Same-sex education outdated

The professional world is not segregated by gender. The era when adult men and women operated in separate spheres is at least 60 years behind us — right? So why is it that thousands of 17-year-old girls are no doubt sifting through scores of solicitation materials from colleges that only enroll females — in other words, colleges that are pretending such separation is not behind us at all?

Granted, many of these institutions (and their lesser known and less common all-male counterparts) have great reputations, academically and socially, like Barnard, Bryn Mawr and Smith College to name a few. But how can these same institutions claim to fulfill the top criteria of a college education — to prepare people for their adult lives — when they openly deny their students access to a massive sector of that world’s population, one that offers a host of rich alternative perception, personality and creativity?

This idea is perhaps why a group of psychologists, child development specialists and a neuroscientist who specialize in gender have set out to prove just exactly why single-sex education doesn’t work. Their recently published study on this issue in the journal Science also set up the platform for the organization they founded together: the American Council of Coeducational Schooling. Headquartered at Arizona State University, the Council is the first organization dedicated to advocating for co-ed schooling as the best education for a co-ed world.

ACCES argues for coeducation well before the tertiary level. Members of the Council are fighting to eradicate what they see as a detriment to elementary, middle and high school students everywhere — the trend toward single-sex education in public schools. Such gender segregation has become much easier since the 2006 publishing of federal regulations facilitating single sex education in American public schools, a direct result of provisions made in the No Child Left Behind Act to embrace this practice as an innovative educational tool. Since then, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, more than 500 public schools have incorporated single-sex classrooms at their facilities.

Proponents of this change tend to give three main reasons for their support: That it’s easier for students to focus when not distracted by members of the opposite sex, leading to better academic performance; that students at single-sex institutions, lacking social pressure from the opposite sex, feel more comfortable being themselves and pursuing their goals; and that single-sex education addresses the apparent differences between girls’ and boys’ learning styles.

This is all well and good — if you don’t happen to be an eight-year-old girl who despises arts and crafts or a boy that doesn’t like the rowdier style adapted by many teachers in all-male classrooms. And it’s great, too, if you ignore that consistent gender segregation could sometimes lead to serious discomfort and loss of self-confidence upon actually encountering members of the opposite sex, perhaps explaining why a 2005 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development showed that girls in single-sex schools are more likely to develop eating disorders. And it tends to bode well for the future — as long as you don’t become so used to having that opposite sex “distraction” nipped in the bud that you’re shell-shocked and utterly incompetent once you leave the sheltered, gender specific universe.

If these effects sound bad for primary and secondary school students, consider how inexcusable they are at the college level. A 12-year-old who doesn’t know what to do with herself around boys is one thing; a college graduate who starts her first day on the job treating her male coworkers like aliens is quite another.

The fact that there are still single-sex colleges implies there is a sizable population of people not ready to face a world where men and women not only coexist as equals, but work together, share insight and enjoy the unique benefits that result from the synthesizing of their inevitably different social and biological backgrounds. Such synthesis benefits individuals and society in general. Men and women were meant to interact with one another — intellectually, socially and competitively.

Perhaps those who champion single-sex education on the basis of coeducation being “distracting” need to consider how this bizarre deviation from human interaction might be distracting to students itself.

 

Francesca Bessey is an undeclared freshman.