Won't somebody think of the children?
Pauline Vu, reporting for Stateline.org, says that the number of public single-sex schools has risen from 5 to 241 in the past decade. Leonard Sax, director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and author of Why Gender Matters claims that girls and boys have different learning styles and that these differences can be used
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I attended public co-ed school from Jr. High and through High School, and I loved it. I choose a women's college because I fell in love the the school itself and because of its excellent academic tradition, not because it was specifically a women's college. That fact was neither an attraction nor a deterrent. But in the course of the past two years, I have come to see that everything they said (at least all of the postitive things) would happen within a single sex higher education institution have happened, and I'm certainly a better person for it. I'm more assertive, more creative, I'm driven and I'm confident in myself. For a wall-flower from small-town Indiana, it's a 180 degree turn-around.
One of the benefits that I have found in my school as that the information in the courses is presented different ways and that the profs are willing to work with you if you don't understand it the first time around. Perhaps it's because it is such a small school, or perhaps it is because they know that everyone has different learning styles. I'm a very visual and hands-on learner; my best friend does better with audio and abstractions. We're actually majoring in the same subject, have the same advisor and have classes together, but we still do well in the class because the profs present the material in a multitude of ways. Do they present it differently because it's a women's college and certain methods work better for women? Or do they know that everyone has different learning abilities overall? I don't know. I'm not a sociologist or a pyschologist; I'm just an anthropologist-in-training who loves to watch people.
Would I want to be in a single-sex school during my elementary, Jr. high and high school years? I don't think so. There is a need for social interaction between the sexes that you won't find in a single-sex school. By the time you get to college, your social patterns are more or less set, and it can be terribly difficult to adapt. I have friends (female and male) who attended single-sex schools and quite a few of them (specificly the males) seem to have a harder time talking to and interacting with the opposite sex in the appropriate manner. On the other hand, some of them can interact just fine. Perhaps it is more dependent upon the personality and other external stimuli than the schooling itself. I don't really know.
If there was a way to intergrate the benefits of single-sex education with the social skills of co-ed education, I would be all for it. In the meantime, however, I really feel that single-sex education is a choice for the student [barring extreme circumstances]. If my parents had placed me in a single-sex environment for my early schooling, I probably would have hated it.
It's a fascinating problem, overall, because there are so many pros and cons and conflicting statements. In the end, the decision for single-sex vs. co-ed education needs to be made based on the individual student's personality and needs. By the time you get to college, you can decide for yourself [hopefully]. I decided that I wanted to try something different, and it worked for me. But different things work for different people. My sister, a sr. in high school, refuses to even look at my school as she investigates colleges, much to my mother's dismay. She wants something bigger, with males and is planning to apply to a state school. Again, it's all about the individual.
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Strangely, I can't think of anyone I know who went to a single-sex high school or elementary school, and I'm in the unusual position of having most of the people I know who went to women's colleges being men now. *grin*
I suppose I should look for studies that compare single-sex vs. coed classes and control for class size. Thanks again for your thoughts.
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One of the things I find interesting is that a lot of people who experienced single-sex schooling speak positively of it -- and often say they wouldn't have necessarily wanted it at different age groups! Most of the people I know/have heard who went to women's colleges did not go to girls' schools K-12 (of course, since the vast majority of K-12 schools are coed) and in general appreciated the chance to learn about boys at that age and the chance to be in an all-female environment at a time when things like leadership skills are really developing...and many of my students and coworkers feel that the single-sex environment is really good for our boys, and the fact that most of them will go to coed high schools is also a good thing, precisely because you gotta learn about girls sometime. (And I suppose lots of people who went to single-sex high schools think that's good too...but I haven't talked to them so much.)
What I really like about single-sex for most of the boys at my level (7th-9th):
* There is a huuuuuuge average difference in maturity between girls and boys at this age (starting with the fact that girls hit puberty earlier and spreading from there). This is when all the weird queen bee games really get going with girls, and most boys don't know how to play along yet -- but will try to anyway for the sake of impressing the girls. Removing the girls --> boys doing a lot less dumb stuff. Also...it gives the boys time and space to grow up at their own rates. By high school boys and girls are a lot closer together (and have both outgrown the lord-of-the-flies stuff some), so they can relate more naturally.
* In most schools -- at any level -- there are going to be "boy" niches and "girl" niches, and you have to be either pretty confident or pretty oblivious to be in the "wrong" one, I suspect (I went for "oblivious" myself; also, math team). But in a single-sex school, you can't have those niches. We have male flutists (otherwise where would the orchestra be?) and male painters (gotta have an arts program) and and male choristers (else no choir at all) male actors -- male actors wearing skirts and wigs at that (or how would there be plays?). We have, of course, male student government (which was dominated by girls in my high school iirc) and male valedictorians (in Boston public schools, anyway, valedictorians seem overwhelmingly female). I'm sure you can point to similar things from your college which you suspect would have been male-dominated in other environments, but were necessarily welcoming to women in yours, and gave women who are not naturally confident or oblivious a chance to develop those skills (and confidence). And I suspect, just as with my students, you have faith that, having developed those skills in a more sheltered environment, you can now take them out into a coed world confidently.
All that and I never went to a single-sex school myself -- I flat-out refused (also to my mother's chagrin) to consider women's colleges; indeed my college was 75/25 the other direction (in fact many of my female coworkers spent some part of their life in male-dominated environments or socialized more naturally with men for some important set of years). I don't think I'm one of the people for whom it would have been a good thing (too oblivious to care about the gender differences I was "supposed" to pay attention to; much better at being friends with boys until after college; much more closely resemble "boy" than "girl" learning patterns). But I'm glad the option exists and I wish it were more widespread, since one size really doesn't fit all in education.
So, differenceblog, there's your anecdote about elementary/secondary :).
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