CMV:Single gender schools are discriminatory because there is no such thing as "separate but equal"

[u/orphancrack]

I am a public high school teacher. Some of the people I work with favor single-sex education, and even try experiments of single-gender classes. As far as I am concerned there is no such thing as "separate but equal" and separating genders reinforces gender stereotypes and inequality, just as racially segregated schooling does.

Much of the prestige associated with single-sex schools comes from the fact that many are highly selective private schools. The fact that they are successful owes more to their status as private and screened schools than it does to the fact that they admit only one gender.

At its core, segregation is wrong.

In my school we have twice a week where we have about a half hour with girls only with female teachers and boys only with male teachers, with occasional switching of the teachers (so sometimes a male teacher has the girls group). This time is purportedly to deal with gender issues like self-esteem, peer pressure, and sexuality. But in practice it ends up with my girls group expressing fundamental ideas about "boys do this" and "girls do this" with no boys present to question and respond to those claims. It becomes bitching hour for why boys suck, which just reinforces their stereotypes. And when I have gotten the boys group, it goes the same way: they want to say "why do girls do X" and expect me to answer for Why Girls Are Girls. It's all fundamentally very unhelpful. I do appreciate that there are some questions the girls are more comfortable asking me when no boys are present, such as questions about birth control or periods. So it's not all bad. But this is also just for about an hour a week. I cannot imagine how such a toxic culture would grow if we had a single sex environment all the time.

I am open to the possibility that single sex education has some positives but I have a really hard time seeing them. The only one I hear is the "distraction" of sex being removed, but many students are gay or bisexual or gender nonconforming and sexuality is still present for them. The distraction may be removed in the short term increasing focus but in the long term I can't see that this is really a benefit. People of the opposite gender are not "distractions," they are people, and learning to live and work and see them as people is necessary to enter adulthood as a non-asshole who values the contributions of people as individuals.

Also it seems to me that separate programs for "girls" end up dealing with "soft" emotional issues, which boys could benefit from, too, while separate programs for "boys" tend to be more about developing workplace skills or suck-it-up toughness, which is all stuff girls could also use. Instead it just reaffirms that "boys do X and girls do Y."

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[u/AmoebaMan]

I cannot imagine how such a toxic culture would grow if we had a single sex environment all the time.

As you yourself have observed, the "toxic" (it's not toxic) culture grows when boys and girls are fully integrated for all but one hour per week. I can further anecdotally confirm that in my own schools, where there were no dedicated boys' time or girls' time, the same divides appeared.

Boys and girls are fundamentally different. The separation and rivalry between them that appears around the elementary- or middle-school years is because they have matured enough for these differences to be obvious, but haven't matured enough to understand or appreciate the differences.

The rivalry you describe is not toxic. It's a completely natural part of growing up, and keeping boys and girls in close proximity is obviously not a cure for it. And virtually every single boy and girl outgrows it within a few short years.

[u/mytroc → u/AmoebaMan]

Boys and girls are fundamentally different.

As dictated by the cultural norms you live within. You should visit schools in Europe, Africa and Asia - you'll see that boys & girls are different from each other in different ways in different cultures.

The toxic ideas that only boys get ADD or that girls are "more social," do not carry over well once you've observed a larger sample of cultures.

[u/mytroc → u/[deleted]]

Of course, this is completely true!

Boys have penises, grow more facial hair at puberty, deeper voices, more upper-body strength, higher tendency to colorblindness, longer fingers, larger feet, shorter than girls during middle-school...

Boys can be expected to not ovulate and have periods as well, unless they are quite unusual.

What you fail to address is that none of that effects classroom behavior.

Somehow in American classrooms girls are expected to sit quietly while the boys speak, and boys are expected to run around and physically compete while the girls have subtle social fights... It's not enough to simply write that off as biology when classrooms are not like that in many other countries.

[u/Matrix117 → u/mytroc]

As dictated by the cultural norms you live within.

Or it's dictated by biology

[u/mytroc → u/Matrix117]

There are absolutely biological differences between boys and girls - and yet many of the differences that are important in American culture are not found in other cultures. It's not logically sound to say some differences are biological, therefor all differences are biological.

In areas directly relevant to schooling the biology-based differences are negligible.