Jack And Jill Went Up The Hill

I have attended more co-educational schools than non so I feel, however illogically, that I can tell the differences between the two types of schools.

Kindergarten, of course, was co-educational as was my “primary” (or grade) school after which, for the next five years, I attended Immaculate Conception College, an all-male “secondary” (or high) school. Both the universities I attended were, necessarily, co-educational.

I believe that we do a great disservice to both boys and girls—especially boys—when we force co-educational schools on them for various reasons. This gentleman, posting on a site I came across on Wintery Knight’s blog, neatly encapsulates some of those reasons:

I’ve long thought that coeducation is one of the major factors behind the dysfunction of the modern world. Just as important as the academic problems it causes are the socio-sexual ones. Since most boys have very little of the status and power that attracts the opposite sex, the ones who end up being most popular with girls are jocks and badboys[sic], who in turn become the role models for the rest of the boys. (And of course, badboys[sic] are a lot easier to emulate than jocks.) In an all-male environment, boys can be valued for other qualities, whether of intellect or of character, and proper male hierarchies can develop, in which individual boys with different strengths and weaknesses can find their place, gain in confidence, and grow into men. In the past, it was only after these formative years that young men were exposed to all-out competition for the attention and affection of young women.

Of course, the same thing goes for girls. Homely girls or late-bloomers who in earlier times would have had to dread only the occasional party now find themselves evaluated on a daily basis in comparison with their more attractive and confident sisters. I wonder how much of feminists’ venomous hatred of men has its roots in the humiliation felt by scrawny, pimply or bookish girls. Likewise the feelings of bitterness, frustration and rage felt by so many men no doubt go back to a sense of non-stop rejection experienced in adolescence. These emotions are an unavoidable by-product of forcing boys and girls into close proximity with each other day in and day out at the very time in their lives when they are most sensitive to the other sex’s assessment of their sexual desirability and thus most emotionally vulnerable. Add to this the fact that young people often compensate for this vulnerability by being gratuitously cruel in their judgments of others, and the fact that most of the time they are not under adult supervision, and you have a recipe for disaster.

And this all exacerbates the academic disparity between boys and girls. Lots of girls find academic competition a welcome escape from this other kind of competition. Boys who study hard, on the other hand, risk being seen as overly compliant and eager to please—in short, as unmasculine[sic]. Better to be defiant or act like you don’t care—then at least you’re not a nerd. For a teenage boy, being at the top of the class grade-wise is a poor substitute for being popular with the girls.

That there are differences in cognitive capability between boys and girls has been borne out by the study of the brain. My own very limited experience also bears this out: my son was behind his female cousin in walking, for example. She was up and at ‘em very quickly. He didn’t start walking and generally moving about until he was almost one.

However, don’t take it from me but do from Dr. John Medina whose 11th “rule” from his best-selling book, Brain Rules, is Male and female brains are different. For starters, he reports that mental retardation is more common in males than females (ouch). In addition, men seem to be better at coping with traumatic situations and so on. While he claims we need to be very careful in interpreting these data, the point is, there are clear differences between the male and female brains.

Here’s where modern education takes us down the primrose path toward the disaster of a system we have today: professional “educators” earnestly refuse to do anything based on these scientific facts unlike in every other aspect of education where brain “science” is given more than its due with respect to influencing teaching methods.

The blog I mentioned earlier, The Thinking Housewife, has this to say about co-education in a posting on co-education, complete with quotes from the pre-eminent British psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen:

In the current mode of schooling, these differences work against boys, who are often unfavorably compared with girls in their mastery of academic skills and organization. This begins early in life and extends to higher education, where we now see the disproportionate number of girls in colleges and universities viewed as a sign that young men are lazy or incompetent. In truth, boys and men develop at a different rate than girls, a difference that makes sense in light of the natural roles of men and women.

Single-sex schools or single-sex classrooms, though generally considered less enlightened by modern standards, are practical and sensible. Home education is naturally coeducational, but then home education is by its very nature more individualistic and attuned to differences. Small schools also can more easily accommodate coeducation. Single-sex schooling does not prevent all interaction between boys and girls, which naturally occurs outside of school.

From my own experience, and not wanting to over-indulge in casuistry, I will say that the learning environment in high school was so radically different—in more ways than you think—than at any other time in my educational history, I’ve come to accept it as nigh gospel: separate girls and boys and they’ll learn better.