- An academic has called for all schools in Australia to become co-educational
- Academic Judith Gill would like to see boys and girls study in the same schools
- She believes this would stop students seeing opposite sex as an ‘exotic beast’
An academic has called for all schools to become co-educational so students do not see the opposite gender as an ‘entirely exotic beast’.
University of South Australia Associate Professor Judith Gill believes grouping boys and girls together would help children to appreciate attributes of the opposite sex.
The professor told The Courier Mail having separate schools creates a divide where boys are ‘one way’ and ‘girls are another way’.
An academic has called for all schools to become co-educational so students do not see the opposite gender as an ‘entirely exotic beast’ (stock image)
‘Together they are less likely to see the opposite gender as an entirely exotic beast but rather just the array of personal attributes that people can choose,’ she told the publication.
She believes young people would be freer to choose ‘how they want to be’ in a co-educational environment.
‘Schools have a role in enabling young people to be much more broad in their choosing about how they want to be and that’s more likely to occur in a co-educational environment,’she said.
‘Certainly future schools are much more likely to be co-educational than not.’
An Australian Council for Educational Research spokesperson told the Financial Review in 2017 single-sex schools could be eliminated by 2035 if statistical trends continue.
The publication reported the number of single-sex independent schools dropped from 31 per cent in 1985, to 24 per cent in 1995 and 12 per cent in 2015.
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