Are single-sex schools facing extinction?
Last Friday, Sherborne School, the storied all-boys boarding school attended by Chris Martin and Jeremy Irons, announced it would merge with its sister school to go co-educational. Earlier this month, boys’ boarding school Tonbridge said it would start admitting girls into its sixth form. Winchester School, Rishi Sunak’s alma mater, will do the same from September, as will three grammar schools in Medway, Kent.
While it isn’t just private schools ditching their single-sex model, this move by independent institutions does appear to be an attempt to fill places since the addition of VAT on fees last year. But the editor of the Good Schools Guide, Melanie Sanderson, also attributed part of the trend to a “growing scrutiny of the culture within some traditional all-boys schools and questions about how healthy that environment is”.
I’d argue this is applicable to girls’ schools, too. I’m well aware I might not be where I am today without my hothouse grammar school. But if I have a daughter, I would never send her to a single-sex school. I didn’t realise what mine had done to me until after I left.
After passing the 11-plus, I went to a girls’ grammar school in Essex. Of course, my parents mostly sent me there because it was academic. But they had grown up in Sri Lanka, where single-sex education was the norm, and presumably thought boys an unhelpful distraction.But in my experience, the things single-sex schools are supposed to protect against are exactly what they breed. For instance, not getting distracted by boys. Our headteacher’s rather haughty motto was “boys are for recreation, not education”. But, that didn’t stop us from spending classes developing crushes on any unsuspecting male in the vicinity, though – our spaniel-eyed history teacher, the German student “Carlos” who helped with GCSE prep.
Without age-appropriate boy candidates, hormonal teenage girls naturally developed unrequited crushes. I fancied a boy I’d once met at a holiday club and barely spoken to over MSN Messenger, and made great hay of it because of the social cachet knowing boys seemed to bring in a single-sex school. Not knowing boys gave them an air of mystery and power – and that became ever more apparent when I did find myself around them. I would fall silent on the rare occasions I was around boys who were friends with my female schoolmates, thinking I didn’t know how to speak to them.
Being in a single-sex environment was also supposed to make me feel comfortable and confident among my peers – but it caused huge self-esteem issues. In every class in my year, one girl had an eating disorder; conversations around body size and what we were having for lunch were not infrequent. I would pick at food the lunchtime before a disco with the boys’ school, in the hope my tummy would be flatter.
In Year 9 at my all girls’ school. When I went to a mixed sixth form aged 16, I quickly realised I’d got boys all wrong (Photo: Pravina Rudra)Low-level bullying was also frequent in my all-girls school. Some girls would pick on others, or leave them out in attempt to maintain the social hierarchy, seemingly driven by insecurity. Everything felt heightened – fallouts and perceived slights carried more weight than in real life, and more claustrophobic. All the toxicity in teenage girlhood was amped up, because there was no one to dilute it.That all changed for me when I left that school and went to a mixed sixth form down the road, aged 16. I quickly realised I’d got boys all wrong – and I didn’t need to be silent, thinner or act stupid when I was around them. I became more confident in what felt like overnight. I leaned into my nerdiness, and went on to spend my lunchtimes at philosophy and debating club. I made as many male friends as female ones, and became louder and more articulate in class, and more popular socially.
In the real world, genders aren’t divided outside of school walls. Your twenties involve flatshares, sports clubs, house parties, and if you are heterosexual, dating the opposite sex. You need to be able to chat with, debate, and listen to them. Most importantly in the workplace, unlike decades ago, women not only work alongside men, but on a par with them. The next generation need to be equipped to deal with that.
Thanks to the online “manosphere” teenage boys are informed about girls by online caricatures. Single-sex education cuts boys off from a vital corrective to all this – an opportunity to see what girls are actually like. It’s important for young girls, too, who, as a result of the backlash to the manosphere, often only hear content warnings about boys. A poll a couple of months ago found only a third of women under 25 have a positive view of men. Segregation only exacerbates this division.
Of course the main objection raised in response to all this is the fact girls get better exam results in single-sex schools. But one seminal study of English schools suggested that 90 per cent of this effect disappears once you account for the fact single-sex schools are often selective in other ways (requiring entrance exams, being concentrated in wealthier parts of the country and so on). Given men often pull ahead of women in the workplace (even for those in full-time work, the gender pay gap is 6.9 per cent), we’d surely do better to educate girls to hold their own around boys – rather than suggest they can only be truly excel when they’ve left the room.It doesn’t have to be this way. In mainland Europe and the US, educational reforms made single-sex schools rare long ago. It is telling that single-sex classrooms are banned in Sweden, often considered the European leader for gender equality in the workplace.
The way I see it, single-sex schools are an outdated social experiment. What happens if you separate teenagers from half the population, who they’ll spend the rest of their lives working with, living alongside and perhaps falling in love with? Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work. People misunderstand the point of mixed schools – it isn’t that it makes boys and girls identical. It’s that it makes them ordinary.
Hence then, the article about i went to an all girls school i d never send my daughter to one was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( I went to an all-girls school. I’d never send my daughter to one )
Also on site :