After a very heated discussion the other night about single gender schools, I was called a sexist for simply attending an all girls school and for "supporting" them and not seeing the "wrong" in them.

The person I was "debating" with argued that they were being sexist because "if a boy applied to a girls school, he would be rejected because of his physical appearance, i.e. his genitals are different. He doesn't have a choice what he's born with but he's refused the right to an education because of something that is out of his control. Therefore that is being sexist"

please note that this wasn't quoted and I have tried to make that statement as non-offensive as possible considering what the person really did say!

I'm upset about this, in fact I was quite angry. I don't consider myself to be a racist, ageist or what-other-ist there is let alone being called sexist. I believe in equal opportunities and I always try to stand up for what I believe in as best as I can.

Something else the person said was that "they were taught differently" based on where they studied. Well no duh, Sherlock; of course they're taught differently, they go to different buildings which is the same as attending two different mixed gender schools!

The only thing that makes the education different there is the style of teaching because it depends on what the teachers are like but the curriculum is what remains the same and is pretty much the same in all schools!

So members of this forum, I invite you all to share your views and opinions on this topic. There is a poll and you can vote as many times as you like because there are a few different issues to be considered. You don't have to vote for everything which applies to you but I would appreciate it if you did. Even if you attended a mixed gender school and hated it so you wanted to attend a single gender school or vise versa, I'm interested to know what you really think about single gender schools.

Finally, am I sexist if I think single gender schools are a good idea?
Don't be afraid to answer honestly, I can handle the truth even if it does hurt :)

Thank you

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I think that so long as a community provides both a boy-only and a girl-only school as an option, it's fine...

There's plenty of schools which provided a better education than the school I attended. I guess I was not welcome at those school for all kinds of reasons - not being in the right locality, not being of the right religion, not being in possession of a ton of money etc so actually, all schools have necessary limitations on their intake.

There is a lot of evidence that single sex schools provide better education than mixed schools. Why shouldn't kids of both genders have the option to take advantage of this? However, I do think it's more dependant on the individual child involved as to how much they make out of their school days. My sisters both went to a single sex school, and I didn't. This ought to mean that they got better results but are not as social as me. In reality I got better results across the board, but am much shyer - so that just goes to show that you can't treat schools like a machine - you don't put a child in one end and have them to all come out the same at the other end, because it depends on the kid him or herself reguardless of how good a school's reputation is.

Schools are all different reguardless of their intake for the reasons AJ gave. I personally prefer mixed schools as I think it reflects society better than single sex schools - and afterall, school is really there to prepare you for real life. But I wouldn't question anyone for sending their kid to a girls'/boys' school.

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Not sexist, i mean, parent's choice right? But still a bad idea since single gender schools reduce the inter-gender interaction that is ever so necessary from an early age.

Plenty of friends went to an expensive private all girls catholic school and claim they're the greatest, but i can see in them the many, many flaws (IMO anyway) of that particular style of schooling. Of course it does carry some benefits, but at what cost?

When i have kids, I will have them go to a normal boys and girls school.

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The only single sex school I have much knowledge about is the one (or 2 :S) lots of people I know went to. It's basically 2 seperate schools, but they're linked... Seperate buildings close together, they seem to do lots of extra curr. type stuff together and camps etc, and in the last year of high school (and I think all of primary school) they're taught together. So they can be mixed gender for social things, but single gender for academic things. Seems OK to me.

If you're talking about fairness in the sense that anyone should be allowed to go to a school, then technically single sex isn't 'fair' - which is why it's only (as far as i know) private schools that can be single sex. It's no less fair, however, than having entrance exams.

We have an all girls and all boys school in the area. Admittedly the boys school does have a much lower GCSE pass rate, the discipline sucks and the kids lack serious manners. I know cos my nephew goes there and he didn't get into the grammer school of his choice because he was outside the catchment area even though he passed his 11+.

I completely agree with you when you say it's dependent on a child how much they make out of their school days; a former student at my nephew's school came ou with something like 12 A*s and in the same year my former school barely made the papers with their poor results. However, I do believe that was due to the teaching quality falling dramatically in the years after I left school =/

Oh thank you for deleting the other thread, vik, I assume it was you anyway :)

I went to a single gender school cos it really was the best in our area at the time, all my other sisters had been there and came out with fantastic results and I wanted to go there too cos I had seen how nice the students from that school were in comparison to the schools much closer to me.

My school wasn't a private school and it was good at teaching discipline. Albeit they did pretty much prepare you for life in the nunnery!

Regarding inter-gender interaction, I agree, it is important from a young age and I did attend a mixed school up until the age of 11, which btw, is where I experienced what it was like to play "kiss-chase" and from this I learnt the valuable action of self-defense; decking a boy I then spent 5 years in an all girls school and then went to a mixed college. At first it was a bit strange having reply slips saying "I give permission for my son/daughter..." but other than that it was alright I guess. It didn't affect how boys and girls interacted with each other but I guess their hormones just took over same with during secondary school; it didn't stop migling but it's just better for education, imo anyway. I do believe mixed schools can be very well disciplined, I'm just waiting for evidence of one =/

Hinty, they don't have to be private schools in order to be single gender schools. Although, my niece attends a private girls school and she's only 4! I personally think that is taking it a *teensy* bit too far but hey, I guess if it was the best place of education for my niece then that seems like a good enough reason... I think...

Iirc, my old school and my nephew's school are actually thinking kinda mixing, I assume it's similar to how you described. Before I'd have objected to it if given a choice, but right now I think they're both so poor in teaching standards that there's no real difference between the two

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Oh really? I only know private single gender schools...

Oh, for the social argument: at the only other all girls school I have any real connection with, the girls have a habit of being a little too social with males...

Hormones. Nuff said. I saw the change in at least 95% the girls from my school as soon as we left... most of us went to the same college yipee(!)

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dont think its just hormones like.
there are ALOT of private girl schools around my area, i guess its all part of the 'must have a sports car for my 17th birthday, must cram my school books into my 20cms squared gucci bag, must get with half the neighboring private boys school, or ill have no friends' malarkey.

i dont think thats anything to do with the school being all one sex, just wanting to have everything.

The only sexist thing id say about private schools, is that the majority of them seem to be for girls....(in my area especially) there is one main private school for boys here, and i can think of at least 5 big private girl schools. seems a bit shocking to me.

Yeah, I hear ya, Katie. In our particular area there's one all girls school and another all boys school, very close to each other, too. But if I think further afield, there are a lot more girl schools than boys schools in East London.

I was thinking about the reasons for it, and the only thing I can come up with is that the population of females is greater than males, lol.

I think the reason for it is that there is a greater call for girls' schools. Parents tend to think that girls are more likely to be held back in a mixed gender environment, and I should think a fair few don't want their daughters mixing too closely with boys too early. I do think this is a bit old fashioned now as results tend to show that girls do marginally better than boys, so maybe we'll see the number of these schools start to lessen somewhat.

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Mmmk, this is the one thread where I haven't read all the other posts before posting my opinion. :) I'll go read them after I've posted.

I think single gender schools are a bad idea. Primarily because, at such a young age, (school age to me is until one is 18), children are already being directly, but unintentionally, taught that gender is an important difference between two members of the human race. I do not see why gender must play a part in who someone is re: the identity of a person. Why must we think as soon as we see someone: "that is a male" or "that is a female".

I think it is cultural habit in some countries to differentiate between the sexes. I know I can say, that my parents, being Indian, and somewhat conservative, always ground into me that my gender is an important part of who I am. I hate/hated that. It was and is important for them to discriminate between a male and a female, and I honestly cannot say, in a shrinking world, that such an attitude helps a mind geared towards globalisation. We do not need to segregate people into what their physical attributes are, when such characteristics become irrelevant in later, professional life; we need to create bonds, not divisions. In a world like ours, when there's already so much we use to discriminate (such as moral beliefs, religion* (now don't be so quick to bite my head off, I shall explain later on), etc.) why should we discriminate on something that is not a choice?

Having said that, it does occur to me that single gender schools can be validated if they are teaching an attitude or a skill that is particular to one gender - and yes, there are things that one sex is better at than the other. E.g. dexterity is a male strength. However, at school-age, I really don't see why scientifically-proven strengths should be emphasised, and scientifically-proven weaknesses be allowed to weaken. School is when we begin to discover what we are good at as an ~individual~, and what we are not so good at. Social awareness and open-mindedness are traits that need to be developed at school, and in my eyes, cultural diversity and gender diversity are equally important, and their presence in a school only serves to strengthen a school.

I do feel more about this issue, but I'm going to stop before I write a thesis on it

In answer to AJ's last question: "Am I sexist if I think single gender schools are a good idea?": I would not call you a sexist because you discriminate between genders on one issue. That is not sufficient for a label, besides which, I hate labels.

*So if it's not clear yet, while I do not advocate discrimination based on religious beliefs in a professional workplace - because at work, everything should be based on meritocracy - I do not mind people differentiating (which, by the way, I believe is just a less "offensive" term for 'discriminating') between religious beliefs because religion is a choice; and please do not say one cannot choose what religion one is. Religion is a choice, and should someone's personal, original, beliefs be so very contrary to what belief she/he is "born into", if they cared so much about the disparity, they could always change it. So anyway, that isn't really the point of this thread, but since I mentioned religious belief I thought I should explain it. Plus, it tied in with what is a choice, and gender is not a choice, so it is relevant :)).

Edit: Mmk, read all the other posts now. Haha, it seems like I'm the only one who doesn't advocate them! At this point in time, if I had a kid, I wouldn't send him/her to a single-sex school.

My dad always says that a child who wants to learn, will learn, and I believe that. I would send my child to a mixed-gender school even if the quality of education is lower than a single-sex school's quality of education. I want a well-rounded child and mixed-gender schools aid that; my child will perform well academically, if s/he takes an interest in learning and ~wants~ to learn :)

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The severe reaction the girl AJ argued with can probably be seen as a reaction to the gender separation from before, which is deemed 'old-fashioned'. That's usually how things go; one extreme dominates for a while, then it is swayed to the other extreme, and in the end we end up where we started until people get unhappy again. But fortunately, we pick up (and unfortunately also lose) some experience on the way.

To say that there are no differences between males and females is a bit absurd, to me. That doesn't mean that either gender should have more or fewer rights and possibilities to another, but it does mean that something else can be expected from either gender. I think we're trying to assimilate the genders too much, now, where we previously differentiated them too much.

An example of such an over-differentiation would be single-gender schools. Unless you are actually going to teach the females to perform household tasks and take care of children, and teach men to do construction work and hunting, I don't see a need for differentiating tasks for general education. If you want to break through these gender roles--which, in itself, I think is a good thing, because even though one gender may be better at something than the other, it does not have to be true for the individual, as Storm said--you will have to put (or rather, keep) the kids in a mixed learning environment.

The opposite gender on average has a different attitude and different general attributes and patterns of behaviour. Through that, you can learn about this, which makes it easier to deal with later in life. Actually, I think it would be better for heterosexuals to be in a mixed school; as was alluded to in another post in this thread, single gender schools may tend to lead to objectification of the opposite gender. And personally, even though I like guys, I would have got ♥♥♥♥ing sick of being around pubescent boys all day, in secondary school :\

AJ: thanks for bringing discussions back to this forum!

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Lol, don't even get me started on that one! ;)

Maybe they don't want them mixing in order to prevent teenage pregnancies since it is on the increase :o

Hmm, cheers for that. I didn't actually think about that hehe. I was thinking though about toilets. You get toilets for blokes and women, never see any mixed toilets other than in your own home.

What gets to me is that this person went "I'm shocked that you think like that.. I didn't expect it from you", re: single gender schools.

Going back to the loos though, I went to some wedding function thing a couple of months back and it was a women only get together. Whilst I was "hiding out" - don't ask - I got bored and thought I'd check out the men's loos, I've never done it before but as soon as I kicked the door open I thought I was gonna die! I learnt a very valuable lesson from that!

See now, education is something that I feel strongly about. My dad says the same as your dad btw, storm; wise men, eh? ;)

Anyway, although the education was pretty good in my school, in the last couple of years I had an awful lot of problems with poor teaching quality. I used to complain a lot to heads of departments about poor teaching, favouritism, lack of care and so on towards students and it got so bad that some teachers were being inspected (of course during this time the awful teachers would suck up to me in lessons so they didn't get told off or whatever ) but yeah, I strongly believe that a teacher should be there to help the students learn and how well a student does is mostly dependent on how well a teacher is in the classroom.

If a teacher is not dedicated to their job, they're only in it for the money, they're not passionate about it or they really have bad teaching skills then this can put a student off learning. I believe that was the case with me and I knew I had the potential to go far. That was the situation I found myself in when I was at school and as a student who was intelligent, I felt like I could have done a lot better. Instead teachers said I needed, and I quote, "a kick up the backside". Cos it's my fault they were rubbish(!) I have now solved my problems to the poor education systems around here by teaching myself and I've never been happier (re: education)

I don't regret it though because I've learnt a huge amount from it. Besides, as a future teacher I can see how not to be. The point is better teachers play an important role in shaping a child's life and they are the ones who can make a good student a great one. like my dad always says to me "There are two types of people who will always be proud of you; your parents and your teachers" even though some teachers just wanna say "I taught him/her!" when they're rich and famous

-rant over- I could go on for ages but that's not what we're really talking about.

Sexist! (just kidding ;)) I was arguing with a bloke like twice my age

Hmm, even though I'm not into girls it could drive one mad being around them too :p
It's the reason why I stopped knowing all my "friends" towards the end of school and as soon as we all-ish got to college I abandoned the lot and made new, sane friends out of 120 girls from my secondary school I'm only in contact with 3 because they've not changed a bit since puberty kicked in ;)

No problem Nay, I always hope for a bit of fist action, hehe :p

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Oh haha, see, I assign over-the-top feminism to women automatically. Shame on me. Or wait. Look what society has done to me! ;)

By the way: my faculty has mixed toilets. There are separate ones for each gender, too, but the 2 biggest ones are mixed. My faculty has about as many toilets as it has students, though. Counting each separate one (that is, male, female, mixed, disabled), it has 10 bathrooms for about 200 students :D

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Yeah, like Nay says - you do get unisex toilets! Didn't you ever see Ally McBeal? XD

I say: make all toilets unisex. Let's see you have your private chit chat (gossip) now. Muahahhhahhahahah

Lol, you know when I first read what you wrote, it distracted me so much/made me chuckle I couldn't focus on the rest of what you said :P Then I imagined that guy as a girl... =/

Wow, that' a lot! in school we had 5 lots of 120 people plus one year had 5 classes so that was 630 students and we had about 20 toilets tops and there were only 2 "bathrooms". The one on the second first floor you could only use during lesson time otherwise the teachers would seem like they'd chew your head off. During breaktime you'd spend the whole time queuing for the loos! Oh and then of course if people don't flush the loo, or it's dirty or there's no loo paper you can't use the toilets, so that made it less than 20 toilets for 630 students to use

Shush you, Ally McBeal's not real :p I did forget about that though, that was good
I've never used a unisex loo, don't even know if there are any in London lol.

Oh and as for the chit chat/gossiping thing, that's not why girls usually go to the bathroom in pairs. Have you seen that email going around explaining why they go around in pairs? If not, I'll post it here or something, maybe guys might understand that it's not so we can gossip about them :p

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Well, I don't know if there is a link between mixed gender schools and teenage pregnancies. In my school people weren't fornicating in the classroom and I figure that was pretty much a run-of-the-mill school unless I REALLY missed out on some education!!!

Boys and girls mix anyway, in or out of school. Honestly, before it closed down, our local girlschool had a reputation of it's alumni coming out either preggers or a lesbian (or in one case that I know of, both - not that there's anything wrong with being preggers or a lesbian...). I think if they mix at school every day, maybe it even lessens the curiosity about each other?

Anyways, my point there was you can't really blame mixed schools on teenage pregnancy. Plus of course, mixed schools have been around for a long time and are at a pretty steady number, whereas teenage pregnancy increases each year****. I think teenage prenancy is an issue that is perhaps more rooted in how quickly kids want to grow up these days rather than in education establishments.

Actually, what I was originally referring to as old fashioned was the fear that mixed schools lead to girls getting worse results than boys (see my original post), as this has been proven incorrect, but the teenage pregnancy was also a good point to bring up.


****EDIT: I just did some 30 second research and found evidence that actually, the teenage pregnancy rate has been steadily decreasing. Of course, it's still the highest in Europe!
http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/...E0A954ADA8.doc
Don't you just love the media and their scare tactics? :S

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I am glad you put in the edit, I know also in the US the teen pregnancy rate is declining as well.

I don't have a problem with single-sex schools, although in the US there seems to be an elistist attitude about same-sex schools. This seems to stem from the fact that they are schools that only the richest people can afford. But, I also know that some single-sex schools are parochial schools too, so average people could afford those. One of the girls I went to college with (and by that I mean University) went to an all girl's high school. She told me that all the girls who went there were called "St. Joe's 'Ho's" So, that is a definite deterrent for attending a same-sex school.

Actually, it's very much peer pressure at that school, not (just) hormones. (And I meant while a school pupil, not after leaving).

Although it's not as bad as that at the other school I was talking about, both schools have serious issues with need for popularity. (Both much more than other schools.)

I dont think theres a problem with single-gender schools myself and there have been studies suggesting that they can improve learning since there is less attention on the opposite sex then on their studies. If this is true, then I think they can be a good idea. And as for them(boys/girls) being socially inept... I personally did not go to an all-girls school but knew some girls from the one in my area and they were no less social towards boys than any other girl at my school. I definitely do not think you are sexist if you think single-gender schools are a good idea. Hardly qualifies for that particular title. lol

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I'm pretty surprised at most of the responses on this thread (except Nay's). Atreyu, I'd be interested in a link to the studies you mention. :)

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Maybe a little late in adding my input here, but never mind.

I don't think single-sex schools are a bad idea really. I went to an all girls school - the reason for this being that the majority of schools in my area were single sex schools, an equal number of all boys and all girls and unless I wanted to travel for ages to get to school a mixed school was pretty much out of the question. Also, I chose my school because it was the best in the area. So to be honest, the gender of the school didn't really influence my decision in the slightest.

The only thing I will say, and this may sound ridiculously stupid, is that because I went to an all girls school all of my friends were girls. So when it came to going to college, which was mixed, I was really shy around the lads at first because I was so unused to being in a classroom situation with them. So sometimes I did wish I'd been in a mixed school. That was the only downside though really. But from experiencing both single and mixed schools/college, I can say that they're both as good as each other and at the end of the day it's just personal choice really. Well, unless they're the only schools avaliable to you or for some other reason you have to go to a certain school.

And this probably has nothing to do with the argument whatsoever!

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SarahNarya - YAY!

Sarah, you're not late at all for replying now. I do like what you said as I can totally relate to it, especially the bit about feeling shy around lads in college lol. Well, I wasn't shy, it just felt weird having them in all my classes. I remember in biology some guy came and sat down next to me and I shuffled all the over to the other side of the bench hehe, that was kinda funny...

All my friends during school and college were girls. Although I went to a mixed primary school, my friends were still girls, probably because the boys were muppets :p

Now that I'm in uni I'd have to say that the majority of my friends are guys, it's actually got nothing to do with what I study either cos I've met most of them through my uni meeting places :)

What you said does have something to do with this debate because going to a single sex school could have an impact on how you are socially. Thanks for your input :)

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lol... i dont know if anyone noticed but Peter has a vote on "I think single gender schools are a GOOD idea" and also a vote on "I think single gender schools are a BAD idea".... lol... Sorry, thats just funny to me. (-p

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I noticed that too Atreyu, I assume he has reasons for both or he accidentally voted for the wrong one by mistake. I did want to question it cos I thought if the former suggestion was correct then I'd be interested in hearing why he thought they were both good and bad.

Peter if you see this please reply, we're confused ;)

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