Zaara Farooq
Class IX (DPS, Srinagar)

Is a missionary school everything that a girl needs for her growth in her life, or do coed schools offer more?
Being a girl who has always been around people, whether boys or girls, I believe being or working out of your comfort zone is what makes the considered outer environment ours. Not that missionary schools aren’t good enough, but the amount of exposure that a coed school provides is inimitable. In this contemporary world, where gender should not be a barrier to anything, studying in a missionary school might become one, for both girls and boys.
Imagine spending 15 years of your life in a missionary school, around the most comfortable people you can be with and suddenly after high school, the real world gives you a brutalreality check. How would you feel? Wouldn’t it make you confused? Wouldn’t it make you question your choices for even a minute?
In this world, we don’t get everything on a golden platter, therefore making it a necessity to be able to adjust, counter and to acknowledge people.
One of the reasons a girl is most comfortable in a missionary school is menstruation. When a girl is around the same gender as hers, it automatically makes her more confident during menstruation, but here’s where the actual point is. Living out of your comfort zone is what makes it worth it. And if we want to make a change, it needs to start with us.
Putting my experience forward, I strongly urge that, during this time when, gender equality and awareness on the bases of humanity is the talk of the town; coed schools should be a place of unity and a place where one can try and understand one's thoughts and ideas, and this, in turn, leads to bridging the gap between people.
In a coed school, you get a chance to be trained in terms of your mental growth concerning society. It gives you a more realistic sense of looking at the environment. Tomorrow when you’ll be out there in the world facing people, you would automatically have a sense of relatability. Today’s generation has a sense of competition among themselves; coed school helps in preparing an individual for the upcoming challenges and situations.
Missionary schools might be the most comfortable place to be in for a girl, but coed schools, on the other hand, play an important role in especially a girl’s growth; mentally, morally and socially. Because at the end of the day the world is full of opinions and individuals, whether they are males or females.