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The Gendered Classroom: Girls' and Boys' Experiences in Postwar Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Benita Blessing
Benita Blessing*
Affiliation:
Ohio University in Athens, Ohio
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Extract

At the end of World War II, German educational administrators in the Soviet occupied zone of their nation decided to implement coeducation; that is, the schooling of girls and boys in the same classroom. This policy represented a radical break with German educational traditions, as well as with the western German zones' continued practice of gender-segregated schools. The reason for this move was as simple as it was ambitious: educational reformers of the Soviet zone were committed to a new kind of school, one that would offer all children the same education in order to permit active and equal participation of all citizens, male and female, in the “new Germany.” Educators estimated that over 90 percent of school-aged children attended school in the postwar years, approximately 15 percent of the entire population. Major change in young people's education could thus potentially bring about major social reform. Yet coeducation did not resolve the so-called “woman's question” of structural inequality, a theory elaborated by the nineteenth-century socialist August Bebel and of grave concern to the “antifascist democratic, educators of the postwar years. The implementation of the coeducational classroom, although an important move towards erasing gross disparities in educational opportunities for girls, still allowed for and even perpetuated gender-specific educational lessons and experiences.

Type
Symposium: German Education after 1945
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , Winter 2005 , pp. 597 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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