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Separate but Equal

Jill

If it’s wrong for public schools to be segregated by race, why is it justifiable to segregate them by sex?

As Meghan O’Rourke points out, many of the arguments in favor of single-sex education fall back on gender essentialism and over-emphasis on sex-based differences. And in the end, single-sex education fails the students it purports to serve.

But whatever advantages might ultimately derive from single-sex schools, the gender-specific approach all too easily devolves to formulaic teaching that promises to narrow (rather than expand) learning options for kids. When it comes to English, for instance, single-sex-education advocates tend to disparage what they believe is a “feminized” verbal curriculum and approach, arguing that it plays to boys’ weaknesses and handicaps them. Sax suggests, then, that girls and boys be asked to do different exercises in English. The girls would read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and engage in a role-playing exercise about the characters. The boys, meanwhile, would read Lord of the Flies and then create a map of the island, demonstrating that they’ve read closely enough to retain key details. Neither exercise sounds particularly useful. But the latter simply doesn’t accomplish the most essential work of an English class. It’s a test of reading for information—and a reaffirmation of boys’ good “spatial skills”—rather than an exploration of the thematic complexities of William Golding’s classic. Even well-intentioned prescription easily becomes a form of zealotry, as when Sax declares that “Ernest Hemingway’s books are boy-friendly, while Toni Morrison’s are girl-friendly” and adds, “some teachers suggest that we need to stretch the boys’ imaginations … surely such a suggestion violates every rule of pedagogy.”

Read the whole thing.

54 thoughts on Separate but Equal

  1. Even well-intentioned prescription easily becomes a form of zealotry, as when Sax declares that “Ernest Hemingway’s books are boy-friendly, while Toni Morrison’s are girl-friendly”

    Well, I have read books by Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemmingway and I had a good understanding of both authors’ styles. Segregation by sex is a form of discrimination if you ask me and it restricts the diversity we need in education. After all, education is one of the most important things in society to make it better for the people in the communities.

  3. I saw something about this a couple of weeks ago on the NBC Nightly News, and this just reaffirms my conclusion. Single sex private schools are fine–they’re a choice. But putting single sex ed into public schools is just screaming for separate but equal and the polarizing of information in the already problematic gender gap. Not to mention the need for understanding social interaction–how is socialisation going to change if there’s even more separation?

    That said, I’m proud of my degree from a single sex college, and feel I got a fantastic education. And I daresay single sex high schools can empower young women as well. But these are private institutions, and need to remain so.

  4. Sax us going to be at my school tonight, and one of my friends has been invited to the private dinner with him at the university president’s house.

    If you have any very very specific questions for her to ask him, please post them here or email them to me at esme454@hotmail.com and I’ll try to pass them on to her. She said she wanted to know what I’d want her asking.

  5. I’m torn about this one… The way they are proposing single-sex schools I disagree with but I do think that there is good in them from personal experiance.

    My first year at my high school we had a wonderful head- she was in fact knighted by the queen for her services to education. There was a strong sense of pride, she developped our community and social conscience and instilled in us what it meant to be a true lady. We had the slogan “Once a — girl, always a — girl.” And talking to my friends now I realise that it still means something to us.

    Many of the girls from the school went on to sucess (one ex-pupil became Britains best helicopter pilot for example) and we used to win every single sporting event. One of my fellow pupils was told she ould easily make the Olympics.

    Our headteacher encouraged us to do anything just to prove that women could. We were reknown for languages and design and technology (computer graphics, textiles, resistant materials, food tech.). And I also noticed that in the last year one of our teachers was slowly but surely turning the classroom into a feminist safe space were we could talk honestly about ourselves. This was especially evident in the sex-ed education.

    The vast majority of the girls were what this article calls “classic male learners” and we worked accordingly.

    The problems started when we left and the new head came in. She was a fuddy-duddy trying to form relationships in the way females are supposed to respond to but obviously don’t unlike our old Dame who would inspire fear by breathing (like a feminist darth Vader whom we all worshipped).

    Simply because we were an all girls school we have always had higher teen pregnancy rates but they sky-rocketed after that. Deliquency, vandalism, you name it followed and I was only too glad when the four years were up.

    So I guess this can go either way depending completely on the person in charge and their ethics, beliefs and motivations. The proposed plan looks like hell…

  6. I’ll be devil’s advocate. The one advantage I could see to gender-segregated schools is that this might create a safe space for girls, in the same way as we sometimes do in activist circles. If there’s no boys around to get all the attention, they might actually get to participate more.

    This is the best I could come up with. And I’m under no illusion that the advocates for gender segregation in schools are motivated by feminist theories on safe space. 🙂

  7. Role playing from “Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret” could be total laughs, I must say (“I must! I must! I must increase my bust!”).

    However, part of me thinks that kids could really benefit from schools being single sex, especially girls, and especially in Middle School where girls start “playing dumb” to impress the boys (and many never stop). I don’t think that it should only be an option for kids whose parents can afford private school.

  8. But what makes the single-sex private schools a possible boon for girls is that the curricula are rigorous and the teachers are attentive (ie, boys don’t get all the attention). Those are qualities that would benefit any student.

    As described here, the curricula aren’t comparable, and they aren’t even particularly rigorous. Making what are essentially dioramas as a book report for Lord of the Flies?… Come On. This whole thing smacks of the Simpsons episode where Lisa has to pretend to be a boy to get a decent math education, but without the irony.

    It really looks like what’s going on here is that girls are doing well in school, prompting folks to yell “boy crisis” where there really isn’t any crisis that well-funded schools and excellent teaching staffs can’t fix, and to devalue things that the girls are good at as things that it can’t be expected boys will be good at (English class is “feminized”? Puh-leez.)

  9. A good teacher is, or should be, fine-tuning classroom chemistry, not proceeding on the basis of simplistic biology.

    Exactly.

    Having been K-12 educated in garden-variety co-ed public schools, none of the descriptions of stereotypical “boy” or “girl” behavior in the article particularly resonate with me. There may have been noisy boys who couldn’t keep from blurting out answers in my early years, but they’d all been socialized to the point where they knew to raise their hands by 2nd grade. My English classes conducted discussions in mixed-gender groups all the time from 7th grade on, and we all read the same stuff, and we all had our favorites and things we disliked, but we were not allowed to just not read the things we thought were difficult or boring. And my advanced math classes were packed with both boys and girls– I don’t remember the guys taking over the class and hogging all the attention, but that was probably because our teachers made us all take turns solving problems at the blackboard, so everyone ended up in public (and sometimes publicly mistaken, or publicly revealed to have not finished our homework) pretty equally.

    Sometimes I wonder how much of this stuff is just made up to scare people.

  10. I have mixed feelings on this, primarily because single-sex education can be done well, or it can be done stupidly.

    The biggest problem with all this “girls and boys learn differently” stuff is that it assumes all girls are the same as other girls, and all boys are the same as other boys. It’s a total misapplication of the study results. I’m a psychology professor, and in my introductory psych courses as well as my statistics & methods courses, I often use studies of male-female difference to get good critical discussions of “what study results mean for the real world” going. And something to which I direct the students’ attention is that the within-sex variation is always far far greater than the between-sex difference being reported (and emphasized in manstream media). For example, while ON AVERAGE boys have better spatial skills than girls, there are plenty of girls with awesome spatial skills (e.g., me!) and plenty of boys whose spatial skills suck. If you draw the bell curve of spatial ability for females on top of the bell curve of spatial skills for males, you will indeed see that the “hump” of the curve for the boys is a little bit farther right than that for girls (“to the right” meaning a better score on tests of such skills). But you will also notice that a VERY large portion of the curves is overlapping. So, in sum, I consider any pedagogical plan that assumes all members of the same gender are alike in skills, abilities, and interests to be “single-sex education done stupidly.”

    However, so long as the CONTENT of what is taught is not restricted by such assumptions, I do see a benefit to girls learning in their own space. Rhi noted her pride in coming from an all-women college, and a disproprtionate number of female leaders in this country have come from such schools. There are certainly numerous reasons for this, but one important feature of women’s colleges is that all leadership positions are filled by women. A woman is student body president, a woman is the student liaison to the board of trustees, women head all the committees, even the sports stars are women. Seeing this certainly gives young women high expectations about what they can do and become.

    So I guess my position is we need to work to get/keep the aspects of single-sex education that empower women and girls, without stuffing them into a one-size-fits-all-girls box based on stereotypes and a misunderstanding of the meaning of research reults.

  11. a disproprtionate number of female leaders in this country have come from such schools

    Most of the gender segregated schools tend to be private. I would be surprised if female leaders in any country weren’t coming out of schools that disproportionally draw upon members of the elite class.

  12. Wait – stretching the imagination violates the rules of pedagogy? **break for boggling**

    Okay, now that I’m done hyperventilating – sure, single-sex education can be done well. Given the history of public schools in this country, who’s willing to gamble that it will be done well, if we should do it? Nobody? Good, we’re not idiots here.

    Half of the reason that single-sex schools produce disproportionate numbers of high-achieving women is because girls tend to be sent there for exactly that reason. I will guarantee you that the vast bulk of women at Wellesley College are not there to loaf around, find a spouse, maybe pick up a degree with as little work as possible, and then wander into a minimum effort job. Most of them would bite your head off if you suggested it -and with reason, they’ve worked their butts off to get there, and continue to work their butts off once they are there. The same can’t be said for large numbers of co-ed colleges, even some very prestigious ones.

    And if anyone had tried to offer me some of the really lame “girly stuff” suggested here (or, for that matter some of the equally lame “boy stuff”), I’d have been royally insulted.

  13. “some teachers suggest that we need to stretch the boys’ imaginations … surely such a suggestion violates every rule of pedagogy.”

    What the HELL??? And here I thought that was what education was all about. Guess I’m just old-fashioned.

    I am close friends with someone who went to a boys-only high school, at about the same time that I went to a mixed-gender high school. I note frequently ways in which his education was inferior to mine, and yes, his was a private school and mine was public. So it ain’t all one way, y’know.

  14. Most of the gender segregated schools tend to be private. I would be surprised if female leaders in any country weren’t coming out of schools that disproportionally draw upon members of the elite class.

    Thank you. This is a point that almost never gets brought up.

  15. Half of the reason that single-sex schools produce disproportionate numbers of high-achieving women is because girls tend to be sent there for exactly that reason. I will guarantee you that the vast bulk of women at Wellesley College are not there to loaf around, find a spouse, maybe pick up a degree with as little work as possible, and then wander into a minimum effort job.

    And you know, the only scholarships private women’s colleges give are merit-based. Nobody’s getting scholarships for anything other than working their butts off. So these places select for smart women who are coming from the elite class, and for women with enough of a previous record of success that it’s a safe bet they’ll be successful the future, regardless of class.

  16. Regina: Smith’s grants are almost completely need-based. Scholarships, however, are sometimes given for merit but never given for athletics–I believe all of the private women’s colleges are NCAA Div III, which doesn’t allow it.

  17. Wellesley likewise only gives need-based scholarships. On the other hand, you have to maintain grades to keep them, and nobody whe can get into Wellesley in the first place is going to be a slouch on grades.

  18. Esme, I have no illusions that Sax will answer anything honestly, but
    “Really, why are you doing this?” is a question I’d ask.

  19. Certainly, I agree that most of the women going to private women’s colleges have likely been advantaged in many ways prior to attending. That is why I said there were “numerous reasons” for the high proprtion of female leaders coming from those institutions. Like all human behaviors, causality for “leadership” is complex and multifaceted. Obviously, the attendees of private women’s colleges are in no way a random selection of women. There is the pre-selection done by the privileged (or not) circumstances, as well as self-selection at the level of individual college choice (as noted, women who want to go to college to find a husband do not choose these institutions). But I do still think being in a place where all the leaders are women is a positive contributing factor. I believe the same probably applies to all-female high schools.

  20. So, back to the original question. A lot of the arguments in favor of women’s K-12 schools (safe space, differences in culture or learning style, more opportunity to speak or participate for women, female role models, and group pride/spirit) could be changed very easily to be about black students, Latino students, GLBT students, disabled students, [insert group here] students. So what makes these arguments acceptable for women and not the other groups?

    I see an interesting (to me, anyway) parallel to the disabled rights movement. “Special” programs – funding, schools, jobs, whatever – are often promoted as the best way to support disabled people, including by some disabled people. Integration seems to be a secondary goal by comparison. I can’t remember off the top of my head who said it, but: “Special it such a pretty word. But in the end, it means segregation.”

    The only point I saw that didn’t fit this template was the “playing dumb to impress boys” one. And do we really want to surrender to the idea that gender roles like this are “the way it is”, instead of something to change?

  21. Actually, if we generalize “playing dumb to impress boys” as “behaving in a societally expected way in order to get goodwill from the dominant class”, then that fits into the list I had of arguments that don’t just apply to women.

  22. Why do people invest so much energy in searching for alternative ways of teaching children when one of the most basic problems is ignored: teacher/children ratios. The quality of education could vastly improve if teachers had more time to devote to each student. When I was in public school, there were usually 30 to 50 kids in a classroom. How in heck is a teacher supposed to focus on the individual needs of students when faced with this many faces?

    But, you know what the solution requires? Money and resources. That’s something that US society usually ignores and plays down. So, we distract ourselves with “alternative teaching methods” rather than focus on the most basic problems of the education system. It’s sheer craziness… and for that matter, selfishness. The US should be ashamed of the way it neglects children’s educational needs.

    Hey, that just wild-eyed idealism speaking, though. Lets continue with our current approach: we focus our resources on training soldiers, building weapons, building prisons, and building walls around our country to keep poor, brown people out. We can make up for our growing ignorance and social disfunction through brawn and brutality.

  23. It seems to me that having only girls read books that give insight into the confusion girls feel when growing up, ignores a chance to increase boys’ understanding of and sensitivity to girls, a chance to integrate, a chance to push boys toward seeing girls as equal human beings.

    Having boys read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret or other books like that gives them insight on what life is like for girls, and also presents girls’ concerns/experiences as relevent to the boys, in the same way that schoolkids read accounts or stories of other groups of people that they’re not always a part of—we read stories about people in Europe in WW2 when I was in school, and we read about slaves and Civil War soldiers and pioneers and Native Americans, and sometimes we read about people in war-torn nations in the present, and normal people in other cultures, and people struggling with serious physical illness and a whole lot more—point is, we read about other people, which suggested that even though we were not these people, not experiencing the same thing, that they were people as well, and their experiences were relevent to us. To excuse boys from reading something about teenage female-hood is to suggest to them that teenage girls are not important to sympathize with, to understand—they and their concerns can be dismissed, considered irrelevent, and that’s dangerous. Boys should be taught to view girls like we teach children to view all other groups other than themselves: as people like them whose experiences are relevent, whom they can and should make some effort to understand.

    Also, it’s very important to get boys reading books that have female characters, even books that have mostly or all female characters. The dismissal of such books by many boys and men are very vivid sexism—that such-and-such a book is not worth reading because it has no main characters that are people worth identifying with (i.e. male).

    And honestly, everyone’s time would be better spent working on building self-worth and personal empowerment. That way girls can stand up to patriarchal oppression, and boys will feel less of the insecurity that bullying others makes up for, and both sexes will have fewer problems with feeling marginalized in such-and-such a subject.

  24. Actually, there are some counterparts–Harvey Milk Academy, for example. Although that exists because the kids who attend face physical harm in regular public schools, not just lower expectations.

  25. Sax is a hack. Sorry, but anyone whose theory when boiled into layspeak contains the phrases “boy brain” and “girl brain” is taking biological determinism bias into his research and emerging with–surprise!–results that are conveniently intpreted with biological determinism.

    What an insult and embrassment it would have been to have had to role play about female puberty. Good god, I shudder to think.

  26. re: 10, Thanks Beth,

    The biggest problem with all this “girls and boys learn differently” stuff is that it assumes all girls are the same as other girls, and all boys are the same as other boys.

    Lord of the Flies meant a great deal to me when I first read it as the viciousness of some of the characters echoed girl bully behaviour but with a different flavour- it was like looking into a parallel universe. Are You There God…(and all of Blume’s books) left me feeling alienated and creepy and pandered to. Girls were supposed to like them, but knowing that just left me feeling like a failed girl. In high school I raised a ruckus when after four years of English I hadn’t studied ONE book with a female protagonist – but bringing out sappy writers wouldn’t have solved that problem for me. (Sorry, Blume fans…)

  27. I taught a freakin’ romance novel to my classroom of “at-risk” 11th grade boys last year. We had to read it together in class because my mentor teacher insisted they would steal the books (and they did), but they liked it. I was the one that was tortured for eight straight weeks of Nicholas Sparks.

    And honestly? Toni Morrison’s books are packed as full of violent and weird stuff as anybody else’s — with the right angle you could sell that to teen boys with no problem at all. With the right angles you can sell any book to nearly any audience, provided it doesn’t suck in the first place. That’s teaching.

  29. Piny: I had not been aware of that. I am aware of other counterparts, though, and they are a lot rarer than single-gender ed. Still, I think there’s a lot less acceptance of separated education for other minority groups. For disabled people, at least, the death of segregated education has been a good thing, though it still has a way to go. In high school, a few people in the special ed department told me that ten years ago, they were doing the same special ed in ‘special schools’ in our district. To them, that was something to be proud of, a sign of their experience; to me, it was an admission that they participated in segregation and oppression of the disabled.

    That segregated schooling is generally not considered appropriate doesn’t necessarily invalidate the existence of single-gender schooling, but it does suggest (to me) that we need to think about why single-gender schooling is different, if indeed it is. We don’t necessarily need to reject single-gender schooling; but we should understand why we value it.

  30. But I do still think being in a place where all the leaders are women is a positive contributing factor. I believe the same probably applies to all-female high schools.

    Yes. Though let’s not forget that private schools have the advantage of culling students who don’t meet academic standards.

  31. I would’ve hated being put in a single-sex classroom with just girls. All through junior high and high school, I had almost no female friends. I’m shy, quiet and withdrawn. Girls picked on me and laughed at me. Boys treated me like “one of the guys.”

    I feel sorry for any girl like me who gets stuck in one of these horrible classes by her parents.

  32. StacyM sez:

    Why do people invest so much energy in searching for alternative ways of teaching children when one of the most basic problems is ignored: teacher/children ratios. The quality of education could vastly improve if teachers had more time to devote to each student. When I was in public school, there were usually 30 to 50 kids in a classroom. How in heck is a teacher supposed to focus on the individual needs of students when faced with this many faces?

    Personal anecdote time! I went to a school system in an area populated mainly by liberals who consistently voted to feed money to the schools. There’s also a significant middle-to-upper-middle-class population, so the tax base isn’t insignificant. I don’t think I was ever in a class over 25, even when I got to the high school, which was regional and pulled kids from four towns as well as others through school choice. We had electives for social studies and English in the 11th and 12th grade, and I was able to study things like Shakespeare and Women in Literature. The school has a full slate of AP courses and a good internship program. Over 90% of the graduates go on to higher education; you have to go below the 60th percentile before students have grades below a 3.0 GPA.

    My school – my town – isn’t extraordinary. There wasn’t anything in the water. We’re not mutants. It’s just a town where they are willing to spend the money to provide a good education for the students.

  33. “I would’ve hated being put in a single-sex classroom with just girls. All through junior high and high school, I had almost no female friends. I’m shy, quiet and withdrawn. Girls picked on me and laughed at me. Boys treated me like “one of the guys.””

    Same here. I’ve always noticed that the general atmosphere is a lot worse in all-female classes than in mixed classes.
    As a whole, I think being confronted with people who are “different” from us (whether the difference is based on gender, culture, ethnicity, social background, etc.) breeds tolerance. Many people are prejudiced against what they don’t know. I don’t want to sound like a wide-eyed idealist, but I’ve often noticed that mildly prejudiced people (not die-hard racists, of course) tend to become more open-minded when they have to work with Muslims, for instance, because being around them every day makes them realize that they are not all that different and they are decent people too. Likewise, being around girls in an environment that promotes equality and respect from an early age is more likely to teach boys that women are as intelligent and as worthy of respect as they are than to be confined in an all-boy environment until early adulthood.
    I was also happy to see many people here point out the fact that the good results displayed by private female-only schools are most probably due to a drastic selection of pupils from the privileged classes rather than same-sex education itself.

  34. Just as a note–I was never particularly comfortable with women either. Until I went to college, I definitely had more male friends than female, and my female friends were definitely atypical people. This did change drastically in college, but as some other people pointed out, the school is selective–people who were there to work their rears off.

    That said, on, say, a middle school level, it would have been a disaster.

  36. The best thing about single sex schools is, well… a decided lessening in the distractions of… sex.

    I went to an ‘all girls’ high school and an ‘all womens’ college. Education was about learning, and there was no competition in class for a boy’s attention, unless you count the sea of hands going up in Mr. Fisher’s English class. Girls wore boxers over thermal underwear to class, had ripping conversations about Lord of the Flies AND Beloved, kicked ass in mathematics and biology and all the subjects that interested us.

    To tailor an education to a gender’s weakest traits is to force a growing brain into a very small box.

  37. “I would’ve hated being put in a single-sex classroom with just girls. All through junior high and high school, I had almost no female friends. I’m shy, quiet and withdrawn. Girls picked on me and laughed at me. Boys treated me like “one of the guys.””

    Same here. I’ve always noticed that the general atmosphere is a lot worse in all-female classes than in mixed classes.
    As a whole, I think being confronted with people who are “different” from us (whether the difference is based on gender, culture, ethnicity, social background, etc.) breeds tolerance.

    I used to think exactly the same thing- I believed that girls are more vicious, backstab etc… But those are all lies or behavior codes fed to us by a society that devalues women. I’ve found that when I’m confronted by something devaluing women I would keep telling myself that “I wasn’t like those other girls” and in my mind formed a third gender- one that I belongued to. I believe that gender is the one we refer to when we say a woman is “one of the guys”. Because no woman will EVER truly be “one of the guys”- it’s an honourary position depending on the male reaction to you and one that denies you who identity are as a woman but can never fully grant identity as a man.

    In that way woman became the different, unknown gender and a good girls school can be good for re-discovering, challenging or creating that identity.

    Not having female friends- why? Again, I would suggest behavior codes that become obsolete in an evironment without men. And if there are only woman then one has to connect to other woman and does. It may take a while but it happens.

  38. I think there is some merit to single-sex education, because we do see so many strong female leaders emerging from single-sex colleges. Yes, they are private and thus draw on a group that is willing to work their butts off, but there are a great many private co-ed colleges that draw from the same pool and yet do not produce as high a percentage of female leaders.

    The difference, I think, is not in the type of education but in the behavior and mindset modelled by a single-sex institution. As someone pointed out, women’s colleges tend to have female deans, a well-balanced female to male faculty ratio (or skewed to female, if anything), and other positive role models. There is also an underlying assumption in these institutions that the students can do the work — they achieve results not by dumbing down “male” skills but by presenting them as though the female students’ success in them is a foregone conclusion. As any educator or parent can tell you, young people live up — or down — to expectations.

  39. I went to a co-ed school but am in an all-women’s college, so I can see good in both sides of the argument. I probably had more male friends than female ones in school, but I love the safe space that college creates for us.

    I just don’t think primary schools schould practice any sort of gender separation as that’s just the time when little boys and little girls really need to be taught that the other sex is actually human and quite likeable. Drill it into little boys’ (and little girls’) heads while they’re still young that things like academic success and general likeability as a person have nothing to do with gender; and then you can put them into different schools, co ed schools, whatever. As long as single sex education is based on the difference in how people of different genders are treated in society rather than any perceived inherent difference, I have no problem with it. Sax’s reasons though? Insane.

  40. The best thing about single sex schools is, well… a decided lessening in the distractions of… sex.

    So … what about the GLB students? Or, for that matter, where do you put the genderqueer students in an environment where single sex ed is the norm? And aren’t those “distractions of … sex” good practice?

  41. It seems to me that having only girls read books that give insight into the confusion girls feel when growing up, ignores a chance to increase boys’ understanding of and sensitivity to girls, a chance to integrate, a chance to push boys toward seeing girls as equal human beings.

    I agree. Boys should read books that give insights into girls mind and vice versa. Were I an English Teacher (or even Health Ed/Sex Ed) I think I would let the boys read the boys book (and girls the girls) and then switch it around. Thereby making the class read two books and giving reports on both individually and then perhaps a final report or test on both books.

    I would’ve hated being put in a single-sex classroom with just girls. All through junior high and high school, I had almost no female friends. I’m shy, quiet and withdrawn. Girls picked on me and laughed at me. Boys treated me like “one of the guys

    Actually, it’s for that exact reason why I think I would’ve excelled at an all-girl’s school. I was shy, quiet and withdrawn as well, a lack of available social outlets would’ve been less distracting from my studies, which would’ve allowed me more time & energy to focus on my education.

    If my sister could go to school with blinders on or if her seat were a cubicle, I think she would’nt be failing for the 3rd year with ALL of her teachers saying “she talks too much & doesn’t do her work”. But maybe that’s the frustration talking.

    I just don’t think primary schools should practice any sort of gender separation as that’s just the time when little boys and little girls really need to be taught that the other sex is actually human and quite likeable.

    I agree. It’s when the hormones kick in I think that it becomes an issue.

  42. Yes, they are private and thus draw on a group that is willing to work their butts off

    *sighs*

    Class privilege? Whatsthat? America is a meritocracy. The rich are rich because they work their butts off, unlike all those lazy working class kids who work menial jobs and don’t concentrate on their studies. Those bums!

  43. And if there are only woman then one has to connect to other woman and does. It may take a while but it happens.

    Tell that to a friend of mine who went to a single-sex high school for four years. She strongly disliked most of her classmates, was acquaintances with a couple, and had only one she considered herself close to (besides a girl she was already friends with from middle school), whom she wound up dating which entailed a lot of angst (cuz, you know. high school). She also missed hanging out with boys (obviously not for romantic purposes), and the girl we went to middle school with now feels very shy around boys (she was always shy, but now perhaps even moreso).

    I do tend to distrust people who actively state they “don’t” make friends with members of their same sex as almost a matter of principle (I’ve met two girls like this, neither of whom was especially worth being friends with anyway), but, let’s face it, most people don’t really connect to the vast majority of people they meet, and if the handful of people you do connect to happen to belong to mostly one gender or another, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing so much as the luck of the draw.

    Also, I the “distraction” reasoning makes no sense to me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen “distraction” (for boys) used as the reason girls can’t wear spaghetti straps in middle school, but seriously, life has distractions. Part of education, for me at least, was/is learning to suck it up and do your work anyway. Besides it’s not like members of the opposite sex anyway. One of the most distracting classes I was ever in was with a girl I had so much in common with we just amusing ourselves. In fact I’ve only ever had one class with a boy I was interested in/dating, and that was chemistry, where I was actively looking for distraction because OH GOD CHEMISTRY IS SO BAD. And we had assigned seating so I couldn’t even pass him notes 🙁 But like I said, that class would have been thoroughly uneducational anyway because… chemistry sucks. Teenagers are easily distracted. You can distract yourself by looking out the window, at a clock, at your shoes, sketching the person in front of you in your notes, falling asleep because you were up till 4 finishing the paper you really should have started a week ago. In my experience, if one distraction is removed, teenagers will just invent another one, because a huge chunk of the time, school, even the good classes, is hellishly boring. Especially when you have to take chemistry.

    (no offense to chemists intended, I respect you immensely. especially after doing the AP).

  44. I used to think exactly the same thing- I believed that girls are more vicious, backstab etc… But those are all lies or behavior codes fed to us by a society that devalues women.

    I don’t think that women are “more vicious and backstabbing.” I had a handful of female friendships throughout K-12 school, but like I said, the vast majority of my friends were male. I’m not really sure why. I just know that if I had been isolated from the boys, I would’ve had a much lonelier childhood.

  45. Yes, they are private and thus draw on a group that is willing to work their butts off

    *sighs*

    Class privilege? Whatsthat? America is a meritocracy. The rich are rich because they work their butts off, unlike all those lazy working class kids who work menial jobs and don’t concentrate on their studies. Those bums!

    Whoa, whoa, whoa. Misread me, BlackBloc. Really! I was referring to the points raised above in response to the first comments on women’s colleges producing strong leaders. Private schools have greater abilities to selectively take students than public schools, and greater leeway in kicking out the ones that don’t work out. Something which a public school – particularly a public elementary/secondary school as was under discussion in the original post — doesn’t have as many choices about.

    Even the lazy bums are not only allowed but required to get an 8th grade education, after all — whether they’re rich and lazy or poor and lazy. (And I’ve taught in a few NYC private schools; those planning to live off Daddy’s and/or Mommy’s money for the rest of their lives can be even lazier than the worst of the middle- or working-class kids I’ve seen.)

  46. I don’t know if single-gender would have made a difference. I know the girls at my school made me miserable – but that was because I was more concerned with learning than with being their idea of “normal”. I didn’t sit around and discuss who had a cute butt, etc.

    But maybe “normal” would have been different in a same-gender environment. Maybe I wouldn’t have been seen as bucking the social norm.

    Let’s face it, members of a community want to enforce their ideas of social norms. One way to do that is to pick on them, laugh at them and generally degrade and devalue them.

  47. In Minnesota we started a pilot program in a St. Paul (I think it was St. Paul) elementary school that segregated one class by sex. The data that inspired the experiment showed that if girls learned together as opposed to with boys in early grades, they were more willing to contribute out loud in class rather than letting competitive boys monopolize the discussion as usually happens.

    The idea in separating them was to get the girls used to interacting and injecting ideas early so that when they did go together the participation of the girls in the classes didn’t drop off as commonly happened in the data looked at. The curriculum was the same. I don’t know how’s it going so far.

    This a little different than in the story.

    Also for the record, I hated Lord of the Flies though it was mostly because everyone in my class pronounced the name of the damn shell as Conch, ending in the CH sound. That is a correct pronunciation but by God, the more common one is “Konk” and by God I swore I would say “Konk” or die.

    As you can tell I had little adversity in my English classes. I also summarized the opening of Beowulf as a “kegger.”

  48. But those are all lies or behavior codes fed to us by a society that devalues women.

    I never said women were inherently like that. They’re encouraged to behave that way because straightforward aggressivity is not accepted in girls, so they express their aggressivity in a more indirect way.
    Besides, I don’t actively refuse to form friendships with women at all. One of my closest friends is a woman, but I tend to be around men more because my tastes and activities are generally more popular among men than women (for instance, I listen to a lot of metal: you don’t see many women at metal concerts). I don’t necessarily feel like I’m “one of the guys”, I tend to have more in common with men than women. I don’t see why one should necessarily try to bond with people of one’s gender. As far as I’m concerned, gender (just like race, sexual preference or whatever) is irrelevant. If I find someone interesting and friendly, I don’t care if it’s a woman, a man, a dog or a gremlin.

  49. There are certainly benefits to single-sex education. My primary problem with it is the gender-essentialism that some of its proponents are trumpeting.

  50. As a fellow women’s college alum, I am so with Rhi on this one.

    I think my private college was great. But I think gender segregation in public schools would do more harm than good, even when it’s done with the best of intentions.

    At the very least it needs to be limited to special programs, and not be extended to full classrooms or, god forbid, entire schools.

    Even if girls and boys do benefit from some same gender activities, I can’t see these benefits lasting very long if they aren’t involved mainly in mixed groups. Even if little girls participate more when the boys aren’t there, shouldn’t they also be taught how to speak up when they are?

  51. One quick defense of Single sex education – teenagers are obsessed with sex and are in complete hormonal overdrive. I would contend that there may be benefits to trying to teach them in sex-segregated classes during that period – or with a mix of sex-segregation and sex-integration (such as with a boy’s school and sister-school in different wings and central rooms for the integrated classes). I remember how completely sex-obsessed I was at 16 and 17, and I have to admit that it distracted me from my work a lot. So, I would argue that some degree of sex-segregation may be beneficial for those purposes. Obviously, this isn’t perfect (homosexual and bisexual students would still be distracted by classmates), and it may not generally be feasible. But I would argue that the benefits for that period – maybe 13-18 – are easy to downplay.

  52. I don’t know if I would have done better in an all-girls school or not. What I desperately wanted to do was to finish high school via home study, because I did NOT fit in, and the constant sexual harassment I got didn’t exactly make me feel any better.

    However, I survived, and I swore if my sons are ever that unhappy with school I will find them an alternative that doesn’t have them suicidal and does get them educated.

    I seem to have engendered two social butterflies, but I keep that in mind.

  54. I went to an all-girls school and while my education was excellent, mainly because it was private and had much higher standards and aspirations than any public education I’ve come across in America (I later transferred to a highly competative pulbic school that is considered one of the best in the country) the single-sexness of it was intolerable. Sent there from the age of 5, I had no concept of how to interact with males professionally or socially, I was steered into “feminized” interests (and discouraged from my many more “masculine” ones) and existed in a environment in which everyone feared lesbianism (since there was no male outlet for sexual urges) and everyone had to go through grave contortions to prove their feminity amongst their peers. It was unnatural and distracting and I watched friends who were merely bad at math (or unpreferred it) encouraged to believe they had math phobia — “this is hard for girls, it’s okay.” There was also a pervasive belief in what I call “pretty girls are good girls” — which is to say those girls who were attractive and socially popular were fast-tracked into the advanced classes and usually escaped punishment for misbehavior. The misfits and nerds, who were usually the brighter students, had to beg and plead and connive and try to be pert and well-groomed and all the stuff they were just terrible at to get into classes appropriate to their intellectual abilities. For reference this was in the 70s and 80s.

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