No Body Left Behind

In industrialized societies, most heterosexual interaction, in the form of integrated peer groups, takes place in school settings designed specifically for young adolescents. Coeducation is an implicit change from gender segregated to gender integrated settings to foster heterosexual contacts. The hidden curriculum of coeducation works as an implicit instruction in which nor teachers necessarily intend to teach nor do students intend to learn about other gender individuals. Situated learning occurs when boys and girls get the chance to interact each other. To some critics coeducational classrooms seemed strange and disturbing, and to many Americans they became a natural and unquestioned part of the education. Scholars have both justified and attacked coeducation, and this debate is still going on. Tyack (1990) suggested imagining that coeducation did not become the mainstream of schooling for boys and girls. This may help us understand the significance of coeducation. The history of coeducation is also greatly tied with the education of girls. It should not be assumed that the mixing of genders in the classroom was a foregone conclusion once was the only possibility, once citizens had decided to educate their daughters. Nevertheless, some second wave feminists argue that due to the patriarchal curricula and schooling girls would progress better in girls-only schools. Through a poststructural feminist analysis I am deconstructing the concept of “distraction” which is still key in heterosexual interactions and segregates genders within our current coeducational settings