Separate schooling for girls
in Epiphanies
This discussion was created from comments split from: Sacrificing ND/ disabled kids and adults for 'principle'.
Comments
[The part of the post below is the relevant bit - discussion of the first para belongs back on the parent thread - L host]
I personally am a big believer in girls' schools being beneficial for girls - particularly now with classroom misogyny at frightening levels amongst boys. This isn't about keeping girls away from boys in general (at least not for me) but avoiding misogynistic influences in the classroom, especially in STEM subjects. State girls' schools are increasingly thin on the ground - the one I attended is now a co-educational Academy school - so if I had daughters I would choose a private girls' school over a state co-educational school , if I could afford it. Boys don't benefit from single-gender education so that would not be important for any sons. However, I am also very opposed to Academy schools so I would choose a private school over one of those. This is all academic though since I have no children and wouldn't be able to afford private school if I did.
I certainly have heard that view and from Doctors. It takes many good doctors out of the NHS so giving poorer service to those in it.
As a recipient of all-girls education in the state sector, you'd have to work long and hard to persuade me that it is a better option! In my particular case, the misogyny just meant they did not make provision for girls like me within the school because we (girls who are good at maths) did not exist, although they knew I existed. I was forced to redo two years of maths because of this! If I had been in the co-ed where I did A-Levels, I would simply have sat O-Level maths two years early. They did that sort of thing.
Co-ed is supposed to be good for boys, but which of us who has a choice in the matter would want to sacrifice our daughters' well-being for them?
Seconded, though I think the fact that girls are often threatened by boys in some cultural contexts can create a very frustrating wrinkle.
One frustration I've picked up as an adult is that every single intersectional group has its own unique dynamics. Race is one thing, sex is another, gender is another, culture is another. Even within race, racism vis a vis African Americans is one thing, vis a vis Asian Americans is another thing; and that's only working from the American context. You can find variations of feminism in each of these cultures, and variations of racism in each feminist context. Thank God for bell hooks, whose memory is a blessing!
I'm generally skeptical of segregated schooling, but I can see why it comes up. At Oberlin, where I went to undergrad, I recall there being a lot more pressure for there to be an all-girls' "safe space" than an all-guys' "safe space." At my job, which is care-taking at a Catholic institution for disabled adults, women are allowed to provide for the toileting needs of men, but men are not allowed to do similar for women. Admittedly, most employees are female, but it is observed that males are - statistically - a lot more likely to be predatory.
As a guy, I hate to see that, but I think it's true. Taken to extremes, the trend of male antisocial behavior against women can become a justification for gender segregation in sensitive areas. This also bleeds very unpleasantly into transphobia, which I loathe. A lot of people in conservative culture are quietly scared that men are sexual predators because by evidence too many of us are.
These statements (single sex education being good for girls, and mixed being good for boys) are statistical statements, and the details very much depend on the individual children.
Frankly, as a straight man, I'm quite glad I went to a boys-only school, because it eliminated the social pressure to date, and I wasn't interested in that sort of distraction. My kids don't seem to have strong opinions on whether they would prefer single-sex or mixed classmates (and there are enough NB kids around that thinking in binary terms isn't a great fit), but all have strong opinions that they would like classmates who want to be in school, and consider that far more important than any personal characteristics of their classmates.
There's an underlying assumption that if you segregate, you reinforce the lesson that boys and girls are just ontologically different, which can turn into some kind of "separate but equal."
"Well, we all know that boys just can't handle themselves, so we'll just keep them apart." This can encourage boys to act like they can't handle themselves, to never learn.
(Mind, as a Nb afab person, an all girls school would have been anything but good for me.)
Please go back and read @Jane R's post again and imagine girls dealing with all she describes while boys are being socialized. Seriously. I'm stunned that you seem to be okay with that.
And why "better sooner than later"? What is the actual argument in favor of boys learning to handle social situations with girls while they are still in school rather than later when they are more grown up? Is there any benefit to girls at all?
I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said she’d describe it as the worst year of her life. (This was 10 years ago.) My daughter encountered pretty much all of the things described above, especially “having every aspect of your appearance and dress sense picked apart and minutely criticised.” Add to that things like having everything she chose to eat or not eat picked apart and minutely criticized. In pretty much every way, the treatment and bullying she received from her classmates at the all-girl school was much worse than treatment she received from boys at other schools she attended. The experience made her very leery of any all-girl organizations. She often said that she doubted the girls would have behaved so badly had there been boys around.
To be clear, I’m not knocking all-girl schools. I’ve known too many women for whom they were great, and I know the statistics. But like so many things in life, for an individual it depends not on the statistics but on the specifics—the individual female student in question and her needs, the school and the culture it fosters (whether intentionally or not), and the other students at the school. When the specifics line-up positively, it’s great. But when they don’t, it’s not.
That's a fair question. Honestly, looking at the Epstein files, I sometimes wonder if many of us of the male persuasion are ever fit for polite society. I've been regarded one of the "better ones" who has a pretty clean record, and I'm not particularly proud of myself. And a lot of my earlier lessons were shame-driven. I'm not sure "grown-up" necessarily is any better, especially if boys are socialized as if girls are untouchable alien creatures that you never see except under strictly controlled circumstances.
I've heard tell of lots of grown men are can be every bit as ill-behaved as middle school boys. I'm not sure age is the deciding factor in male behavior - though in my experience some of us are trainable. Maybe the problem with some males is simply that they don't learn regardless of age. That might be a case for exile and very strict enforcement.
Dating boys was not something I was interested in anyway, so that wasn't an issue. My main social issues came from being fat in the 90s and early 00s, and being undiagnosed autistic surrounded by neurotypicals, which would have happened at any school and indeed did happen at my mixed primary school. I do think being a girls' school was beneficial for me from an academic perspective, which was also the thing that mattered most to me at school anyway.
No. Girls bully; girls in my secondary school bullied that badly that they drove at least one girl to suicide. This was long before social media. The culture was twisted and weird to say the least. Stereotyping was rampant, as I think my earlier post adequately demonstrates. Violence is not overt but is covert. It is rare for a out right fight, but "accidentally" hurting someone in a crush happens too often. I was removed from the playground because I was often the victim of bullying there. Social ostracism is widely practised.
In my opinion, having been to a single sex and a co-ed school, I would say girls need boys as much as boys need girls. Not perhaps to socialise but to stop them from becoming experts in psychological manipulation.
This comes across as honestly very misogynistic, suggesting that girls aren't capable of learning how to not manipulate others without the influence of boys. It also leans into a lot of biological essentialism; girls at school are just children like children of other genders, and not inherently more prone to bullying or manipulation or violent etc than any other children. Likewise boys are not inherently less prone to such things. I'm not sure why such blanket gender essentialism is being accepted here.
I'm in favour of girls' schools for the simple reason that girls tend to succeed more at STEM subjects and other subjects often dominated by boys otherwise. Obviously any child can be a bully. Nobody is suggesting that girls can't be bullies - indeed this whole thread is full of people talking about how terrible girls are.
Edited to add that while I was educated in co-ed state school I have twice worked in single sex girls’ schools. Some girls thrived there, others did not, and for thé latter it was not the teaching but the social environment which held them back.
Clarify with people what they mean and don't jump on posters with accusations of sexism or misogyny when they are talking about their own and others mistreatment.
There needs to be a bit of leeway here.
At the same time it might be good as a general rule to be wary of making sweeping statements of 'girls are x' and 'boys are y' when what's being referred to is a particular experience of a particular school.
Louise
Epiphanies host
Why is it misogynistic to say teenage women behave badly in these ways when they are on their own and not misandrist to suggest boys do not develop social skills quickly in the absence of females?
This is what I experienced. I was a STEM student, and I would have simply done better in a co-ed environment because they would have provided the education because there would have been boys there who needed it.
Remember, I am a female who has been repeatedly bullied by females in that school. I know others were as well. One suicide, and one pupil withdrew due to this. Teenage girls are capable of this; teenage girls in an all-female environment can be as unhealthy as teenage boys in an all-male environment.
My nephew persisted in believing in Santa well past when I thought he would. When I said I thought someone at school would have set him straight, my brother said that at the Montessori school he attended, the teachers impressed upon the kids how important it was not to ruin Santa for others, and the kids were all on board with that. From this and a bunch of other stories I gathered that the teachers had firm control over what was and was not acceptable in a way teachers at my schools never even attempted. I guess you can do that in a very small school with an impressive teacher-student ratio.
I'm not sure that that's true.
Adolescents are interesting people. There are a whole load of wild hormonal changes, partially-formed brains and so on. The argument that you must deal with something so intensely personal as dating another person whilst you're going through a rapidly-changing process of forming who you are is one that I don't think necessarily stands up.
That's a good start. I think another problem was I was growing up in the 1990s, in the shadow of a generation that took a wrecking ball to traditional norms and did a poor job of establishing new ones.
So, our social norms were generally anarchic or self-made. It was chaos. I mostly tried to get my work done and my social life - such as existed - mostly consisted of escapism. The popular models undeniably sucked, and I knew it.
One problem I've learned about myself as an adult - which might explain a few things that you might be wondering about - is that I never really had a model to work from. I had a confusing mess of models and had to improvise on my own. I'm a self-made man, quite literally, which makes me undeniably weird. But I think that's the only proper way to be one.
Yeah. It's not great. Digging around a bit, it might be my unpleasant experiences with male competitive culture that make me leery of being forced into exclusively male environments. Douchebag males (for wont of a more technical term) will not stop being douchebag males because they lack female targets. Often, other boys are targets. And I think, growing up, in not-catastrophic-but-significant ways, I was one of them.
There might be a reason some kids in my school very mistakenly thought I was gay. And there might be a reason why many (not all) of my earlier close-ish friends were girls. I'm not at all interested in guys sexually, but being of the less-competitive male sort, all-male environments do tend to make me uncomfortable.
The idea that girls should be sacrificed for this is not something I'd condone, but I think the problem is antisocial behavior, and/or environments that reward a certain kind of competitive "me first" culture. I think, at some point, there should be a way to deal with antisocial males besides assuming that all males must necessarily be deemed antisocial. Boys have been victims of that too.
There are many ways to socialize with a girl besides dating. An important lesson one must learn is that girls are people first and potential dates only much later.
Mind, I am thinking of a recent conversation with an old high school crush - and one of my dearest old friends - who admitted to me that there was a lot of low grade flirting going on in high school that we were all rather oblivious to.
It is a learning curve and I think - with reasonable care - we're all better for it.
I went to an all-boys school in London, and few lived near enough to socialise over the weekend. Technically we were paired with a girls school, but there were no interactions between the schools AFAIK.
I count myself as lucky that the local Baptist Church had a good Young People's group that socialised on a Saturday and had an after service meeting at someone's house in the evening. I imagine that that era has now gone.
Women first got access to education outside the home but it was inferior, so they fought for access to the education that was given to men, which they got on poorer terms. So they fought for it on equal terms, which they got but the culture still favoured me. So they should be fighting to change the culture.
If, however, we say we should go back to separate education, then I ask you to find a single example in the world where separate education has meant equal education. In a generally misogynistic culture with men still holding more of the cultural power, I am not going to place any money on men getting the poorer education in general.
@Jengie Jon : Speaking of where I grew up, I was talking to @Gwai about this offline, and realized another thing that's bugging me is I grew up in a small town where there was barely enough resources to run one public school, and splicing resources across multiple single-sex schools would've meant less to go around in general. And in a more conservative social culture, I'd anticipate the same "separate but equal" effect you're predicting. There was one Catholic parochial school, I think, but it was basically one high school serving the town. And since I graduated, they've been closing down other schools in the region and consolidating because of general population decline. So...yeah. They got bigger problems than boys and girls sharing classroom space, unfortunately.
I was extremely badly bullied at my girls' school, I am also speaking from lived experience here. But I was also extremely badly bullied at my mixed-gender primary school - sometimes girls and boys bullied in a similar way and sometimes they didn't. They were just different individuals.
@Jengie Jon I don't believe that misandry is a real thing, because I believe that misogyny is a structural form of oppression based on living in a patriarchy. We don't live in a matriarchy, thus misandry does not (in my view) exist. There are certainly men who are oppressed under the patriarchy, but that isn't the same thing in my opinion. I know others disagree which is fine. But either way, I don't believe that boys don't develop social skills quickly in the absence of girls - I would see that as equally as gender essentialist. I don't think that girls doing better in STEM without boys in their classes is quite the same thing.
How far do these conflict? Can the outcome be a better individual education, but a less well-structured and connected society? If so, which takes priority? Does an education system which distributes its participants indifferently lead to a better-structured and connected society? Can it?
Sorry, misogyny just means hatred of women. It is multi-level, and it can be institutional or it can be personal. I have dealt with a woman for whom it is personal. It is weird to deal with her. She is very pleasant to most men and normally treats women badly. I came very close to personal misandry myself at one stage, when a particular man treated me very badly and knew I had to take deliberate action to deal with that temptation. You get close to it with people who believe "all men are rapists". So they exist both at an institutional level, but also at a personal (and group) level and can be really nasty.
As I said, I am speaking about what I am seeing. I am not suggesting it is universal.
There was one all-male dorm, but this was not nearly as political, generally regarded as a refuge for the football team.
I agree with you, but the culture I grew up in largely didn't, which was why I was glad I went to a boys' school.
The fact that we were a boys' school, and that being gay wasn't really a socially acceptable option, meant that there was no social pressure to date within the school community, because there were no socially acceptable dates there.
(The sixth form boy who was seeing a young female teacher was a whole different kettle of fish. The general view of this from the boys at school was mild disapproval - not because of any issues to do with consent or abuse of authority, but because the teacher in question was not deemed particularly attractive.)
I never had a problem viewing girls as people. I played in a community orchestra, and was involved in various community theatre type things, all of which contained a significant number of girls, and I got on with them fine.
Except that in all of those things, there was ridiculous social dating pressure. For me, this manifested as continual questions from my male compatriots as to whether I fancied this girl or that girl, with the expectation that I should endeavour to date one of them, plus the ridiculous go-between games that the teen girls used to play (as best as I could tell, the rules were that if girl A fancied you, she would tell her friend, girl B. Girl B would then engage you in conversation, and "subtly" (reader: teenagers are not subtle) attempt to determine what you thought about A.
My feelings were very much "I don't know why you're doing this. We're doing this show together, but may well not see each other in three months' time once the show is over, and I don't know what your university plans are, but we're unlikely to end up at the same one." Teenage me wasn't so eloquent at expressing that, though.
I had an Essex / Methodist version of that in the 80s. The church was brilliant, looking back, and I am sad that my kids missed out because that scene has gone. My school was all boys until 16, with a mixed 6th form. It's hard to say much about the effect of going co-ed at 16, because 14-yr-old boys and 16-17 yr-old-boys are very different anyway. 3rd year (now year 9) was the absolute, nihilistic worst, and church held me together such a lot.
FWIW, my girls (in a mixed RC comp in what used to be the inner city) recently did well; their struggles tended to be with other girls. They were usually dismissive of boys' insults, but motivated by male competition (especially my younger daughter who had motivation issues until out-performed by a bright lad a year down from her
I definitely wanted to have a girlfriend in high school, though I think I was looking for more commitment than "dating," and earnestly didn't have enough self awareness to understand what that meant beside a general envy of the kids I saw "making out" in the school hallways. In hindsight, I probably dodged a lot of bullets but not being one of those kids, but I was just really lonely and confused. I also have a running hypothesis now that being kind of unhappy at home made me crave a girlfriend for deeper reasons than I was aware of at the time. And of course all of these motivations were deeply entangled in a typical adolescent way.
As such, no surprise the first girl I met who gently cracked through my shell became a very intense semi-requited crush that dragged on for a long time. Fortunately, I had the sense to commit to our friendship first and stick to it as she ended up marrying a mutual best friend. I love them both dearly, and I think we all handled that pretty well.
Curiously, I didn't have any male teachers until fifth grade in elementary, and even in high school it tended to vary by field. Men tended to teach science, women tended to teach english, and math and foreign languages were kind of a toss up.
Interesting! My experience exactly, apart from no 'pairing'.
I'm not sure why you seem to be under the impression that I think that misogyny doesn't involve interpersonal behaviour. Obviously misogyny does result in treating women badly at an interpersonal level too.
Misandry and misogyny are mutually exclusive forms of oppression - it's not ontologically possible for both to exist at an institutional level. Women cannot oppress men in the same way that gay people cannot oppress straight people. Women can discriminate against men individually, but that's not the same thing as oppression. Misogyny is to sexism what white supremacy is to racism. It's the specific structural outworking of it. Furthermore, misandry was coined by men's rights activists to discuss how feminism was oppressive to men - it's a term inherently linked to an opposition to feminism.