Co-ed Classrooms work in India

Mark Parkinson wrote an interesting blog post about whether children should study in same-sex classrooms. While the Newsweek article underlying the blog post is about the US, some years ago I made the decision to send my (now) 7 year old son to a co-ed school in India.

My reasons:

• In India, it is considered quite ok to be rough with boys, with a smack now and again being fair game. More so in a boys-only environment where everyone is expected to be rough and tough and take it "like a man", irrespective of age. However, little boys are also people with feelings!
• Boys-only schools still tend to have corporal punishment (although this may change due to recent tragic events)
• Boys should see girls as "normal people" of the opposite sex and not aliens (and vice versa). Much easier to buy in to gender stereotypes if you don't actually have peers of the opposite sex.

On another note, it isn't as if boys-only schools in India offer education customized to boys' "needs" as is being done in the US. The classrooms, the syllabus and even the teachers are the same, irrespective of whether the school is for girls, boys, or both.

So far, my faith in the coed classroom remains unshaken. My son does well in school, is good at math., a voracious reader and has friends of both sexes. He gets along (and also fights) equally with boys AND girls. In fact, his school has semi-free seating and he sits next to girls as normally as he sits next to boys, with no eyebrows being raised, or, as far as I can see, learning being compromised!