Created by Jeenn Lee Hsieh
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>TOEFL TWE Topic No. 077
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Boys and girls should attend separate schools. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
>IELTS Writing Task 2
What are the pros and cons of co-educational schooling?
The effort to introduce female students into male secondary schools, or vice versa, must be regarded as undesirable because the practice has not been working well. Beyond the religious as well as cultural grounds, there are other issues about co-education that are worthy of serious consideration. Of all the drawbacks about mixed-sex educational system, the decline of moral principles and the fall of academic performance have raised more concern.
Morally, a possible risk facing teenage coeds is promiscuity. A high school is no place for serious Harry-meets-Sally romances. It could not be more wrong to claim that being in a coed school can be beneficial to both boys and girls by training them to develop their roles in the real world. In fact, most students are not ready to experiment the real world during a period of time when they are no longer small children and are not-yet adults. The question is not whether boys and girls can both get distracted by the other sex in the same class or building or school. What is worrying parents and teachers may be unwanted pregnancies and downgraded sense of moral responsibility. Nobody would doubt that moral education is more effective in a single-sex environment.
The integrated education does not promise better academic performance, particularly in secondary schools. More often than not, the contrary is true. This is in part because girls and boys have different brains, learn differently and require different educational conditions. Recent statistics from Europe as well as from North America indicate that overall academic results are much better in single-sex schools than in mixed-sex ones. It must be understood that different gender capabilities among teenagers should by no means be neglected. The last thing both parents and educators want to see is that the quality of secondary education is going from bad to worse.
Not surprisingly, from the moral or academic point of view, the voice is increasingly being heard to escalate support for single-sex schooling. It has also been more evident that to sacrifice physical and mental differences for artificial gender equality is probably not the right policy to run teenage education in general. Accordingly, sending immature boys and girls to attend the coed schools is likely to cause unexpected hidden costs to society.
