One of my favorite research projects I ever did for school was the effect of single-sex education on children. I’ll tell you why.
My initial research (mostly news articles) all said that there’s no benefit to sex-segregated education. They acknowledged outliers like that school for young black men with such incredible graduation statistics, but said that, generally, there’s no benefit.
But then I kept looking. And it turns out that yeah, if you look at all children overall, there’s no benefit – because sex-segregated education is great for girls, and terrible for boys.
Girls in all-girl schools get better grades, have closer and healthier social lives, and have better mental health.
Boys in all-boy schools get worse grades and get in trouble more.
When attempting to make sense of this, journalists and researchers usually fall back on “girls do better because they’re not distracted by boys/boy drama, and boys do worse because there’s no girls to impress.”
Which is ridiculous, of course, because these effects are seen even grade school – 8 year old boys are not doing well in school to impress girls. It’s also ridiculous because teenage boys are also not doing well in school to impress girls. That’s not how teenagers work.
The answer is obvious to women. Girls learn better away from boys because they are not being assaulted, harassed, belittled, or compared to their male peers at every turn. Boys do worse away from girls because, without a socially acceptable target, they turn their antisocial urges on each other. Even adult men do this when separated from women – see hazing scandals at fraternities, or the constant man-on-man sexual harassment that is just “part of military culture.”
But because it doesn’t benefit men, sex-segregated education is considered pointless. Send your daughters to girls-only schools.
Okay, as someone who actually attended single-sex school for all of middle school and high school (7 years, age 11-17), send your kids to co-ed schools.
First, the few people who felt enriched by their single-sex education tend to be straight. I’m gonna throw out a guess that there are an astounding ZERO single-sex schools that aren’t somehow religiously affiliated. Which you know, tends to not be too great on queer youth. Also this theory is totally forgetting the fact that the same sex can assault you. So sending your child to a same-sex school is not a “free from assault zone” and honestly, this kind of horrific shit lurks all the time at same-sex schools. It’s covered up even better at these private institutions because they’re private and the perpetrator’s parents PAY for their child to be at the school, they are minors, etc.
These schools tend to see kids with “better grades” and “more healthy social lives” because the schools are expensive as shit to attend, therefore families with children in attendance are generally so wealthy. The facilities on average are insanely over the top and student to faculty ratio is VERY small.
“Because it doesn’t benefit men” shit. Bye. All girls school has scarred the lives of so many women I know. Sex education is generally SHIT, if you “god forbid” get pregnant you are generally asked to LEAVE, and your girls-only school WILL be partnered with boys-only school. Maybe multiple depending on the location.
So saying “send your daughters to girls-only schools” is a crock af, because the majority of your revelations are simply conjecture, and it assumes that every parent has $15k-40k to shell out PER YEAR to have a false sense of safety, harmful sex education, homophobia, transphobia, racist ideologies (which i can’t even begin to get into, bc it’s so all-encompassing re: Catholicism). Gendering the shit out of your child’s education just seems archaic, does it not?
No really. I make a point of saying this was a research project (essentially a literature review, which I followed up with original research btw), and this guy says “excuse me, I have lived experience here and you’re wrong.”
Like yes, good job for explaining that general trends don’t apply to everyone, and that there are a variety of factors that influence the quality of children’s education. But what, give me literally no credit for knowing how to interpret research? This effect exists in public schools, charter schools, secular schools, etc. I wouldn’t say it did if it didn’t. I get that I didn’t exactly post the paper, but damn. Does my horrible vagina make me incapable of understanding research? Or is it just that the research isn’t flattering to men, therefore it must be my evil feminist agenda?
I’d also like to point out that when women give their lived experiences, even when they have the data to back it up, they’re considered biased, emotional liars, and the man should be the authority. But when I have the stats and a man has an anecdote, what surprise, he’s still the authority in his mind.
Men.
So a male went to an all male school and had a negative experience, which is exactly what you stated in your OP, but this dude somehow thinks his post is contradicting you.
I guess all male schools really do make males stupid.
I was in an all-girls school. It was a public, secular school, cost as much as any other school, because you Yanks keep forgetting that a world outside of the USA exists.
That was mean. But yes, secular all-girls schools are a thing. And they are beneficial. The best years of my life so far were in an all-girls school. Do you know why?
Because girls are easier to work with. In a group project in an all-girls school, the worst you got was the beyond-disorganised goof, and they usually weren’t malicious – they were just that much of a mess. In a co-ed school? Watch some dickhead deliberately sabotage the project just to get a rise out of the girls, because, y’know, girls are there to be messed with.
It’s so much more open. We’re all girls, what’s there to be shy about? Need a pad? You can ask openly nbd or chuck it across the classroom to the poor sod that needs one. In a co-ed school, that would be unthinkable because some of our classmates wear pants rather than a skirt as their uniform, and god forbid what goes on under there is ever revealed.
That being said, hook your daughter (and your entire household) up with a good ear doctor. I can guarantee you, she, and by extension you, will be fucking deafened by all the screaming that goes on in an all-girls school.
FantasyBoudicca 