January Journal: Single-sex education
Jan. 19th, 2014 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
views on single-sex education (schools/colleges/universities). I like this prompt, it gives me an excuse to pontificate on a topic I don't get into too often.
As
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
The huge advantage of being in a girls' school was that nobody had the slightest possible ghost of an idea that girls couldn't achieve academically, couldn't do science and technical subjects, couldn't be leaders. I never had a problem of teachers deliberately or unconsciously giving the boys who were absent from my classes the lion's share of attention and encouragement at my expense. I'm sure that was good for my confidence and may well have been a contributory factor in my pursuing science subjects to A Level and applying for science courses at university. A lot of the time when you read feminist writing you see claims that women "are taught" to be deferential and subordinate and to put others' needs ahead of their own. Which always leads me to query, taught by whom? I most certainly wasn't taught either explicitly or implicitly to be feminine in those sorts of potentially limiting ways.
In fact the school almost went too far in this. They took a kind of weird "Lean in" style feminist attitude that everybody must aspire to highly paid, highly respected professional jobs; caring professions or support jobs or simply choosing other priorities over career success were considered beneath us. Being encouraged in maths and science was great, being steered away from learning much about computers and IT in case (horrors!) we ended up working as mere secretaries was not so great. In sixth form we were sternly told not to apply for a part-time job as an amanuensis and note-taker working for students with disabilities, because we might get the idea that women weren't good enough for real jobs. I went against the school's edict and took the job anyway, and found it extremely valuable experience quite apart from the fact that earning some extra pocket money was beneficial. And I wasn't in fact "good enough" for a high prestige job at that point, because I was seventeen years old and had no job experience at all, nothing to do with the fact that I was female. I certainly don't think this kind of weird snobbery is an inevitable consequences of single-sex education, though, I think that was just my particular school.
Based on the experiences of many of my friends and many many accounts I've read on the internet, I do think that secondary education in the company of teenaged boys can be a pretty miserable experience. But it's a pretty miserable experience for boys as well, and I don't believe that anyone deserves to suffer violence and sexual aggression just because they happen to be male. I really can not think that the problem of the worst of teenage boy behaviour is appropriately addressed by segregating education. Rather there is a pressing need to treat peer violence as wholly unacceptable, no matter what gender the perpetrators are. And yes, girls can be bullies too, but are much less likely to get away with the level of actual physical and sexual assault that seems to be almost the norm in boys' or mixed schools.
Less seriously, another argument against co-education is that teenagers will be "distracted" by being around members of the opposite sex. This is kind of ridiculous since it assumes that absolutely everybody is strictly heterosexual! I think one could reasonably argue that it's not so much the fact of having sexual desires which is distracting, as the social context in which you're expected to "get" a boyfriend / girlfriend, and the consequences of that, the often competitive pursuit, the social status jockeying over having a partner or not, the breakups taking place within a small community of learners. Single sex education is in no way a barrier to teenagers having sex or to teenage pregnancy, but perhaps it's something that the relationships that do occur are less disruptive to the social situation if the majority at least don't pursue, date, sleep with and break up with their fellow pupils from the same class. I have to say that personally, I benefitted from simply not bothering with the whole dating scene until I went to university, and from not having to deal with a lowered social status due to being unattractive to boys.
So I see that there are problems with educating teenagers in a mixed sex environment. I generally disapprove of segregation as a method for dealing with social problems, though. It may be that until we have actually got to a much less sexist world, and one in which teenage boys in particular are not tacitly encouraged to hit other boys and ignore girls' consent and bodily integrity, single-sex education is the least worst temporary option. But for me the less sexist and less toxic masculine broader context has to be the goal. And even as a very temporary kludge, single-sex education is kind of a disaster for anyone who's non-binary, or who isn't the sex that their parents and those in authority insist they are. Even for me, pretty much cis, I found being in an all girls' school extremely difficult; in a co-ed environment it was possible for me to be a tomboy, to socialize mostly with boys and so on, and when I moved to a girls' school I really struggled to be sufficienly feminine to fit in socially. In some ways it has been to my advantage that I have learnt, albeit imperfectly, to conform more or less to feminine gender norms, but it's somewhat of a double-edged "advantage" of my single-sex education.
I find it very hard to see the point of single-sex education at primary school level; the differences between pre-pubescent boys and girls are just so tiny that segregation seems utterly illogical. At very best it's going to reinforce binary assumptions, and I generally find those to be almost entirely harmful.
The situation I haven't addressed yet is single-sex post-compulsory education. I think the argument in favour is mostly that single-sex education means that women aren't competing with more dominating men for resources and attention, and this may help to mitigate the disadvantages of generally sexist world. It's possible, but it's an approach I find somewhat distasteful, even though I admit that the problem it's a proposed solution for is a real problem. Beyond that, some people do just genuinely feel more comfortable in a single-sex environment, and I concede that there's probably no harm in that being available for them as an option. A subset of that is people who are following religious prohibitions against mixed-sex learning, or at least whose parents are going to block them from accessing mixed education. It's better that people in those circumstances have access to further and higher education at all, even if it means having to sustain segregated institutions which I don't really feel are a good thing.
[January Journal masterlist]
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 02:35 am (UTC)Speaking for myself: literature, parents, and teachers, in approximately that order.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-24 11:32 am (UTC)As for literature, I completely managed to miss that message, because I'm not very good at paying attention to gender cues in literature. Partly I just related to the most interesting character in whatever I happened to be reading, without really caring if they were male or female (and sometimes not even noticing, I was convinced that Kim was a girl since he has what I think of as a girl's name). I don't think I was anything like subtle enough to pick up that sexist subtext from reading about Pauline Petrova and Polly, or Susan and Titty and Nancy and Peggy, or Jo and Mary-Lou, or even Susan and Lucy and Polly and Jill, though as an adult I've read essays pointing out that Lewis was in fact unfair to his girl characters, especially Susan.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-24 06:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 02:43 am (UTC)I went to a co-ed primary school, then an all girls' high school, and I'd generally agree with what you've written here.
I found it was good for me, because, as you said, it was really helpful as someone who was very interested in maths/physics/computer science to be in an environment that didn't have as many of the stereotypes floating around. It was a real shock to suddenly be hit by a flood of microaggressions as soon as I went to pursue those interests elsewhere later, and I think having to deal with them in early high school would have been something I would have found very difficult. The downside was that IT subjects were never offered because there wasn't enough interest - I think those stereotypes were pretty pervasive from influences outside school.
On the taught by whom: I was always taught that making work and trouble for other people was to be avoided - by parents, literature and society in general - which I think is an idea that works when everybody believes it, but when I met people who were more assertive and didn't put such a high priority on avoiding hindering other people, it didn't go so well.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-24 11:41 am (UTC)I do think that bias in which subjects are offered is likely to be a real problem with segregated education. My school was very good at maths and chemistry, and basically awful at physics, electronics and computer science / IT, and the fact that it was a girls' school probably contributed to this. So I don't know if the advantage of being able to excel at technical and traditionally male subjects without being cut down by a lot of sexism outweighs the disadvantage of not even having the opportunity to pursue some subjects at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 03:58 am (UTC)Teachers, other girls, my grandparents, the media, just about everyone other than my parents.
I had an entirely mixed-sex education which I was very grateful for, as 99% of the bullying I experienced was from girls, and all but one of my friends were boys. There was a unisex school not far from my home (separate male and female campuses for ages 11-16, then two years on a mixed campus) but the girls there didn't seem any nerdier than other girls, so I didn't feel I was missing out on a secret cache of nerd girls. Then I got online and nerd girls were EVERYWHERE! It was awesome, and something that I never got at school.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 04:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 04:12 pm (UTC)When she died in 2003, I found among her effects a biography that she had written for the senior residence she was living in, in which she attributed her "life-long feminism" to that experience. I did not know she identified as a feminist, although I knew she was one of the most egalitarian people I had ever met.
I have to wonder about single-sex education for boys; it seems like it's so frequently good for girls.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 04:20 pm (UTC)Unlike you, I do think it hindered me pursuing science/tech subjects: because it was an all-girls' school they just didn't think they needed to offer those subjects as much as a mixed school might have. They only offered double-award GCSE science rather than three separate science GCSEs, and they didn't offer computing/IT GCSE (they did make us do the CLAIT course, which as far as I can tell is for people who want to be secretaries). They offered GCSEs in Food and Textiles instead.
Luckily, only having double-award science didn't actually stop me getting to do maths and science A-levels at a mixed sixth form. Once there, I was the only girl in top set Physics and in most of my Further Maths classes, so I expect if that had been an all-girls' school those classes wouldn't have existed.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-23 05:40 pm (UTC)So I think I would rather my parents had considered both schools rather than ruling one out on principle. Interestingly at time my school had very good head and the girls school a poor one, but both left within a year and their new one was better and didn't end up in the Daily Fail for having an affair with the music teacher...
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-23 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 06:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-20 09:24 pm (UTC)