Histroy of co education

The history of co-education at colleges and universities in the United States varies from school to school.  While the women and men who attended college during these times of transition often had similar stories to tell, each school had it's own challenges to face, both inside and outside the classroom.

Many institutions of higher education opened their doors to men long before women were afforded an opportunity to learn side-by-side with men in the classroom.  Other schools were founded with charters that provided for co-education, but it would be many years before female students were admitted.  As noted below, Bucknell was well ahead of most of the schools in the Patriot and Ivy Leagues, many of which waited until the advent of Title IX to become co-educational

Though it is very common today, coeducation was once a very controversial idea. The notion that women and men can learn together and help educate one another has evolved over a long period of time. The progress of women in education is a product of great determination from the Women's Rights Movement, educational institutions and government legislation

Definition of Education

Durkheim conceives of education as "the socialization of the younger generation." He further states that it is "a continuous effort to impose on the child ways of seeing, feeling and acting which he could not have arrived at spontaneously."

Summer defined education as "the attempt, to transmit the child the modes of the group. So that he can learn what conduct, is approved and what disapproved how he ought to behave in all kinds of cases: What he ought to believe and reject,"

F,J. Brown and J.S. Roucek say that education is "the sum total of the experience which moulds the attitudes and determines the conduct of both the child and the adult."

James Welton in Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edition) writes that education consist in an attempt on the part of the adult members of human society to shape the development of the coming generation with its own ideals of life.

A.W.Green, "Historically it has meant the conscious training of the young for the later adoption of adult roles. By modern convention, however, education has come to mean formal training by specialists within the formal organization of the school,

Samuel Koening says "Education may also be defined as the process whereby the social heritage of the group is passed on from one generation to another as well as the process whereby" the child "becomes socialized, learns the, roles of behavior of the group into which he is born."