LTo THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.1
SIR,—Mr. Tylee's letter on " Co-education in America " and your article on " Co-education and Teaching by Women" (Spectator, May 16th) tempt me to point out a fact which is
strangely and persistently ignored by writers on the subject of co-education. This fact is the existence in Wales of nearly a hundred secondary schools (strictly speaking, the number is ninety-five), established under the Welsh Intermediate Education Act of 1889, about three-fourths of which are mixed schools. These schools have now about thirteen thousand scholars on the roll. One reads accounts, given with an iteration that is almost wearisome, of the experiment in co-education made at Keswick. But one never hears of
the school in the " mountaine towne " of Llangollen, which has been in existence for twelve years and has over a hundred
and twenty pupils. And if Llangollen has to yield the palm
to Keswick, and to Keswick alone perhaps, among British towns for the beauty of its surroundings, the school at
Keswick, placed in the town, cannot be compared for the beauty of its situation with the Llangollen school, which, uplifted high above the sylvan Dee, has an almost incom- parable panorama of encircling mountains, and rests under the shadow of Dinas Br&n, " perhaps the most proudly perched castle in all Britain," says Mr. A. G. Bradley, of which Wordsworth sang in his sonnet to " A Castle in North Wales " :— " Relic of Kings! Wreck of forgotten wars,
To winds abandoned and the prying stars."
But it is not my object to sing the praises of Llangollen or its school, but to point out that inquirers into the system of co-education in secondary schools need not cross the Atlantic, but will find an abundance of such mixed schools- in nearly every town in Wales, in watering-places such as Ethyl, Abergele, Llandudno, Pwllheli, Portmadoc, Barmouthe, Towyn, Aberystwyth, and Tenby, and in innumerable other places, of which I may perhaps mention the one at Hawarden (with over two hundred pupils) because of the associations of that
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