Sir, – I attended a co-educational primary school and an all-girls secondary school, and my experience has taught me that mixed schooling can place undue pressure on adolescent girls (Gráinne Faller, Education, January 29th).
Towards the end of my primary school years, there was a constant expectation that each girl would “fancy” one of our male co-students – a nonsensical situation from which I was only too glad to escape into the relative simplicity of single-sex education.
I can only imagine that this pressure would have intensified had I progressed instead to a mixed secondary school – with the ever-present need to “impress” the boys by donning the latest hairstyles and plastering on as much make-up as possible.
Perhaps the ideal solution is to educate young men and women in separate, adjacent schools until they begin to prepare for the Leaving Certificate, at which stage they are mature enough to fully benefit from co-education? – Yours, etc,