The Importance of Coeducation at Gilmour
Given Gilmour Academy's mission of teaching the whole child, we strongly believe in coeducation.
For the first 36 years of Gilmour’s history, it was a boys’ school in the Holy Cross tradition. In the late 1960s, the campus made room for a separate all-girls institution, the Glen Oak School, operated by the Sacred Heart Sisters. There was interaction and cooperation between students at the two schools, but they maintained their separate identities.
By the early 1980s, a deliberate choice was made to merge the two schools and embrace coeducation. The Gilmour Academy community has benefited ever since from that decision to create a school community where the importance of gender equality is lived each and every day.
Coeducation is an authentic, real world experience. We view our mission as preparing young people to collaborate and lead in the world they will inherit. Separation of the sexes can lead to undesirable attitudes and misunderstandings based on stereotypes and biases. Students will develop more positive interpersonal skills if their education takes place in an environment that more closely resembles the world they encounter in the rest of their lives.
Diversity of thought and point of view are enhanced by coeducation. Young men and women all benefit from being exposed to Jane Austen and Markus Zusak, William Shakespeare and Loung Ung. Socratic seminars are enriched when girls and boys express their intellectual and emotional reactions to what they read. Gender naturally influences life experiences, and life experiences likewise influence gender. Those formative experiences cannot be replicated in the absence of the opposite sex.
Gilmour Academy offers outstanding resources and facilities to both boys and girls. Young women at Gilmour excel in math and science and young men thrive in the arts when they are taught by experienced teachers in an inclusive environment. Students' education is enhanced when boys and girls collaborate on projects, pray together on retreats, and learn side-by-side.
Forming healthy, respectful relationships based on positive communication skills and respect is crucial to the development of emotional intelligence. At Gilmour, we nurture those relationships at every stage of growth. Cultivating an environment where boys and girls grow into successful young men and women is one way that Gilmour lives out its Holy Cross values of Inclusiveness and Hospitality. We welcome students of both sexes and value their learning, contributions, and gifts equally.
*Adapted content with permission from Summit Country Day School