Steiner's practice of seating boys and girls together in every Waldorf class and giving both the same handwork, so that mutual understanding between the sexes forms in childhood.
What is coeducation in Steiner education?
Coeducation of Boys and Girls in Anthroposophy is the Waldorf practice, set out by Rudolf Steiner in the Oxford lectures of August 1922 published as The Spiritual Ground of Education (GA 305), of seating boys and girls together in every class to the highest grade and giving both the same lessons, handwork included. Steiner reported that little boys knit and crochet gladly, and that girls take up work otherwise given only to boys. He grounded it in observation rather than slogan: the female organism between the tenth and fourteenth year and the male organism from the thirteenth become spiritualized on different clocks, girls through the blood and its relation to the cosmos, boys through language working into the nervous system. The teacher holds that difference privately while teaching both children in one room, so that mutual understanding between the sexes forms socially in childhood.
Coeducation of boys and girls was settled policy at the Stuttgart Waldorf School from its opening in September 1919, when most German and English schools divided the sexes after the early grades. Steiner treated it as a social question answered pedagogically. Children who make the same things with their hands, at one table, reach adulthood already knowing one another.
In Steiner's Own Words
And it should be noted that in Waldorf schools, boys and girls always sit together for everything. We have boys and girls sitting together right up to the highest grade. So that in fact, with minor variations of course, and the further we go up into the higher classes, the more we will of course have to differentiate, but it is true that, on the whole, the boys learn the same work as the girls, and it turns out in a strange way how much the little boys enjoy knitting or crocheting, and how the girls also do work that is otherwise only done by boys. This also achieves something socially: mutual understanding between the sexes, which must be our primary goal today, when we are still not very advanced in this respect socially and live with the greatest prejudices.
What it Means Today
The sharpest modern test of Steiner's arrangement came from psychology rather than pedagogy. On 23 September 2011 the journal Science published "The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling," signed by Diane Halpern, Lise Eliot, Rebecca Bigler, Richard Fabes, Laura Hanish, Janet Hyde, Lynn Liben and Carol Lynn Martin, working through the American Council for CoEducational Schooling at Arizona State University. It answered a decade of American enthusiasm for separating boys and girls in public classrooms, much of it built on Leonard Sax's 2005 book Why Gender Matters. The eight authors granted the developmental differences and refused the inference drawn from them: sorting children by sex does not lift achievement, and it does raise stereotyping, because the sorting itself teaches a child that the other sex is a different kind of creature.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner and the 2011 signatories agree on the observation, that the female and male organism ripen on different clocks, and part company on what a school should do with it, and Steiner's answer is the harder one, because it asks the teacher to carry the difference privately while the room in front of them stays one undivided body of work. The residue for a school today is small and testable: one handwork curriculum, not two.
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