Separating the Sexes

Single sex education seems to be becoming more and more common in American education systems.  In “Single Sex Public School Settings” it is “suggested that one benefit of SSE is that it complements learning styles” of each gender by addressing them separately (Crawfor-Ferre and Wiest 301).  While I agree that it is important that we work to empower women at a young age and provide an enriching educational experience, I feel that same sex education is generally problematic.  The “real world” outside of institutional education is mixed with men and women working together towards common goals.  By having boys in one school and girls in another, society’s youth loses the opportunity to learn how to work together with the opposite sex.  This being said, it could be argued that same sex education puts girls under less pressure to maintain their appearance or feel the need to “act dumb” as societal expectations encourage. It is said in the article that boys act differently when girls are not around, but the same could be said for girls; girls can be cliquish. In my experience, girls can be exclusionary as well and quite mean. Maybe the same is true for boys (I don’t feel as though I can speak for them in this circumstance)!  Some girls even get a long better with boys, and separating the sexes eliminates that option and could make some girls feel isolated.

To me, separating the sexes is not the ideal solution to addressing educational needs of each gender—I may be biased to mixed schools because I attended one.  I think that if public school systems didn’t “dumb down” the material but rather provided more challenging curriculum that forced everyone to work hard and succeed, then we would be on our way to reaching a solution.  The solution is to elevate the curriculum and make public school education more effective—not separating the genders.   I feel that separating the sexes could be somewhat interpreted as the genders being unequal and thus reminiscent of a battle between the sexes.   I think that separating genders is like separating people by their skin color or checking a box for your race; while it is true that gender, skin color, and race are separate ideas, they are all part of a person’s identity and creating tolerance and equality means submerging both groups together is essential. 

The article that I chose this week, Van Thompson’s “How Same Sex Schools Affect Students,” presents positive and negative results of students who attended same sex schools.  I chose this article because I believe that there are pros and cons to BOTH forms of institutions and that single sex education may be better for some than others.  In this article, Thompson suggests that single sex education reinforces “gender stereotyping” because all boy schools argued they needed a more physically active and all girls schools needed more “nurturing” environments.  While it could be argued that mixed schools could also reinforce gender stereotypes, it seems to me that this would be more likely to happen in a single sex education environment.

All in all, it is safe to say that single sex education may work well for some, but is not necessarily the ideal system for everyone.  Separating the sexes could make communication between the sexes more difficult in the future, and could further develop inequalities.  So, what do YOU think about single sex education?