Our education system in Syria is one of the many topics that have been discussed in the current context of our country, but one thing we don’t discuss much regarding our education system is segregated vs mixed-gender institutions. From a social perspective, education- especially during childhood- is considered crucial to the ways in which a person thinks of the other sex and how he/she deals with the other. We lack discussions about the serious social effects of segregating our youth within educational institutions.

In Syria, the number of coed schools differs from one city to the other. Each city differs in its social nature, and often, even within a city, the social environment differs from one area to another. For example, there were 98 high schools in Damascus before the war, and only 12 of which were coed schools, whereas in some other cities coed schools can make up a majority. Globally, this issue was controversial during different periods of time in different countries, with conflicting evidence due to interference of other factors in the research. In the end, there has been evidence on the benefits of coeducation. Studies have shown that single-sex education (segregation in general) increases opportunities of sexual stereotyping, prejudice, hatred towards the opposite sex, and reinforces sexism in the culture at large, particularly in societies that are already more socially conservative; whereas coeducation creates diversity in ways of thinking, allows boys and girls to learn positive skills from each other, recognize each other as equals, and helps them understand one another’s perspectives. A typical argument often given by advocates of single-sex education, is that it improves students’ academic performance. However, it turned out that there was no well-designed research to back up this claim (Halpern et al., 2011). This leaves us with the question: do we really need to separate our boys and girls with walls and barbed wire in schools to ensure they are “safe” from one another? What are we trying to teach?