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This chapter discusses the history of coeducation in secondary schooling, mainly in Europe and North America. The analysis focuses on the gendered characteristics of educational systems and curricula, as well as on national discourses about single-sex or mixed schooling. The focus is on the latter half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, when the merits and perils of coeducation were debated for this stage of schooling. Until after World War II, children of the working class hardly ever attended school past the age of 13 or 14. Therefore, this is a history of middle- and upper-class education. In the early nineteenth century, girls had to do with a very limited, private education that prepared only for homemaking and motherhood, while boys could attend public grammar schools that opened the door to the university and the professions. From the mid-nineteenth century, initiatives to improve the quality of girls’ education were taken. Few countries opened up boys’ public schools for girls; in most cases, new girls’ schools were established with more serious but still unequal curricula, focusing mainly on humanities. Schools teaching a curriculum equivalent to that of the boys’ schools were not created until after the turn of the century, when a more critical view of coeducation became the rule. Democratization and coeducation came hand in hand with the introduction of comprehensive mixed secondary schooling in the 1960s and 1970s. The shortcomings of coeducation, however, were not rediscovered until after it had generally been introduced.

History of education was initially and for a long time predominantly written as the history of ideas, developed for teacher education. The early scholars in this field were, as a rule, German theologians and/or philosophers interested in the origin and historical manifestations of eternal (educational) ideas. These ideas were characterized as describing the idea of (morally) the good, most often combined with the idea of the true and connected to the idea of the beautiful. Through the nineteenth century, these histories took different nationalist configurations, first of all in France, then also in England, and the United States, aiming to convince future teachers that the true heroes of these eternal ideas for the good, for the true, and occasionally for the beautiful in postclassical antiquity in fact shared their nationality. It was the consequences of the linguistic turn that challenged this idealism by contextualizing the early ideas of the heroes of education rather than recognizing in them the incarnation of eternal ideas. The research interest focused more and more on discourses or langues of education, styles of thought, and epistemologies and, with this, on questions of power as both restricting and enabling conditions of knowledge production. Ideas in context became a research program that is open to academic history and to philosophy and is thus capable of emancipating the genre from its traditionally assigned role as agent of dominant ideas and preferences and guiding it instead to its analytic potential. Ein Zugang zum gesamten Handbuch ist innerhalb des Netzwerks der PH Zürich mit diesem Link möglich., +repphzhbib2019F