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Single-sex schools. Yay or nay?
Fawkes
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From a tangent in an H/A thread:
I'll address the first part last.
Obviously, schools which enforce a curriculum based on stereotypes are a Bad Thing; worse than that, they are a very Stupid Thing. Obviously bargain-basement 'science' like the stuff touted by Mr Sax above is full of it, and not a good basis for education policies. But as both Cat and those articles point out, these methods bear close relation to schools which teach selectively based on religion / politics, and so on. A single-sex school that limits education based on presumptions of gender is no different to a faith school that limits education based on presumptions of religion. They both fail at the first hurdle, which is that education should give the individual a universal provision of knowledge (ie not a selective curriculum) and when there is disagreement about what this knowledge means, the intellectual tools to be able to choose for oneself the best conclusion from the facts.
A less virulent strand of the above system might be a simple economic problem: allocation of scarce resources. Schools only having a certain amount of time & money, they have to devise a curriculum. For a co-ed school this would necessarily require a mix of both male & female aptitudes, and since it would generally be politically unsupportable to disallow on grounds of gender, eg females access to a weightlifting team, both sexes get the opportunity for the widest range of classes or activities. A single-sex school might say that science & such shows that both sexes display general aptitudes or preferences for different areas, and focus only on those areas. However, experience & such shows that there are always exceptions, and these aptitudes are not absolute in any way or form. As Cat showed in her example, it is better to allow each individual the opportunity to excel at their own aptitude than to enforce a program which gives preference to the mean (though I am interested to see how this squares with the rest of her left-wing political philosophies which do precisely the opposite).
However, the single-sex schools mentioned in the first paragraph only fail to do this because they are linked with that political philosophy of education, not because educating children in a single-sex environment inevitably means that all wimminz will learn Breeding and all menz Killing Things With Sticks. In fact, if one considers that the gender stereotypes above are largely based on the natural roles that men & women tend to fall into - reflecting general but not absolute aptitudes (see below) - there is a convincing argument that single-sex environments can provide less railroading of either gender into a specific role, since that gender both has to fulfill all roles, and encounters less peer pressure to conform to stereotypes from interaction with the other gender. An all-girls school necessarily must have an all-girls weightlifting team if it wants such a team. A cooking class in an all-boys school must necessarily have all boys in it. Furthermore, common sense (& I suspect scientific observation if I knew the studies) suggests that girls are more likely to try out for a weightlifting team if they aren't assuming all the boys will beat them, and boys are more likely to try a cooking class if they aren't afraid of being labeled as a 'girly-man' in front of girls. There will be a certain tendency towards the mean, both due to allocation of resources (girls schools are more likely to have a hockey team than a weightlifting team, boys schools are more likely to have a design & technology class than a cooking class), and to peer pressure within genders (weightlifting girls will still be called chunky by other girls, cooking boys will still be called girly by other boys - at least until the latter hit their mid-20's and figure out that it's actually sexually attractive), but is not at all obvious that this will be any more prevalent than peer pressure in co-ed schools, particularly from the ages of 13+ when sexual dynamics inevitably inform most behaviour.
Essentially, there is no obvious argument which shows that a well-run (ie doesn't pander to stereotypes) single-sex school will be any worse at gender stereotyping than a co-ed school, and at least one (a single-gender school must necessarily have that gender involved in all activities, even those contrary to to the stereotype) which suggests that it may be better.
This leaves me at the first point in Cat's post, which is my own positive experience of single-sex schooling, both myself and among many others I have known. It is probably important that this was in Britain, where single-sex schools are not a new movement as an end in themselves, but simply a product of how private schools have evolved over centuries; these are called public schools (confusing, eh), those which have a long history going back to the 16th century or before, names which even Americans have heard of like Eton, Harrow, and so on. There is a separate argument to be had here about the traditional methods of such schools re: class and so on, but it is incidental to the fact that most of them are single-sex - over the last decade for example, most of the all-boys schools have introduced girls from 16-18, and the rest & the all-girls schools invariably have strong links and daily interaction with local schools with the opposite sex. Being single-sex is far from an unbreakable rule of those traditional methods. Furthermore, far from being the bastions of conservatism that most people imagine, many of these schools provide an extremely wide and very liberal curriculum, and have a holistic, independent approach to education involving much extra-curricular work which is a far cry from the grades-centric standard among both state schools in the UK, and public schools in the US.
There is a general perception that public school pupils a) will have a complete & well-rounded education, b) but lack motivation to study without structure, and c) that they will be less experienced in 'the world' than those from state schools and thus have trouble relating to it. A) tends to be true, b) also tends to be true, though c) is often wrong - due to private education & the fact that this tends to go with well-off parents, they tend to have far wider experience of the world than state pupils, but within controlled boundaries. In fact, public school pupils tend to be among the most confident & gregarious people you will meet in UK universities, though mostly they will be easy to identify as being from public school. I find there is a strong correlation here with people's perception of Army officers (unsurprising, public schools were feeders for the Army for centuries); people can identify an Army officer quite easily by the uniform quirks of that job & generally quite alien deportment - scratch this surface, however, and you find they are among the most open-minded, interesting & engaging people you will meet. Unfortunately, many people don't bother to see past the surface, and judge them on preconception rather than actual experience. Much the same applies to the preconceptions about public school pupils. There is also a presumption that pupils from single-sex public schools will be less able to relate to or deal with the other sex. Again, this is simply untrue. They are perfectly able to relate (& usually pretty successful) to the opposite sex within their own social circles, but sometimes not outside those - though this is generally limited to the people who would be cliquey bastards in any situation. I personally saw just as much prejudice directed towards myself & others from a public school from nice, enlightened left-wing state-educated types as in the opposite direction; one particular occasion sticks in my mind when a girl fitting the above description, who had never met me before and only heard about & seen me around the university, approached me with disgust literally written on her face because she wanted to do a project within the society I'd been running for the last year. She clearly assumed I was going to laugh in her face or tell her to fuck off, and was quite surprised when, far from being the misogynist, conservative clique-master she had assumed, she learned that I had actually spent the last year opening up said society to new blood, and was happy for her to go forward with the project. 24 hours later I'd managed to break down the rest of her preconceptions about me (partly around a debate about feminism if I remember) and had her admitting that, just possibly, I hadn't been the one there with predjudiced views about people & the world.
Point to my personal experiences of single-sex schools being: at least in Britain, there are definite traits which single-sex schools tend to impart, and not all of them good, but few to none of them come from the fact that they are single-sex schools. Moreover, they are in general very good schools. None of this proves that you should 'seek out single-sex education' as Cat said in the H/A (which I have no particular views on either way), but it does show that single-sex education is not a Bad thing in itself. So since in the real world of limited choices a parent's decision may well be between a very good single-sex school, and a less good co-ed school, I'd go for the first one; yay or nay, who really cares?
Y'know, discuss.
TheCat wrote:Anyway, suffice to say that the time I spent at a girls' school was one of the worst times of my life even allowing for early teen angst, and the curriculum was really horribly biased (in a tyranny-of-low-expectations way, for the most part). You'll also notice I never said anything about the male school's curriculum beyond that I was pissed off that I couldn't access a number of subjects I was interested in - technical drawing, for one, which I couldn't get near until I got to a mixed-gender state school in QLD. And I was forced to do dance as a subject instead. Man, fuck dance. I'd like to think my experience counts for something.
Secondly, in the US, where schools are a lot less regulated and people like Leonard Sax are getting support all out of proportion to their actual qualifications - and just to be clear, we're talking about a guy who thinks algebra is too complicated for girls and that boys should be encouraged to fight each other in school to establish 'natural' dominance structures. As the post I just linked points out, there are single sex schools out there established to shelter historically oppressed groups from the wider culture, but the modern single-sex education movement isn't about that. Its not even about some of the recent research identifying slightly different needs between the genders in terms of teacher treatment. Its a movement deeply tied to gender-essentialism, religious fundamentalism, and a peculiar kind of worship of ideas about human instincts that don't have much basis in fact - the worst of evo-psych fairytales, really. Its rather creepy, and most importantly its not at all about maximising an individual's potential. Instead, its about putting a child in a pre-determined box and not allowing them to develop at all outside of it, because that wouldn't be 'natural'. That's pretty much the definition of bad parenting, as fas as I'm concerned.
I'll address the first part last.
Obviously, schools which enforce a curriculum based on stereotypes are a Bad Thing; worse than that, they are a very Stupid Thing. Obviously bargain-basement 'science' like the stuff touted by Mr Sax above is full of it, and not a good basis for education policies. But as both Cat and those articles point out, these methods bear close relation to schools which teach selectively based on religion / politics, and so on. A single-sex school that limits education based on presumptions of gender is no different to a faith school that limits education based on presumptions of religion. They both fail at the first hurdle, which is that education should give the individual a universal provision of knowledge (ie not a selective curriculum) and when there is disagreement about what this knowledge means, the intellectual tools to be able to choose for oneself the best conclusion from the facts.
A less virulent strand of the above system might be a simple economic problem: allocation of scarce resources. Schools only having a certain amount of time & money, they have to devise a curriculum. For a co-ed school this would necessarily require a mix of both male & female aptitudes, and since it would generally be politically unsupportable to disallow on grounds of gender, eg females access to a weightlifting team, both sexes get the opportunity for the widest range of classes or activities. A single-sex school might say that science & such shows that both sexes display general aptitudes or preferences for different areas, and focus only on those areas. However, experience & such shows that there are always exceptions, and these aptitudes are not absolute in any way or form. As Cat showed in her example, it is better to allow each individual the opportunity to excel at their own aptitude than to enforce a program which gives preference to the mean (though I am interested to see how this squares with the rest of her left-wing political philosophies which do precisely the opposite).
However, the single-sex schools mentioned in the first paragraph only fail to do this because they are linked with that political philosophy of education, not because educating children in a single-sex environment inevitably means that all wimminz will learn Breeding and all menz Killing Things With Sticks. In fact, if one considers that the gender stereotypes above are largely based on the natural roles that men & women tend to fall into - reflecting general but not absolute aptitudes (see below) - there is a convincing argument that single-sex environments can provide less railroading of either gender into a specific role, since that gender both has to fulfill all roles, and encounters less peer pressure to conform to stereotypes from interaction with the other gender. An all-girls school necessarily must have an all-girls weightlifting team if it wants such a team. A cooking class in an all-boys school must necessarily have all boys in it. Furthermore, common sense (& I suspect scientific observation if I knew the studies) suggests that girls are more likely to try out for a weightlifting team if they aren't assuming all the boys will beat them, and boys are more likely to try a cooking class if they aren't afraid of being labeled as a 'girly-man' in front of girls. There will be a certain tendency towards the mean, both due to allocation of resources (girls schools are more likely to have a hockey team than a weightlifting team, boys schools are more likely to have a design & technology class than a cooking class), and to peer pressure within genders (weightlifting girls will still be called chunky by other girls, cooking boys will still be called girly by other boys - at least until the latter hit their mid-20's and figure out that it's actually sexually attractive), but is not at all obvious that this will be any more prevalent than peer pressure in co-ed schools, particularly from the ages of 13+ when sexual dynamics inevitably inform most behaviour.
Essentially, there is no obvious argument which shows that a well-run (ie doesn't pander to stereotypes) single-sex school will be any worse at gender stereotyping than a co-ed school, and at least one (a single-gender school must necessarily have that gender involved in all activities, even those contrary to to the stereotype) which suggests that it may be better.
This leaves me at the first point in Cat's post, which is my own positive experience of single-sex schooling, both myself and among many others I have known. It is probably important that this was in Britain, where single-sex schools are not a new movement as an end in themselves, but simply a product of how private schools have evolved over centuries; these are called public schools (confusing, eh), those which have a long history going back to the 16th century or before, names which even Americans have heard of like Eton, Harrow, and so on. There is a separate argument to be had here about the traditional methods of such schools re: class and so on, but it is incidental to the fact that most of them are single-sex - over the last decade for example, most of the all-boys schools have introduced girls from 16-18, and the rest & the all-girls schools invariably have strong links and daily interaction with local schools with the opposite sex. Being single-sex is far from an unbreakable rule of those traditional methods. Furthermore, far from being the bastions of conservatism that most people imagine, many of these schools provide an extremely wide and very liberal curriculum, and have a holistic, independent approach to education involving much extra-curricular work which is a far cry from the grades-centric standard among both state schools in the UK, and public schools in the US.
There is a general perception that public school pupils a) will have a complete & well-rounded education, b) but lack motivation to study without structure, and c) that they will be less experienced in 'the world' than those from state schools and thus have trouble relating to it. A) tends to be true, b) also tends to be true, though c) is often wrong - due to private education & the fact that this tends to go with well-off parents, they tend to have far wider experience of the world than state pupils, but within controlled boundaries. In fact, public school pupils tend to be among the most confident & gregarious people you will meet in UK universities, though mostly they will be easy to identify as being from public school. I find there is a strong correlation here with people's perception of Army officers (unsurprising, public schools were feeders for the Army for centuries); people can identify an Army officer quite easily by the uniform quirks of that job & generally quite alien deportment - scratch this surface, however, and you find they are among the most open-minded, interesting & engaging people you will meet. Unfortunately, many people don't bother to see past the surface, and judge them on preconception rather than actual experience. Much the same applies to the preconceptions about public school pupils. There is also a presumption that pupils from single-sex public schools will be less able to relate to or deal with the other sex. Again, this is simply untrue. They are perfectly able to relate (& usually pretty successful) to the opposite sex within their own social circles, but sometimes not outside those - though this is generally limited to the people who would be cliquey bastards in any situation. I personally saw just as much prejudice directed towards myself & others from a public school from nice, enlightened left-wing state-educated types as in the opposite direction; one particular occasion sticks in my mind when a girl fitting the above description, who had never met me before and only heard about & seen me around the university, approached me with disgust literally written on her face because she wanted to do a project within the society I'd been running for the last year. She clearly assumed I was going to laugh in her face or tell her to fuck off, and was quite surprised when, far from being the misogynist, conservative clique-master she had assumed, she learned that I had actually spent the last year opening up said society to new blood, and was happy for her to go forward with the project. 24 hours later I'd managed to break down the rest of her preconceptions about me (partly around a debate about feminism if I remember) and had her admitting that, just possibly, I hadn't been the one there with predjudiced views about people & the world.
Point to my personal experiences of single-sex schools being: at least in Britain, there are definite traits which single-sex schools tend to impart, and not all of them good, but few to none of them come from the fact that they are single-sex schools. Moreover, they are in general very good schools. None of this proves that you should 'seek out single-sex education' as Cat said in the H/A (which I have no particular views on either way), but it does show that single-sex education is not a Bad thing in itself. So since in the real world of limited choices a parent's decision may well be between a very good single-sex school, and a less good co-ed school, I'd go for the first one; yay or nay, who really cares?
Y'know, discuss.
Fawkes on
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Also, the public school system in Britain and single-sex education as an entity should really not be confused. They're really completely different things, but you're conflating them and all its doing is muddying the waters.
I'm aware that extracurriculars bring you into contact with people with the opposite parts, but come on. You spend 7 hours (if not more) in the school, and most of the extracurriculars are school-related.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Let me rephrase.
...but all other factors are never equal, are they, so it's pretty stupid to argue as if they are. Which is what I said. Several times. I also said that I had no view either way on whether single-sex education was a positive thing, I simply said it didn't have to be a negative thing. There is a distinction.
Read before maek poast next time?
Again, you missed my point. I'm not arguing there is reason, given a hypothetical educational system where all other factors are equal, that single-sex schooling provides more benefit than co-ed. I'm arguing that the hypothetical educational system is hypothetical, and best intentions aside, is never going to happen: to do so would require total Soviet-style centralisation & no choice, and experience of those systems throughout the world suggest they give a far more proscribed education than those of the mature democracies we are talking about.
Thus we have to consider the other factors which contribute to the school. The greatest of these (in the US & UK at least) tends to be money: the richer the school / area / parents, the more opportunity for less in-demand subjects, since the school has more resources. Since a lot of single-sex schools are private, certainly in the UK & US, and I would imagine in Australia too, it is not just possible, but plain fact, that many single-sex schools offer more of the opportunities you are talking about than co-ed schools; my school, for example, could offer not only many obscure classes numbering only a few people in each, but even one-to-one tutoring in the most obscure subjects. The fact that co-ed state schools couldn't do this has nothing to do with the fact they were co-ed, but that they don't have the money or high teacher/student ratio to make it possible: they didn't have the resources. My entire point was that little of this has to do with the fact they are single-sex schools, and that, unless they follow some bizarre medieval theory of education like the Sax one you outlined above, the one factor of them being single-sex schools is either educationally quite benign (& there have been plenty of reputable, non-political studies which show performance and concentration is as good or better in single-sex classes), or socially offset by deliberate introduction of the opposite sex in other areas.
But they are conflated. And not just in Britain, that's just where I have experience of, but everywhere. 'Single-sex education as an entity' doesn't exist in 'as an entity'; by pretending it exists in a vacuum, you are making exactly the same mistake as Leonard Sax, arguing that gender issues are so vital that they outweigh every other factor. Whether a school is single-sex or co-ed, it will still have common factors which affect all schools, such as money, resources, policy, quality of pupils, specialisation in subjects, etc. The reason I spent so long discussing them side-by-side is precisely because no useful argument can consider them any other way; I was illustrating how the single-sex aspect is relatively unimportant in the final estimation.
There's an easy way to sort it out: if your only two choices were between a bad co-ed school and a good single-sex school, which one would you go for?
Well, interesting point, but flawed.
First, you may be correct in the first sentence. However, how often have you known students to be able to change school policy? They might be able to supplement their own education (counter the bias) once it is more under their control at university, but then universities tend to be much more specialised & focusing on only a few subjects - pretty much just the one in the UK, so in practice there is little opportunity to revisit what should have been the general base for education. Even if they could do so, given a finite amount of time at university they are cutting into what they would otherwise be concentrating on then, spending valuable time on essentially remedial learning. It is surely much better to never have the bias in the first place.
Second, given the private school model of much single-sex education I was using above, there is a much more effective mechanism for ensuring there is minimal bias - the parents who foot the bills. They tend to be acutely aware of both what their children are learning, and what they are not. Unless these parents are sympathetic to the bias in the first place (ie convent schools for example) they are unlikely to accept it, and in a much better position to change it, either by representation to the school or simple market forces: ie school reputation & not sending children there in the first place. In my experience, it rarely comes to the latter, both because parents send children to the well-researched school they choose, and because the schools are very responsive to the wishes of parents. Thus there is much less, if any, bias in the first place that requires fixing.
So with the standard exception in this thread of those schools which cater to a specific specialisation (ie faith schools, specialist subject schools, military schools or single-sex schools based on Saxian ideas), many modern single-sex schools are most likely to display less educational bias simply because they are most likely to be private. Can't prove it, but willing to bet that certainly in the UK, most likely in the US, and probably in Australia, there are far fewer Sax-type single-sex schools than traditional private schools which happen to be single-sex.
Also, this is just idiotic. Do you not trust anyone with a mustache not to be a mass-murdering dictator?
But how many people face exactly that choice?
Again, check out the Pandagon post: in part it's about a Louisiana public school system that's trying to change to single-sex education with a horribly flawed curriculum rife with gender bias.
Let's consider your "bad coed school vs. good single-sex school" example: let's be honest, it's not like parents are going to choose the "good single-sex school" just because of the benefits of single-sex education, they're going to choose it for the overall advantages, such as better teacher qualifications, more money spent on each student, smaller class sizes, etc.
I found this snippet linked from Pandagon to be far more valuable:
Probably none of them face exactly that choice. Plenty may face almost exactly that choice, except with more schools, such as in the UK - since so many private schools are single-sex until sixth form. Also, if you work in one of the main factors that parents balk at in education (distance), they may well be faced with the local state school or the one local private school which is single-sex. The example is simplified, but not so far from a real possibility.
Why? I've already said several times that I think running a curriculum based purely on gender is ridiculous, and it's stupid to choose a school based purely on the fact it's single-sex. My argument is that it's often similarly stupid to do the opposite.
I FUCKING KNOW!
Fucks sake, reading comprehension people! Welcome to the point I've been hammering for the last page!
PS The example your blogger used about her own single-sex school is how the all-girls public schools I've encountered in the UK are run to the best of my knowledge (obviously I didn't spend that much time at them), and they tend to similarly have been founded by suffragists...cracks about old-school elitist British snobbery run into a problem there: we did invent the suffragette movement after all. So if we can all agree that single-sex education isn't necessarily a Bad Thing and it is pretty stupid to shun a good school purely because it is single-sex, then I can go home. By which I mean, er, go out.
...And it's the "almost" that, I contend, makes the example useless. No offense, but the other factors involved in education are simply far more important than genitalia.
You're missing our point: the schools you're talking about don't exist in the USA. Or, at the very least, they're the tiny minority exception to the overwhelming majority rule.
Also, you apparently didn't read the snippet from The Happy Feminist: the differences between girls and boys are smaller in number and magnitude than the differences between girls and between boys.
Single-sex education completely ignores this fact and only emphasizes the problems it causes.
Cue grade 10.
Grade 10, when my parents came into a bit of the moolah, decided (with me, mind) that a school with better facilitys would end in better employment opportunites etc. Well, those years were the worst years in my life. It was horrible. There was just so much male...... angst? floating around. They had to prove themselves to thier peers by embarrassing, hurting, humiliating other lad's in the group. And at the student level it was bad enough... but the teachers were like that too!!! Too much, "it's a boy's group" mentality. The math teachers wouldn't slow down for those not mathematically inclined, and the other teachers, well, acted as if they were the students. For example; My 1st year 12 english teacher, male ex-boy of the school. coached the cricket team. Me by merit of being a boarder scored a seat on the *back row* with all the cool kids. They would all be talking about the wimminz they banged last weekend, or how much rum they drank, whatever, feet on the table, elaborate hand gestures..... and me sitting amongst them, sitting up straight and reading a novel; was the one the teacher saw, the one the teacher threatened, and gave detention to. I mean, what the fuck?! there were students there that didn't give a shit about the subject, and the teacher would ignore them. Me, reading, was targeted! eventually I got a transfer out of that teachers group (after writing a scathing "free writing" assignment demeaning my teacher (describing his red neck, and red horns creeping of his red hair) and handing it in, for a B+) and enjoyed the subject more, with a female teacher.
The main argument for and against single sex schools is the distraction that the other sex provides, but with my experience of both methods of teaching, I think that a mixed enviroment, is much better. Having women in the class room shifts the focus from skill, to application, in my mind. Knowing how to apply sine/cos/tan rules to a triangle means shit to me unless I can actually use it in a real world example (I was actually failing math untill a female tutor realised that I improved my techniques when I could apply really examples) just as writing a english paper on Rocky V means little when trying to examine the love sub-text.
....well, i've been rambling... like, alot alot, and I hope people can glean the nuggets of truth from my lengthy spiel.
P.S. I attended Anglican Church Grammar School in brisbane (A.C.G.S/Churchie) for my single sex years, and Sunshine Coast Grammar School (S.C.G.S) in my mixed education years.
What, even though I gave you a specific example of how the original proposal was possible. So, no 'almost'? Furthermore, would you like to give a reason why, say, having to choose between one good single sex school, one mediocre co-ed school, and one poor co-ed school is any different? The essential point is that of all the choices, the single-sex school is the best when you weigh all other factors except gender. Therefore, do you choose the better single-sex school, or the worse co-ed school. How important do you really consider single-sex schooling to be? You've already answered it somewhere else, simply denying the question is obtuse.
If you want to prevaricate, get smarter. Otherwise, answer the question please.
Er, yeah you're freewheeling now. You clearly haven't read through my posts, or even the rest of that post, and haven't picked up the thousands of times I've specifically said that the other factors involved in education are far more important than whether it is single-sex. Either that or you are extraordinarily dense. Look, it's right underneath where you wrote that, in big bold 20 point letters. At least man up and admit you fucked up.
Perhaps I missed it because you haven't said that, anywhere in this thread. Nobody has. Or perhaps I have some strange British misconception of 'the point', and it actually means 'the statement which I have not yet made, and possibly argued directly against'.
But now that you have stated your none-too-clear point: I'm not sure I believe it. Variously depending on what that ambiguous statement could have meant, I certainly don't believe that the US has changed so much in the last 7 years since I lived there that the majority of schools are no longer co-ed; I'm very skeptical that the overwhelming majority of single-sex schools for both genders have changed so much since they ran on the British model in the post-war years that these very traditional establishments have all taken on some new & unconvincing educational theory of gender bias; I'm also highly suspicious that if you took out all the convents & religiously orientated single-sex schools (because I think it's more accurate to blame their bias on the religion rather than the 'single-sex theory' that Sax represents), those all-girl schools that were left would show an overwhelming majority of biased curriculum's; I'm even unconvinced that if you left all of those faith schools in, there would be an overwhelming majority of schools which adhered to the kind of theory Sax is touting.
I'm not basing this on current facts, but purely on common sense from that which I do know, and the feeling that you've launched into this thread getting things wrong, making sweeping statements & claiming statistics which would require specialist research, based on no demonstrable knowledge or prior experience in the subject (judging by your reaction to the posted article) and instead just a vague sympathy to the political alignment of the argument.
In short: facts, or I call total & utter bullshit.
The other point made by the blogger is more interesting, but I have to go, and will address it later.
What's funny about insulting my intelligence and claiming that I've not read anything at all is that it doesn't substitute for a good argument. I've posted links and quotes from a few different blogs which, I think, speak pretty well about the problems involved with implementing single-sex education in America. The fact is that politics plays a huge role in education in this country---or, at least, that's my perception based on the experiences I've had thus far and what I've gleaned from internet, television, radio, and print commentary on the subject. But then again, I'm probably too stupid to have adequately understood what I've heard/seen/read, right?
Or, more likely, I've seen exactly how much politics dictates education policy in many parts of this country. I've read and heard convincing arguments about how biological sex differences have historically been misused to justify sex discrimination, and that these bad theories have been injected into school districts to reinforce traditional gender roles.
***
Fawkes, I'm going to discuss what I think are some important points about "Single-sex schools. Yay or Nay?" If you think I'm off-topic then I'll stop posting, no questions asked.
Snippets from various blogs, re: single-sex education (in America):
Melissa McEwan
The Happy Feminist
Spoilered due to duplication from earlier.
There may well be advantages to single-sex education that make it prefereable overall and in general to mixed-sex education; I'm not really interested in that, though. What I think is far more important to to recognize the context of the educational system in America, that it's still a majority public-school system with tremendous local control. School boards dictate curricula pretty much everywhere and hold the pursestrings, meaning that public schools are often subject to the political whims of elected school boards with little or no professional education experience. Thus, curricula are also subject to politics, and as demonstrated in the ACLU lawsuit against a Louisiana school district, often this political interference damages the integrity of the education provided to students. Based on this, and on the fundamental similarity of girls' and boys' brains, I think that single-sex education in the USA should always be the alternative to the mixed-sex rule.
* Please note that I acknowledge that private single-sex schools are a different matter entirely, provided that there's still a viable and competitive public school alternative in a given community.
Sorry for making this even longer, but a quote from a cognitive scientist:
And a different quote, from U.S. Department of Education (1994)
Right. First off, I was insulting your intelligence because you were displaying none - you parroted back what I had been saying in every post in this thread at me, as if it was a contrary position or some startling revelation. Either you hadn't read what I wrote, or you couldn't understand it. I'm guessing it is the former, but while you refuse to acknowledge that you'd just fucked up and not fully read my argument, I'll have to assume it's the latter.
Second, nice though it is, none of what you have written above demonstrates the factual evidence behind your statement here:
I was calling bullshit on those exaggerated claims which seem to suggest some kind of factual basis. What you outlined top may accurately describe the political debate around the subject, but it does not reflect the facts you cited. I'm simply asking you to prove that statement or retract it, I don't think asking for accurate factual reporting is out of line in a debate forum. Also, I'm comparatively well aware of US education policies, since I did live (though not go to school) there when younger, knew people from various schools who were educated there, and - having access to the same print & internet media you do - being a US citizen & studying the country, do maintain some minimal knowledge of what goes on. On education, perhaps not as much as you, but enough to know that to claim the overwhelming majority of single-sex schools in the US are beating down their pupils with the gender stick is a little off the mark.
As I've already said, I'm quite happy to agree that policies instituting single-sex education for its own sake are a bit suspect, though I probably wouldn't assume they are all based on trying to re-establish gender bias as these bloggers seem to be doing. (I also object to the wanton use of blogs as 'evidence', since they are mostly so blatantly polemical and selective in their evidence, that using them in an argument about bias is hugely amusing). But I'll agree with the conclusion that single-sex classes aren't a solution to problems with an educational system, because I never suggested they were.
Once again, I agree. To most of the rest of the world (and I'm guessing you), the absurd flip-flopping in Kansas over ID for the last 8 years is proof enough that such a low level of political interference is a Bad Thing. But once again, you seem to have missed or ignored my point that I'm not arguing the merits of single-sex education; I'm certainly not arguing that single-sex education is a goal in itself; I'm simply stating that if a school provides a good education, the fact that it may have only one gender attending is not detrimental to that education. I also suspect that the arguments you quote above are subject to politics: nowhere do I see evidence that these single-sex schools are endemic throughout the US, and I suspect that both those arguments and you are falling victim to political inflation; that those making the point consider it so morally important that they completely ignore the actual incidence of these schools - which I would guess is still very small - within the nation.
Well, since private schools were the only ones I was arguing about, good.
I have no problem with this thread being about the single-sex education movement in the US (though it seems a bit pointless, like the ID threads that used to come up: "I agree!" "Me too!" "Then we WIN!"), but before that slight derail, it would be nice to conclude on my initial point; whether the fact a school is single-sex can be benign.
Of course, all-girl school girls bussed into our school (or when we were bussed into theirs) tended to be...more efficient with their time. So perhaps it evens out...
Someone came into this thread in full claws-out mode.
To be clear, this is where I disagree with you:
And I say, compared to co-ed education, yes, it always is a negative thing. I included the "all factors being equal" bit because I wanted to emphasize that I'm not talking about any of the gender stereotyping and other things that you mention in your (well worded but disjointed) OP.
It isn't about wimminz learnin' breedin' or whatever other nonsensical policies whatever particular wacko single-sex school happens to adopts or doesn't adopt. The point I was trying to make is that being put into a largely single-sex environment hurts the development of children and teenagers (particularly high school age, 15-18 or so) in a way that cannot be compensated for through curriculum or lack of stereotyping.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Nothing says "Girls and Boys are Different" better than shoving them into a different schooling system. I'm equally against race-based and religion-based schools. Isolating people from one another just leads to xenophobic behaviors.
Ah, good. So using my example above, if you had to choose between a single-sex school where 'all other factors' were superior to your other choice, a co-ed school, you would go with...?
PS I come out into every thread in full claws-out mode, think of it like a Tourettes reaction to stupidity, it's not personal ;-)
Yes, everyone has done that bit, we all agree. The question at hand is whether it necessarily has a negative effect.
You know, I don't see how any of that actually responds to Cat's point. If only a small number of people in one gender are interested in a certain subject or class (right now, I'm the only guy in my dance aerobics class), why would it be offered in a single-sex school?
The fact that a school is single-sex is a strong negative doesn't mean that's the only thing in play when deciding on a so school. I'm quite sure there could be circumstances going on at two schools that would make me pick a single-sex one over a co-ed alternative.
But there would have to be pretty serious problems at the co-ed school for that to happen.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I've only ever heard horror stories and lesbian jokes come of it.
But that's all anecdotal.
That said... I fail to see how shitty relations between the two halves of humanity can be anything but negative.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Two years ago (according to my old boys newsletter) the iron curtain was removed so the two schools now pool classrooms and the sixth forms are mixed, so when you turn seventeen you start having girls in lessons.
It worked for me, I got a decent education, made lasting friends and have been to able to speak to the opposite sex without having a stroke.
I can't see how it could be anything but negative. A significant function of school is socialization - have you ever met a home-schooled kid who was booksmart but a social retard? How is proper socialization supposed to occur if they're isolated from the opposite gender?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Quoting this because this is a biggest problem with single sex schools and this should be brough to the OP's attention once again.
School administrations of single sex schools may not overtly try to stuff gender stereotypes down their students' throats, but they are inadvertently limiting teenage girls+guys from learning how to interact with each other. "Proper Socialization" is an important part of a kid's development and can't be "taught", no matter how much money or resources a school has; single sex schools definitely don't provide their students with an environment that encourages teenagers to learn about the opposite sex.
Second, I think that the social aspect of school is as important as the informational aspect of school. Having only one gender present at a school is bad for that in so many ways. Anything that keeps the genders apart is bad.
But everybody knows that all teenage boys are so full of hormones that they can't think about anything except girls when girls are close to them!
Money. Resources. The example was: single-sex schools I'm talking about are usually private schools, thus tend to have more money than co-ed state schools, thus can offer more variety in subject choice, among other things. Cat's point was taking a hypothetical situation of single-sex school vs co-ed schools, all other things being equal. My point was nothing occurs in a hypothetical situation.
You also answered your own question. IE: "If only a small number of people in one gender are interested in a certain subject or class, why wouldn't it be offered in a single-sex school?" Answer: because they have limited resources to spread around, and would be less likely to spend them on minority subjects.
Seriously, for a forum which likes to consider itself intelligentsia, it's amusing that if you don't write an answer here in three sentences or less, nobody ever understands / reads it. Clearly this proves that co-ed schools limit attention span!!!11one
I meant the question I posed, which you got. So you consider a single-sex environment a strong negative, fair enough. But...
Ok...I fail to see how single-sex schools automatically create shitty relations between the two halves of humanity. This must be because I have shitty relations with all women, am too close to the problem & cannot see it.
I assume this means that single-sex schools necessarily promote these gender stereotypes. Again, please show your working.
I can't see how quantum mechanics works, but I'm reliably informed it does.
...and another, anyone ever bother reading the OP where I addressed the fact that single-sex school pupils in the UK have less issues with "Proper Socialisation" than co-ed pupils...didn't think so...
...and yet another informing me that my social development re: women has been irreversibly retarded (please memo all the women about this, they don't seem to have been informed yet)...
Notice a trend here? Lots of people with no experience of single-sex education opining in good, solid groupthink about how it is a terrible thing while offering no actual evidence. Several people with actual experience of single-sex experience saying it was a good one (including a blogging feminist!), some saying it wasn't great but ain't necessarily evil, and one saying it was Bad. Let me repeat an experience I wrote about in another thread:
I might have also mentioned something in the OP about ill-informed prejudices. There might be something in that.
Unless single-sex education changes fundamental human psychology.
The single most effective way to defeat a negative stereotype is expose whoever's doing the stereotyping to as many of the people being stereotyped as possible. Socialization.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
You should start bragging about not being concise; I'm going to be impressed.
While I would agree with you in theory, it doesn't seem to always hold true in practice. I mean, there seems to be a lot of misogynistic jerks who grew up going to co-ed schools. I think exposure is only effective as far as the individual's psychological conditioning allows. That is, if you enter into a social interaction with firm-set prejudices, you're most likely just going to dismiss any experiences that don't jive with your pre-conceptions. Also, even if you didn't go in with prejudices, you can only accurately form an opinion of the other party if you have a healthy sense of empathy and critical thinking abilities. In short, while socialization and exposure may be the most effective way on average, it isn't sufficient by itself to promote better understanding.
In the purely hypothetical case of all things being equal (subjects available, number and quality of teachers, amount of resources, etc), I would probably say that co-ed is better, just based on the raw fact that it provides an extra facet of experience for the students. In the real world, however, I think there are too many variables for me to judge whether one is better than the other. Personally, I doubt I would have really cared if my school had been all-girls, because I was much more focused on the academics than the social aspect of school. Fawkes seems to have had a particularly positive experience with single-gender schools, though I wonder if that might not have been due more to the quality of the educators than the fact that it was single-gender.
Things in the UK may not be the same in the US. I certainly don't think my all girls school did any favors for me or my other classmates because we had very limited interaction with guys. My girls school was K-12(6th form for you Brits) and there was a boy's school next door that was only K-8. So there were senior high schools girls that would often flirt and even go out with 7th-8th grade boys because they had access to absolutely nothing else(because of this I refused to apply to the girls' HS). Additionally, the girls and guys from both respective schools were only allowed to meet under heavily supervised situations (i.e. school dances that happened one a month). This gave me the silly idea(for most of middle school) that boys were foreign weird creatures that I wasn't suppose to interact with at all, since the school made it difficult for us girls to do so. I had absolutely no idea how to treat guys at that point and because I had limited resources to help me, I made some very erroneous decisions. Thankfully, I got set straight after a series of very fortunate events.
Additionally OP, I think you've misinterpreted the opinions of some of the anti single sex POV. While Single sex schools inherently don't foster an environment where girls and boys can learn about their respective sexes because one sex is simply missing from the school atmosphere. Sex single schools don't necessarily promoted gender stereotypes, there's a lack of opportunities for one sex to experience the other. This flaw (within the paradigm of the single sex school) can't be "fixed" no matter how much money a school has because it defines the single sex school. People learn quite effectively from experience, and in terms of interacting with the opposite sex, single sex schools can't help their students much with that.
Perhaps some people have had good experiences at single sex schools(obviously possible) but single sex schools will always be missing that crucial component to an individual's development. And because of that and my experiences, I am of the opinion that single sex schooling isn't as effective because it does easily let kids learn about the opposite sex.
That doesn't sound a whole lot like the NZ I grew up in...
I can only speak anecdotaly here, but I know dozens of single sex school students, past and present, so I feel pretty comfortable making some generalisations from them. Single sex schooling seems to do little to prevent social developmet; the students develop just the same weird, shy, silly and occasionally plain crazy impressions of the opposite sex that co-ed students do. Although it's not unusual for them to feel like they've been shortchanged a little.
The real problem (not that I think it's a particularly serious problem) isn't the under exposure to the opposite sex, it's over exposure to the same sex. The weirdness of an all boys or all girls environment tends to lead to some fairly interesting role situating amongst the students, and a lot end up really unhappy with the over the top cattiness or hyper aggressiveness that can be bred in these places.
In the fairly irrelevant news corner: The one group of kids I know who universally love single sex schools and dislike co-ed education is girls from refugee backgrounds. For pretty obvious reasons they're often not at their most comfortable around males, and the opportunity to learn in an environment with absolutely no focus on the normal gender relations of teenage life is extremely liberating. So there's something.