ABSTRACT
For co-education at secondary school level to be realistically assessed, it has to be put in the context of the historical debates, philosophies and practices about education. To ignore this background is to obliterate the efforts of many people, including women, who genuinely believed that co-education would provide girls with access to some of the educational privileges dispensed to boys. To enable girls to be educated with boys was and still is seen by many as a progressive if not radical move: one which lifted girls’ education out of the kitchen and into the modern unisex world. But to be critical of a domestic curriculum for girls and to support co-education are two entirely different things. My research, the techniques and findings of which are discussed in this book, led me to conclude that mixed-sex groupings constitute a disaster area for girls: in what follows I shall try to explain why.
