in society is the mission of a mother and mistress of the house.

Fénelon said in his book "The Education of Girls" that woman's learning, like man's learning, must stop at the acquisition of those branches of knowledge that bear upon her function in society.

And I add to that: the difference in kinds of learning leads also to a difference in the method of imparting this learning; and thus the girl must have her school and the boy his.

The lecturer ended by refuting his colleague's citation of America, where the schools follow coeducation; he pointed out that a single law is applied in different ways as countries and mentalities differ — and this is what the Americans did in our country when they divided education into several stages.