Fieldtrip! Via maveric2003 @ Flickr.
I am the product of public, mixed-gender education where I did pretty well, thankyouverymuch. That, combined with my feminist spidey-sense that separate-is-never-equal, has me furrowing my feathery brow over this recent article from the Times, about the movement to gender-segregate underperforming public primary schools in the Bronx.
In the past, I’ve read statistics that indicate that girls tend to perform better in a single-sex environment, while boys ultimately do worse (these studies then go on to focus on how girls serve as civilizing influence for boys, which: yeesh), but this article can’t offer up any statistical backing for the benefits of single-gender education for either boys or girls. What does it offer?
The testimony of a 50 year old male teacher, who believes that in his all-boys class there are fewer disciplinary issues. And of course, that he can have more “closeness” with his young charges, and do “male bonding” activities like…read comic books and wear deodorant. Yes, really.
Down the hall in a female classroom, students research important black women in history. The teacher in that classroom isn’t quoted about how she feels about bonding with her students; she actually seems to be interested in talking about teaching and learning skills (both academic and larger life skills). Quite apart from the issue itself, there’s some interesting framing going on in the article, and it’s definitely worth a read. The comments, too, are illuminating, although I would recommend you only read the “Editor’s Choices.”
Plenty of ink has been spilled in the last ten years about how there’s a “boy crisis,” and how that’s largely fostered by school, which, with its sit-down-and-focus ways, is inherently hostile to boys’ “natural” inclinations? (Which prompts me to ask: why then were girls excluded from it for hundreds of years? Wasn’t that because all that sit-down-and-focus stuff was hostile to girls’ “natural” inclinations? It was? Huh. How ’bout that.) So I’m a little skeptical about the fact that nearly all the male voices quoted in the article–a principal, the teacher, a student’s father, and a student–seem strongly in favor of single-sex classes, compared to the women–the president of NOW, a law professor focussed on educational opportunity, and the teacher–who are more skeptical, or at least concerned about how single-sex ed will play out beyond the classroom.
I know we’ve got several harpies who were schooled at various points in sex-segregated classrooms, and regarded it as a boon, but I don’t know. As much as I value women-only spaces (and believe that men-only spaces are fine…ish), I’m not sold on educating children in single-gender groups, even if there were some measurable benefits in testing outcomes. We have to live with and learn about each other, and sex-segregating seems to reify difference based on chromosomes, which makes my Sexist Butt-itch flare up something awful. What do y’all think?
I also would have liked to have a school uniform. Although my baggy jeans, oversized t-shirts, and plaid flannel shirts probably counted as a uniform of sorts. Ah, grunge.
I also was educated in a coed environment from kindergarten through graduate school, and while I think I could have benefited from sex-segregation in some classes (like, say, Math), I don’t think it would have made a difference in others, and as you say, eventually we’re going to have to live with and learn about (and from) each other. I’m just not sure this is the way to go.
That’s a bad article. I actually think there is some decent data on it that is not just old men talking. I did feel I benefited heartily from a single sex education but I understand the problematics of it too. I wonder if it depends on when in one’s life cycle you get it — maybe single sex high school or university has different benefits than elementary school.
I attended high school at an all-girls public school, and I think that its important in these discussions to distinguish between single sex education and single gender education. The school I went to was very careful about giving us an education based on childhood development without gender stereotypes, but that doesn’t seem to be whats bugging you about this. I agree, that the concept that different genders need certain environments is based on nothing more than stereotypes. Single sex education can be used to try and give an education away from a great deal of the dynamics that are present in a co-ed classroom.
My high school had only gone co-ed the year before I started there, and we also had a dress code if not a uniform: no jeans except on certain Fridays, boys always had to wear collared shirts, no skirts above the knee, etc. I actually loved it! And it was almost a single-sex school. However, I am not sure how much the dress code really affected my love of that school. I think the tiny number of guys had a much greater impact on me.
Yeah I do think it matters that there be a feminist perspective on the single sex/gender ed. That guy in the article who was like “I can get up in the faces of male students but female students would cry and shit if I did that”… well, gender-sensitive education, ur doing it wrong.
Dori, I cosign 100%. Except I never attended a single-sex school.
Educating girls in single-sex classrooms is apparently very beneficial for them; girls tend to blossom when they don’t have to deal with boys in the classroom. So on one hand I like the idea of single-sex classrooms as a bandaid remedy for sexism. I do NOT approve of single-sex education for the purpose of addressing boys’ and girls’ “different educational needs,” or whatever.
I also worry that educating boys away from girls is detrimental to boys’ development because it others girls even more than they already are. Boys are taught that girls are a subhuman alien species; I can see boys educated in a single-sex environment growing up with views even more warped than those educated in co-educational environments.
I also am in favor of school uniforms (as long as there are gender neutral options) even though I totally led a school campaign against them in 7th grade.
our society is already too gender-segregated. Don’t instill this Mars/Venus crap in kids who are a captive audience.
Like gender-segregating the teams in reality shows: Hell’s Kitchen, the Apprentice. I can’t help think that both teams would be better and higher achieving with a mixed group.
I’m interested that you would be opposed to single sex ed even if it is proved to produce better outcomes for women…is this because of your fears of what it will do to boys and men? Or because you value equality and integration above individual women having power?
@madaha: I went to a single-sex college and an almost-single-sex high school where I was in a dorm with all girls. I think it really helped me feel much more comfortable. It’s not like I felt segregated at all. I just had to go off campus to get my share of men to hang out with, which wasn’t a huge deal. Also, plenty of male profs.
I saw a segment on the Today Show about this single-sex education experiment that they are doing in a few schools and I have to say that I did not have a favorable opinion of the practice after that (though I’ll grant that I was probably slight swayed by how it was covered by the Today Show–god I hate that show. I don’t know why I watch it). But anyway, it looked like a ridiculously gendered mess. The focus was so much on “this is what girls like” vs “this is what boys like” and trying to provide for these supposed “likes” in the separate classrooms. They also spent a lot of time discussing how girls tend to act vs how boys tend to act and how it is important to provide separate educational environments to cater to these differences in behavior and temperament. It really bothered me because I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor kids who aren’t “typical” boys or girls and don’t fit into a very stereotyped gender mold. Talk about feeling even more isolated. They interviewed one little girl who said she loved being separated from the boys because now the girls could be happy to just act like girls and not worry about the stupid, mean boys. All I could think was “what about the girls who want to act like boys?” How does this separating of the sexes take into account differences in learning and social styles within each gender?
I went to an all girls high school and I feel like I benefited from it. immensely. I went to a mixed gender HS freshman year and the differences were really pronounced. The girls were less focused on appearance and more proud of academic achievements and that’s just to begin with.
“Plenty of ink has been spilled in the last ten years about how there’s a “boy crisis,” and how that’s largely fostered by school, which, with its sit-down-and-focus ways, is inherently hostile to boys’ “natural” inclinations? (Which prompts me to ask: why then were girls excluded from it for hundreds of years? Wasn’t that because all that sit-down-and-focus stuff was hostile to girls’ “natural” inclinations? It was? Huh. How ’bout that.)”
I’ve asked to various trolls over the years and I’ve never gotten an answer
also! I have NEVER met an adult woman who went to an all girls HS or university who regretted it.
Ugh it is so discouraging to hear that some of these programs are just reifying stupid sex stereotypes. The thing I loved about my single sex ed is that it was women doing all the “boys work” of hard sciences, math, engineering, sports, and school leadership. Conversely I imagine a fantasy boys school where boys do “girls work” like language development, writing, drama, home ec, child dev., and music or whatever.
I guess i see it as a way to create a safe space to free kids from the constraints of gender rather than to force them into those roles, but I can see how it can be poorly administered to do the opposite.
Yeah, I went to an all girls high school (regular elementary school, and regular university though I’m in a very male dominated field).
It was a publicly funded high school which has closed down due to parents being angry that there wasn’t a similarly funded all boys high school. I guess I can’t really compare how I might have turned out in a co-ed school, but I DO know that I had a great time in high school. Nobody wore make up and we had leg-hair-growing competitions. The only self esteem issues I had came from when I accidentally left a bad test mark on my desk. We had an incredible sisterhood and I now realize that we were all little blossoming feminists. First year university was a big adjustment, that’s for sure. With men making belittling comments at me in the engineering lab (what? I’ve never felt anything but at home in a lab) and professors saying things like “well, girls just aren’t as good as visualizing”. If I was rich I’d certainly give enough funding to open my old high school back up.
Yeah I never have either bluebears. Nor have I ever met one who has trouble in the co ed world. The real question I guess is about the effects of single sex ed on boys. Of course we have all of history to tell us about traditional mens education, but I think there is the deeper issue that there are not a lot of places in society at all where men are encouraged to think critically about their gender and power, no companion movement to feminism (or push for men to join feminism).
There is an all-boys Catholic high school in my hometown, and the guys I knew seemed fine, but I do remember hearing a story once about how a college girl was rollerblading by in a sports bra and the entire class just stopped and stared out the window. Generally speaking, I don’t think it hurt them any, but this is also a case wherein they weren’t single-sex divided until high school AND they were all upper middle or upper class students who were paying to go there. I have no idea what the guys would be like if they had always been in all-boys classes or if they hadn’t been a population of people who chose to be in that type of school.
The nearest all-girls high school was 35 minutes away. One friend lasted 3 weeks there before she came back to our regular public school. Other than that, I never knew anyone there.
Now that I think about it, maybe I would’ve benefitted from single-sex education during those awkward ages from 11 to 14… ugh.
jd: I have heard some horror stories about all-boy schools. They seem like very different places then all-girl schools, unfortunately. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. The BF went to an all-boys HS and he absolutely hated it.
dangermouse: I really think any group of teenage boys would stare at a girl who was rollerblading by in her sports bra.
Bluebears, I’m interested in what you think these reasons are. I actually think there is a boys crisis, but I don’t think it’s an achievement crisis so much as a crisis in identity, use of violence, gender, that potentially single sex education could remedy, but obviously isn’t. I just dislike the idea that we shouldn’t support single sex ed which benefits women simply because men do better when integrated. i mean, do we have to do ALL the work around here?
JDR, I think my general resistance to single-sex ed is the difference between theory and practice. In theory, it seems great, and yes, I do know quite a few amazing women who went through it and wouldn’t change a thing. (The private school boys? Messed. Up. Patriarchy Hurts Men Too.) But in practice, I think because there isn’t a lot of feminist pedagogy-in-action out there, it quickly devolves into stereotypes like those claire mentioned, or that The Simpsons lampooned in the epi where Lisa dressed up as “Jake Boyman” to get a more rigorous math education.
I’m also really resistant to this sort of thing at the elementary, pre-puberty level, because then, yeah, I think it’s 99% programming, and I’m leery of any system that starts out organizing your world by “There are two–and only two–types of people, and by god you better fit into the group that matches your plumbing.” As a young girl, I would have been pretty miserable, and I’m straight and cis-gendered.
It’s funny you say that PHD because I agree with integration in theory but not practice, because I’ve seen the benefits, feel my single sex education was more rigorous and less gendered than that of my co educated peers. I may agree with you about the young kid thing, it does feel more like we are all in one gender soup then. I’m talking about this on jez at the moment too but an unexpecetd result of being single sex educated was that I actually see the world less like male/female. Being with all one gender made me think that people were people, because I saw all the variety and strengths and weaknesses and gifts and differences that existed within my own gender. I feel like there is more “boys over here and girls over there” kind of thinking when we are mixed. I know it sounds counterintuitive but that was my experience.
JD: I mean, not to be flip, but its almost like a Lord of the Flies atmosphere in a way. All the stereotypical male traits are just hyper-emphasized, like competitiveness and yes violence. I knew a guy (older than me, in HS in the 80s) who witnessed a Brother slamming another boys head into a chalkboard when he didn’t get a geometry proof right. If you seriously complain you’ve basically just had “pussy” tattooed onto your forehead. I agree, that the damage seems to be more emotional than academic, the academic side is often really top-notch.
oops! when he got a geometry proof WRONG. duh.
JD, PHD: I totally agree with JD on this. If anything the gender roles were more (way more) defined at the mixed gender HS. I have heard all the stereotypes, oh you guys were probably so boy crazy etc etc but in actuality that just isn’t the case. Its a stereotype. My all girls HS was probably the only institution I’ve ever been a part of that I felt fully encouraged feminist thought and ideas. And I went to a Catholic school!
“My all girls HS was probably the only institution I’ve ever been a part of that I felt fully encouraged feminist thought and ideas.”
See, this is what I love about the idea. But I imagine the intent of many programs is to tailor learning to the alleged inborn sex differences in kids.
I was thinking about that “seeing variety” thing you mention, JDR, as a possibility in single-sex environments, but I the problem–as always–is the Patriarchy. We live in a world where doing science and math are “male” things and as such are valued over “female” things like lang and lit, so it’s not surprising to me that girls benefit from achieving (and seeing others achieve) in all areas, but boys still get shit on for writing poetry, and as bluebears notes, being a “pussy” (not an idiot, a dummy, a loser, but a pussy) for making a geometry mistake.
Not that I’m saying “what about the menz!” Just that the problem is so much bigger than the education system that single-sex schooling isn’t going to solve it.
right so that locates the problem in single sex boy environments. and like i said before i think it is an argument for a radical reimagination of boys education, an equal to the feminist education movement. i know it’s funny to talk about “what about the menz” but seriously? how is society going to progress unless boys and men change? i still think if single sex is demonstrably better for (some? most?) girls, why would you be against it for them? Honestly besides this article and the anecdote Claire told, I have found girls education sites to be much less stereotyping and much more feminist, even if they are religious or not explicitly feminist. I’m just loathe to deny this experience to other females simply because the reverse is bad for boys. I’m also not suggesting that single sex schooling is enough to fix patriarchy. but no one action is! it takes fixes and interventions and gender critical thinking about every aspect of society.
SarahMC: true. and I think this is even more true for the schools mentioned in the article. and obviously, as PHDork notes, the need for single sex schools only speaks to a larger societal problem about the way girls and boys are treated in comparison in our public school systems and everywhere else.
I just found it to be such a nurturing environment. I would also add that it was fairly liberal, it was an ethnically diverse school and they went out of their way to celebrate different cultures. Many public schools are not as diverse because they represent the neighborhood in which they’re located which tend to be more homogeneous.
I think it would be great if boys were educated in a progressive environment, but how will it turn out in practice… yeah, probs pretty retrograde I’d imagine.
and i also want to say i totally get why it feels icky to separate boys and girls. we have such a strong “separate is not equal” ethic in america.
JD: I am totally down with a re-imagining of boys ed.
I think it is nice to have the option for some girls. PhD it sounds like you are naturally a little more gender neutral, having dude friends, feeling normal around them. But I being frilly and prissy and slutty by “nature”, I think I could have easily fallen into some bad traps if I was in a co ed environment my whole life. I think I could have fallen into playing stupid, being super into being hot, making sure boys liked me, a lot more. In single sex ed my teachers and co students weren’t having any of that noise. It just didn’t benefit me to play that shit up the way it would have in a co ed environment. Maybe I’m just the kind of girl who needed to get schooled in that way.
Oh, JD, you slutty, frilly thing. I am 100% with you on reimagining boys’ education. And how we raise boys in general. And for the record, I’m not 100% against all-girls schools, either. But I think its less appropriate at the primary level, and ideally, we could someday get to a point where it was totally unnecessary, because gender would be like eye color or handedness.
careful — those left handers are gonna go separatist on us any minute!
PHDork: But they need separate scissors! and desks!!! don’t ignore their pain.
I was traumatized by both boys and girls throughout my primary and secondary school years. I don’t think a single-sex educational environment would have made much of a difference for me. In fact, I might have actually been more comfortable in an all-male environment, as strange as that sounds…
It seems that the trouble with sex-segregated education is not so much on the female end as on the male end. All those here who have attended an all-girls school loved it, but it seems from the glimpses reported here that all-boys schools are not nearly as well run. I am inclined to think that the issue is not so much that boys do better in an integrated environment, but that its all sexist bastards teaching at all-boys schools. If there was a way to create an environment that encouraged boys to just be themselves the same way the all-girls schools do, then I think that would do away with much of the disparity that exists between the two.
Ok, emailed the BF and this is what he had to say about his same-sex HS education for what its worth:
“But I would have preferred co-ed cause I felt really isolated with just guys. My social development was stagnant. And its not like I learned all that much when I felt so lost and depressed. I had very little motivation most of the time.”
I know an educator who is developing a single-sex school for at-risk boys, believing that environment offers a better chance for success. I think single-sex classrooms are great; single-sex curricula based on retro/made-up gender stereotypes is ridiculous. I went to mixed-gender schools through high school and had a wonderful experience at a women’s college. Looking back, I wish I had been able to go to an all-women high school. But I also think of all the times I had to play “the feminist” in high school discussions, and it would be a disservice to boys (and the society they live in) to miss out on girls’ perspectives. Even students at the most progressive boys’ school would lose something.
If I remember correctly, those studies about girls doing better in single-sex schools came from Israel. Boys here are socialized to be nutcases, so that doesn’t surprise me. Not that I think Israel should change over to single-sex schools, just that the whole culture here needs to change, which it won’t. Anyway, I don’t think that study has been duplicated in the US.
I think single-sex schools are stoopid but that’s just me.
This is purely anecdotal but I attended mixed state schools, private single sex schools and a very posh mixed boarding school and without a doubt I did best in the single sex school without which I doubt I would have passed my qualifications or made it to university.
I can not speak for America but in England, at both my state and mixed boarding school, girls were ignored in lessons, we were belittled by the teachers and unless we were prepared to be shiny, happy barbie pod people we weren’t talked to by either the boys or the girls.
At the single sex school I attended there were lower incidences of self harming and eating disorders than in the mixed schools, particularly the boarding school where both were rife.
Do I think all mixed schools are like this no, not at all and I enjoyed my mixed elementary but I would certainly be inclined to educate my daughter at a single sex school. Two years at one transformed my confidence, my belief in my abilities and ultimately my life.
And I still had a good social life during this time, we socialised with boys out of school and it was a more pleasant experience than being mocked and groped by them in school.
Is there evidence that boys perform worse? I remember learning at school that it was an improvement for girls, neutral for boys, but my google scholar-ing is just showing me a hot mess of results.
I don’t know, Dangermouse (who is your Penfold?), I couldn’t find the studies either, or I would have linked them. I seem to remember, though, that the real “crisis” is for poor boys, and/or boys of color, not “boys.” White, middle-class boys were fine. That hardly makes it okay, but it also doesn’t make it about how “school is feminizing” or whatever. It’s like someone doesn’t want us to recognize that class issues might be important…
@phdork: That is a good point, about class/economic/race factors. I would hate for my first grader to miss out on the her relationships with her friends that are boys, and here the only all-girl schools are Catholic, so it’s not an option for me. There is so much more emphasis on behavior, respect, and helping others in school these days, (of course a largely white upper-mid district)–it’s seems that character education can help boys, by raising what is expected of them and teaching rather than penalizing them, and acknowledging that they might have different learning styles.
I don’t know if this is totally naive, but would it be all that difficult to have the same curricula in girls’ and boys’ schools? If they’re all public schools, and all the curricula are the same, then it seems to me the benefits of same-sex education would still be there but the drawbacks could be avoided. I also dream of a high school in which girls and boys are mixed for lunch periods and for homeroom, and possibly electives like band/art/orchestra/choir, but not for academic subjects. I would have loved that.