Editorial: The Kiski School is latest to struggle with coeducation
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Coeducational learning has a complicated history in America, and it always has.
Harvard opened its doors in 1636. It went without saying that this classically English college, intended to educate Puritan ministers, was focused solely on teaching men. The University of Pennsylvania was the first college in the Keystone State. Its first class of 12 young men was welcomed in 1751.
Washington & Jefferson College was the first college in Southwestern Pennsylvania. It came in steps when three schools came together as Washington Academy in 1789; Jefferson College would merge later. Again, all the students were men. Women wouldn’t be admitted until 1970.
The first coeducational college in America was Oberlin College in Ohio. It didn’t start that way, opening to only men in 1833. Female students were allowed in 1837.
That was one year after the first women’s college, Wesleyan College in Georgia, was founded in 1836. It took 200 years after the first college in America began educating men to decide women should be taught, too.
From the 1920s to the 1980s, various high schools and colleges across the country struggled with whether to admit women — or men. Let’s not ignore that traditionally women’s schools also reevaluated the decision. Seton Hill University in Greensburg was originally a women’s college, with men first admitted in 1946.
So it isn’t unusual that The Kiski School is wrestling with not only the decision to open its boys-only boarding school to girls starting in fall 2024 but also the feelings of alumni who identify strongly with the program. It’s the same process that happened at other boarding school programs such as Phillips Exeter Academy, colleges like Harvard and even military academies like West Point.
There are only three all-male colleges left in America. Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and Wabash College in Indiana are both men only. Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, is the third, though it began admitting transgender students who identify as male in 2019.
There could be good reasons for a single-sex school. Education isn’t one-size-fits-all. Kiski is a private academy and is free to make those decisions for itself. But the board has made that decision and believes coeducation is the best option moving forward.
It’s hard to look at the long list of distinguished schools that once excluded women but now welcome them and say they were wrong.