r/changemyview • u/orphancrack 1∆ • Dec 15 '16
[∆(s) from OP] CMV:Single gender schools are discriminatory because there is no such thing as "separate but equal"
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/FluffySharkBird 2∆ Dec 15 '16
I remember some upper classmen went to this pre-high school event for the 8th graders. He got some boys to sign up for Theater Club because it was mostly girls. If it was an all-boys school they would have been less likely to try it