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
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