Letters to the Editor
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grr
The obvious answer to the question of whether boys and girls should be taught separately is "No."
This is simply because we live in a world where gender is more complicated and less black-and-white than simply girl and boy. Nevermind the fact that 1 in 100 babies is born with sexually ambiguous genitalia. Nevermind the fact that the number of transsexual and intersexed people is significantly higher than anyone is willing to admit.
There are a whole lot of reasons not to segregate public classrooms. But the fact that a gender dichotomy is a social construction in the first place seems like a good place to start.
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Uh huh
But women's colleges? Gotta keep those.
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Boys lose
in mixed gender classrooms, boys are cited for not acting like girls with penises and promptly drugged to make them comply.
boys need protection from society (AKA feminists- who run the show top to bottom) and obviously women will not hand this right to protect our boys over to us without a fight.
when given the chance, the first thing feminists do is to turn boys into little self hating apologists. OBVIOUSLY, something is quite broken with the system as it stands.
but then, given that women consider boys to be basically disposable, excising their genitalia to suit female fashion and hygienic trends, I am not surprised by this feminist attitude towards boys-- they think they own them.
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the social costs trump the gains
I'm not going to deny that there are almost certainly some biological sex differences, but as far as I can tell, they seem to be orders of magnitude too insignificant to justify sex-segregated schools. Even if there were some tiny advantage in learning, the social costs of something like this are enormous - we spend the last fifty years trying to diversify what our children experience and then we're ready to go back on it over minor differences such as these? Not to mention just the fun aspect - what kid wants to be denied access to the opposite sex? How will this affect their social futures? Their friendships? Given this information, I think skilled educators could use it in a mixed-sex classroom to improve childrens' educational experiences.
As a self-described progressive, I always get very wary when I see the right (we should segregate so we can harness womens' biologically-driven need to cook and clean!) and the left (we should segregate because the patriarchy lets boys dominate the classroom!) come to some kind of unholy alliance. And if the latter situation is true, I think this can be dealt with in the mixed environment.
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No matter how you slice it, it's still Victorian-era baloney
Now, in an era when many Catholic schools are starting to see the light and ending the tradition of single-sex high schools (grade schools have almost always been co-ed), along come public school systems that, for reasons that do seem somewhat noble on the surface, want to go "back to the future."
Case in point: Chicago has a public school for inner-city teenage girls in called - ick - the Young Women's Academy! I don't know about you, but I'd never send my young-woman daughter to a school that calls itself a Young Women's Academy. Shades of the old "finishing schools" where "young ladies" were taught the fine arts of hostessing and homemaking and, oh yes, math and English. (And of course religion in the Catholic "convent schools".)
Now if the Chicago school system wanted to show some muscle and label this school, for example, the "Jane Byrne Academy" (after our first female mayor) I might take its announced mission of training the teens of today for leadership positions as the women of tomorrow a bit more seriously. But to me, the name is just symptomatic of what appears to be the "real" purpose of a lot of these single-sex experiments: keep the "temptation" of the other gender away and maybe the kids will concentrate more on academics.
Hey, ever hear the story about the "forbidden fruit?" (The nuns and priests in those old Catholic schools sure did. Maybe they've now learned from experience and can enlighten the rest of us.)
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@ BS
Please cite a single study which reflects your bizarre conclusions. Because everything I've ever read seems to suggest that rowdy, raucous boys are essentially allowed to roam free while girls are generally punished for even raising their voices.
But if you want to keep revealing all your personal background and psychological hangups, through fun Freudian projection, that's cool too.
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The answer is yes
You don't want 'tolerance' you want 'obedience'. Big difference, sorry. And to be honest, the only people who claim they want 'everyone to be everything they can be' are the people who are already at the top of the food pyramid.
Again, sorry, but Girls are specifically catered to and have and are offered distinct advantages in public education. Claiming that you want to grant boys the same chance makes you sound like Leona Helmsley or Marie Antoinette.
I would love to see a 5 year statistical study of girl's academic performance if they didn't have to compete against boys they already push to the bottom of the pile for silly things like bad handwriting, acting out and basically, being boys.
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And while I'm at it
Stop using loaded words like segregation. Or, go full on and call it apartheid or something equally innocuous. Because that's what you're trying to do.
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uh huh
I find it amusing that the public school system, which stems from the very first monastical schools and comes from a long and distinguished line of educational institutions that were meant to serve men, and varies little from the traditional educational formats which have always been intended to serve men, are somehow meant to be interpreted as being geared towards women.
Newsflash: The fact that girls are doing as well or better than boys is not evidence that modern education caters to girls. Quite the opposite, our educational system has barely changed since its Oxford days, when women did not go to school at all. You'd have to perform some impressive logical cartwheels to try to make the case that the modern education system, which is undoubtedly flawed, is inherently biased towards girls.