Girls who like Boys to dig Girls who like Boys (Single Sex vs Co-Ed Schools)

Member Name: kittykat18

Product:	Single Sex vs Co-Ed Schools
Date:	22/08/02 (2207 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Possibility of improved grades

Disadvantages: Unnatural, limits sports and subjects

I went to a girls school from the ages of 11-15, through no choice of my own. I was accepted into grammar school after taking the 11+ and at that time there were no mixed grammar schools in Birmingham. I would have preferred to have gone to a mixed school as at primary school I always got on equally well with boys and girls. After I did my GCSE's, I escaped to a local college, which was mixed (although the subjects I took, apart from law, were mostly taken by females anyway). A lot of parents want their children to go to single sex schools, but why is that and are there really any advantages? I can not answer every side of the story but I can write from my own experience.

Disadvantages:

Bitchy atmosphere

Put 32 girls together and there is a recipe for disaster. Anyone who has read Enid Blyton books will know about that, but bullying, spitefulness and vindictiveness are all qualities that can show their ugly heads when groups of girls are forced to spend every day together. Of course this can happen in mixed schools too, but the boredom of having no boys around leaves a lot of time to bitch and pick on each other. I found this especially prevalent in years 7-9, when the entire class of 32 girls spent the whole day together, with no classes divided into sets until year 10.

Outdated attitudes

In my girls school the uniform was a skirt (not just a skirt obviously). Freezing cold in winter and expensive considering the amount of tights I got through, laddering a pair daily on average. Then in the summer you get wolf whistles and pervy comments from dirty old blokes who should know better. In a mixed school, you can argue that on the grounds of equality, girls can wear trousers. In a single sex school, there is no basis for this argument so even though they are impractical, uncomfortable and downright disgusting, school skirts remain.

The next annoyance was the lack of sports on offer. I was keen on football and
played it at primary school, as well as basketball. But oh no, we were young ladies and had to play netball, hockey and tennis. And that's it. And yes, you guessed it, we had to wear sodding skirts (really silly short kilts that fly open constantly) for PE too. Paaathetic.

Not to mention the obsession with sewing lessons and cookery lessons, when many of us would have preferred something more "masculine", but no, there was no choice again.

Obsession

Ok, so there's no boys around, but with plenty of hormones and no outlet for them (unless you are that way inclined), the topic of conversation, classroom notes and whispers was constantly sex and boys. We were obsessed. We passed notes around about who had done what, made lists of who we fancied, and even, blurgh, resorted to fancying teachers out of sheer desperation. The fact that two male teachers were sacked from my school for sleeping with pupil is surely no coincidence. The poor girls probably had no contact with any other males. So, blokes, if you want to have an ego boost, even if you're 50 and balding, go and work in an all girls school.

Unnatural

From the ages of 11- 15, I had virtually no contact with any males, other than my Dad and the few male teachers there were. The only other men I came into contact with were brothers of friends and people who lived in the area where I had a paper round. I don?t think this is a very healthy or natural way to grow up. It meant that when I started having boyfriends, I was inexperienced at even talking to blokes. In every day life as an adult, a person will come into contact with people of both sexes at work and outside, so this forced segregation during puberty makes no sense to me. Some claim that the opposite sex are just a distraction from studying, but surely school is about more than studying? Besides, some of the top schools in the country are mixed.

Research has shown that boys do bett
er in mixed schools and girls do better in single sex schools. Maybe this is because girls can be competitive- they were in my school. At the end of the first years we had exams in every subject and lists were pinned up, showing exactly where you had come out of the whole class. I was proud to be top of English, but it's not very nice when you are at the bottom. Girls tend to be quieter and less willing to answer questions in class when there are boys around. They don't want to seem like "swots".

Advantages

Promotes Opportunities for that sex

This depends on the school. My school ran self defence classes for some time, and also encouraged girls to study sciences and maths, subjects of there is a shortage of females students, especially at the higher levels. In years 10 and 11 we had PSE (personal and social education) lessons, some of which involved discussions about contraception (a bit late in my opinion). I don't know how this works in mixed schools, but I can't imagine a group of 14 year old lads taking a talk on the pill and condoms very seriously. Mind you, we had a laugh at attempting to putting the condom on a banana.

This one is not a very good advantage because surely any good school, mixed or single sex, would encourage pupils and give them opportunities.

Keeping Love Life separate

This is one of the few advantages I can think of. I can't imagine being at school with someone I was going out with and having to cope with that relationship being scrutinised and talked about. When I went out with anyone whilst I was at school, it was totally separate from school, nobody even had to know about it unless I told them, and I liked it that way.

Improved Behaviour?

I had to add this bit after reading in another opinion on the same subject that single sex schools have improved discipline. As I never went to a mixed school I don't know what they are like (apar
t from watching Grange Hill), but there was very little trouble at my school. Apart from pupils sleeping with teachers, a gang of year 9's all being suspended for systematically stealing food from the canteen and selling it on cheaper. Oh and then there were the usual pregnancy scares, smoking in the toilets and the girl who hated the school so much she brought a knife to school and smeared bodily fluids over the toilet. Nice. Then there was the day a huge gang of youths decided to meet in the playground, and the horrible day when one of our teachers was murdered.

My school took discipline very seriously and things that you would have got away with in a normal comprehensive, in my school you were threatened with expulsion, as I was several times. I don't think that just because a school is single sex that it means it will have better behaved pupils. Not when I am a student anyway!

So, in conclusion I would have to say I disagree with single sex education. School is about more than academic results, but should teach people to get along with others, whatever sex. Many young people in this country do not come into regular contact with the opposite sex until the age of 18 and I fail to see how this can be healthy or natural. Segregating the sexes creates a forced fake atmosphere which is not replicated in life, and can often cause problems with relationships as people just do not understand each other.

Summary: