Single-sex schools - better in the long run?

ninja900 wrote: »

I can't figure out why Quinn is still awarding patronage of newly built schools to religious bodies. The way to get out of a hole isn't to dig more slowly.

Quinn should draw a line in the sand and say that as of today NO more new schools with religious patronage (or which are single-sex) will receive state funding. He should also immediately - and for all schools - repeal the legislation allowing schools to discriminate in enrolment and employment and remove the integration of religion throughout the primary curriculum.

Then we can decide how to deal with the patronage of existing schools, but at least we won't be spending taxpayers' money on building new schools which are not inclusive.

Agree - apart for the bit about single-sex schools.

girls may do better in all girls schools, so what, let them go to school in a bit social reality, you're missing out the whole equality bit.

what the hell has single sex schools got to do with atheism, can not one thread stick to topic on here?

this thread is about not creating artificial divisions in childrens schools, lets not create another one with 50% of the population.

expectationlost wrote: »

this thread is about not creating artificial divisions in childrens schools, lets create another one with 50% of the population.

Or alternately - This thread is about how the State should not facilitate the indoctrination of children into one religion via the school system which led to a discussion on segregation along religious lines which had broadened into discussing segregation along gender lines.

There is an argument to be made for all schools to be mixed, there is also an argument to be made for single sex schools - in this instance I am arguing for the latter as under the current format (which would exist even if it were secular) girls perform better in a single sex environment.

I *hated* my all-girls school - was in a very bitchy and conformist year group, and as a sporty (but not in the accepted camogie or hockey sort of way), nerdy girl who always got on better with guys anyway I spent 6 years finding it exceptionally difficult to make friends. Also got a lot of stick from people over my choice of subjects, and ended up not getting the full selection I wanted anyway as I was the only person in the year who wanted to take 3 science subjects. The graduation speech about how we would make wonderful wives and mothers made me want to throw up too.

I will not be sending any child of mine to a single-sex school unless it is absolutely the only available option. I don't think segregation by gender really benefits anyone.

Gbear wrote: »

One obvious solution to the gender-defined subjects like home ec, is to make home ec mandatory, as it really should be.


It's probably our best bet in fighting childhood obesity. We'll also creative a generation of world class chefs, no doubt.:)

Cooking and food science is only a small part of Home Ec. In fact for the LC there is no cooking at involved in the higher levels of the subject. A lot of it is actually about household finance and budgeting, which would arguably have been just about the most important thing many young adults in this country should have learned.

Obliq wrote: »

My main distraction in the co-ed school I went to was how not to get a knife in the back over not being a follower of the cliques of girls who determined whether you were cool enough to enter these based on your clothes and make-up. In my experience, girls were less distracted by boys and more by each other in terms of their position in the pecking order.

In a girl's school, I'd have been lost and many times more miserable than I was. I spent the whole six years hanging about with the male misfits, wearing combats and a series of dodgy Run-DMC t-shirts. I'm aware that this is only my story, but to my mind, a girls school could do more (in social terms rather than academic) to perpetuate that VERY female thing of one-up-man-ship based on the perfect body/looks.

As for the choice of subjects, I think it's a generational thing. There wasn't ONE girl in my year who did metalwork for example, and I regret not having had the nerve to be the only girl. However, these days, in my eldest's school, there's a much larger percentage of boys doing home ec than I thought there would be, and a number of girls doing metalwork. The best student in technical graphics (wants to be an engineer) is a girl. My young fella and the lads he knows just assume equality these days (of course, the girls might tell a different tale) and don't see home ec as a girlie subject at all.

Must be all their Dad's cooking the dinner these days?

Maybe I was lucky in that I had a band of misfits to hang around with in school, and I hung around with a lot of boys outside school hours.

I honestly think that the bullying about my general lack of girlishness would have been worse if there had been boys around for the harpies to try to impress.

I'm fully in favour of doing away with any gender taboos in relation to classes, and I think that some form of Home Ec and General DIY (changing a plug, fixing a puncture, hanging a picture or whatever) should be mandatory in all schools.

ninja900 wrote: »

What about young good looking teachers though :eek:

and not everyone in a single sex school is attracted to the opposite sex!

You called?

I just had to listen to them talking about the opposite sex all the time. :mad:

Jimoslimos wrote: »

I'd have imagined it would have been the other way around, girls from single-sex schools, of which the majority would have been convents with a strong religious ethos, would be more likely to be conditioned to be demure.

Absolutely not the case, according to a (female, strongly non-religious, mildly anti-clerical) relative who lectures in a third-level institution. The female students from single-sex convent schools arrive confident, assertive and expecting to be listened to and taken seriously much more so than female students from mixed-sex schools. She doesn’t think that this is related to socioeconomic class.

Jimoslimos wrote: »

Plus it raises the question if girls do better in a single-sex setting, but boys perform in co-ed how do you resolve this - because either way you're disadvantaging one gender over another.

It’s important to remember that these are both generalizations - girls tend to do better academically in single-sex environments than in mixed-sex environments, but there are many girls for whom this is not the case. And vice versa for the boys. So if you only provide one of these two types of school you are disadvantaging the group that would do better in the other type, and there’s some correlation between that and gender, but it’s far from a perfect match.

It’s also important to remember that this comparison usually looks at academic performance. It doesn’t necessarily hold across a range of educational outcomes. It’s possible, for example, that a girl would have a better academic performance in a single-sex school, but acquire better social adjustment in a mixed-sex school. If a girl is bright, and will do reasonably well academically in any environment, then you might prefer the school which will develop her socially, but the other way around if she has strong social/emotional skills, but needs support to develop academically. And similar considerations apply to boys.

Horses for courses, in other words. There are both boys and girls who will do better in both single-sex and mixed-sex schools, and the best outcome can be expected if, so far as possible, people have a choice about which kind of school to choose for their child. It’s not, of course, possible to give everyone that choice, but giving it to no-one is probably calculated to produce a poorer outcome, since it will maximize the number of students who have to attend a school that is, for them, suboptimal.

Rev Hellfire wrote: »

I would have thought economically there would be a stronger case for ensure future schools are co-ed, simply to pool resources, provide greater flexibility to student and maximize the use of land.

Not necessarily. Two co-ed schools take up pretty much the same amount of land as a boys' school plus a girls' school.

Sure, a single co-ed school that is twice as large might save on land and buildings to some extent, but by the same token a co-ed school that was ten times as large would save even more. There's a range for the optimal school size, and if single-sex schools are within that range there's no great advantage in having co-ed schools.

Obviously, there'll be places that can only support one good-sized school or two too-small schools and, in those places, a single co-ed school is a no-brainer.

kylith wrote: »

*Thinks of male teachers in secondary school*
*shudders*

*Thinks of my all female teachers*
*shudders*

recedite wrote: »

I suspect both sexes are going to be disadvantaged in the long run.
Even if its true that girls from single sex-schools get better grades in their Leaving Certs, they will enter a world where segregation, fixed gender roles, and "glass ceilings" seem perfectly normal to the males.

Maybe not. The usual account for why girls in mixed schools underperform academically is that they get less attention, and are taken less seriously, than the boys, and that is how they learn to regard and evaluate themselves. Girls in single-sex schools may hear about such things, but they are not exposed to them, not formed by them at the time of their lives when they are learning their own gender identity. Or, at any rate, they are not formed by them in school.

So, counterintuitive as it may seem, there is some reason to think that sex-segregated education may be beneficial in helping girls to form a positive and confident image of themselves as women, and of their place in society, at least when it comes to academic/intellectual attainment. Or, at any rate, it may be more beneficial than mixed-sex education.

My concern about single-sex education would be different. It’s that girls schools would tend not to offer, or not to put resources into “boys” subjects, and vice versa, thus limiting educational options for both sexes. This is a real problem.

As against that, though, in mixed sex schools where you’d expect to find a wider range of choices, it remains overwhelming the case that the boys pick the boys’ subjects and the girls the girls’ ones. So simply having the choice doesn’t really solve the problem, if other pressures, stereotyping, expectations, etc still steer the boys one way and the girls another. And if you can successfully tackle that problem, then the other one should eventually go away, since single-sex schools will then tend to offer a less stereotype-driven subject range.

recedite wrote: »

BTW it looks like Ireland's first Islamic secondary school is on the way.
We can assume it will be a private, single-sex, state funded school which also serves as a vehicle of religious indoctrination. As such, it should fit in very well with our existing educational system.

You;ve been reading the Daily Mail again, haven’t you, recidite? :-)

You can certainly assume all that if you choose to, but assumptions reflecting your own preconceptions are not the same thing as inferences drawn from observation or evidence. Of the twelve state-aided Islamic schools in the UK, nine are mixed sex (and three are girls’ schools). And, of independent Islamic schools, the majority are mixed sex, so it’s not that co-education is being forced on anyone as a condition of receiving state aid. SFAIK, all the Islamic primary schools in Ireland are mixed-sex. So I’m not seeming much evidence of an insistence on single sex schools in Islamic education. And if Ireland is only to have one Islamic secondary school, common sense suggests that the chances of its being a single-sex school are vanishingly small.