March 04, 2004
"Separate but equal" to reign again in US classrooms.
The US Department of Education has decided to relax restrictions on same-sex education. But while some claim same-sex schooling helps one gender or both, what's the real motivation behind the same-sex proponents?
The advocates of same-sex schooling claim to like it for reasons of academic success. However, articles like this make me wonder. The principal at a school trying single-sex education is quoted as saying (about a coeducational school), "The boys had to learn how to be boys, and girls had to learn to be girls." I wonder how much of this is discrimination in disguise. Studies have shown that the correlation between single-sex education and academic success vanishes when socioeconomic backgrounds are factored in. The argument that teenagers are incapable of dealing with the opposite sex in high school (and therefore shouldn't) seem disingenuous - after all, if they don't learn how to deal with the opposite sex in high school, it only pushes that learning into college or later life - at a time when most of their peers have been learning those lessons for years. It seems to me that this kind of separation distances pupils from the real world - where, gender differences or not, people have to work together in the same setting. Your thoughts?
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I don't doubt that single-sex classes allow for more efficient teaching, but isn't this just symptomatic relief? The problem is that American mainstream culture has come to a point where the sexual stigma -- to both sexes -- of being smart or engaged in learning is too powerful to ignore. Neither boys nor girls want to turn off potential suitors by appearing to be smart. Down with smartness!
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I have to agree, generally, with ulotrichous. our culture no longer seems to value education or intelligence. to me that seeems to matter much more than the demographics of a classroom or school.
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I agree that it's treating a symptom, not a problem. Sure, it's easier to teach a homogenous classroom - but it's not better. It isn't a real education until you teach students how to interact with those different from them as well as the people who are similar. Also, if our students feel uncomfortable speaking up in front of the opposite sex, I fail to see how segregation will make them more comfortable outside the segregated environment. It seems we're just interested in a temporary alleviation of the problem, and don't cfare about its root causes. Maybe we need a big ad campaign full of girls who wear glasses and nerdy guys with roses - "Smart is Sexy" could be the tagline.
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Nothing is sexier than girls with glasses.
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I think on one hand while same-sex education may have benefits academically, one has to look at the social aspects of it. Is same-sex education possibly doing more harm than good? Aiding one symptom by causing 3 more problems doesn't exactly make sense in my book.
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An ex-boyfriend went to single-sex schools until he was 18, and complained that he felt himself at a real disadvantage socially when he got to college and didn't know how to talk to women. On the other hand, I went to a single sex college and had a great experience, but I know it isn't for everyone.
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I went to a single-sex school until 15 and it was hell for me. But I really don't know if it could had been better on a mixed school. Ambrosia. You can't compare college to school. School years are critical to social skills development. And, what BBF said...
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Zemat- I agree- college is *very* different from elementary or secondary school. I didn't realize it consciously at the time, but I chose to go to a single sex college precisely because of the crap I'd encountered from my male peers in high school. I agree that interaction is necessary for social development, but jeebus I wouldn't want to go through that again. Besides, there's still plenty of social development going on between 18 and 22 years of age, don't you think? And, having witnessed a fair amount of (totally unconscious) preferences/biases/attitudes that favored the boys in my class over the girls, having had a few years of a single-sex environment was really eye-opening.
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The key difference between k-12 and college is that castes of intelligence self-select to a degree; smartness becomes far less stigmatic for the serious students, who now have their own community, and totally irrelevant on fraternity row, where success and achievement are calculated by a different system of measurement. If recognition of the different needs of smart and average students was tolerated within the public school system by US society, the need to destigmatize smartness by separating the sexes would be significantly decreased.
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oop, ...in college, castes of intelligence.... Sign me up for the 'low proofreading ability' caste.
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It's irrelevant whether it's two-gendered or one. What ulotrichous said is spot on, of course, but what will matter, now as always, is the calibre of the teaching and the size of the classrooms. Any country, but especially the US: Shrink size of schools, literally -- and make more but smaller schools-- large schools only enable school boards to pay for heating/cooling one classroom building instead of many, and large schools encourage authoritarian methods of coping with kids by the administration, in the end making the bottom line/disipline more important than the kids' grasp of the curriculum, an absurd situation! Calibre of teachers -- eliminate all degrees in education per se in Americans institutions of higher learning. Eliminate tenure at higher levels, reduce the need for good professorts to 'publish or perish'. Reduce classroom size per teacher -- this single measure, if the teacher is even halfway adequate, would boost pupils' lack of academic ability. And when I say reduce, I mean down a dozen kids or less per instructor. Better curriculum: --teach languages from elementary school level on up, and offer Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish as standards instead of a few European ones. --teach the kids to recognize the intent behind written materials, and the spoken word(ie, recognition of [motive/propaganda) --teach world history at high school level- ignorance of other countries and peoples is ridiculous -- get team sports altogether out of the public schools, teach kids fitness through gym, track, swimming, skiing; every kid should ber entitled to an equal share of taxpayer dollars not just the football or basketball teams. Get the athletics coaches out of the principal's offices and off the school boards, so that academic standards are applied to teachers and administrators for a change. Too bad people aren't willing to spend the money it would take to use proven remedies -- such as smaller teacher pupil ratios. Unfortunately we're all stuck with the consequences.
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Sorry, forgot this one: in US, stop buying from textbook companies, and buy items from library lisitngs, books reviews, etc. The problems, alas, are systemic with education becoming a profit-making thingy instead of adhering to goal of making people able to think for themselves.
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I probably would have done better in school, but it sure woulda sucked.
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beeswacky, I would agree with you on everything but languages. I believe a switch to Latin and German would do wonders for students' understanding of the mechanics of their own language - and because they share some roots, they're easier to learn. From there, once they learn one language, it's easier for 'em to pick up new ones in college.
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[Six years of Latin, two of Greek, me.] Believe it makes more sense to offer those languages currently spoken by large numbers of people in place of ones with relatively few speakers, such as German, say, or French. At least this might appeal to restive taxpayers and chronically strapped school boards in view of the likelihood the kids will (probably) be working in a world even more interconnected than today's. It's classical literature I'd rather see stressed, and world literature, too --add both to the ideal curriculum. *sigh*
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I'd rather hang out with teenage boys than teenage girls any day. Teenage girls are *mean*. I had friends who went to same-sex Catholic high schools and they socialized with the opposite sex just fine. They just did it outside of classroom hours. They had joint extra-curricular activities like drama club and dances and they went out with each other on the weekends. The biggest detractor for me (my dad wanted me to go) was I couldn't handle the idea of taking four years of religion classes. Blech!
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It may just be that I'm from a small town with a small school, (28 kids in my graduating class), but I haven't seen that people are afraid of being seen as smart. Maybe a year or two in jr. high where things were weird, but after that everybody got invited to everybody else's parties. Maybe it's just that there wasn't enough of us to form cliques.
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I was in same-sex Catholic schools until I was sixteen. My seventeenth year was a culture shock. Boys! Had murderous intentions on a few of my male classmates that year. I recall that many of my schoolmates in same-sex schools were extremely well...uh... socialised. At least where boys were concerned. I agree with beeswacky. I think the real issues of education lie elsewhere: Curriculum, class sizes, quality of teachers etc.... *remembering looks of disgust from male schoolmates when they see me reading a book outside of class*
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So the Bush administration supports putting a bunch of horny teenagers in sex-segregated schools, but doesn't support gay marriage?