Single Sex Schooling

So, according to this article, girls do better in single-sex schools. This is not a surprise. What the article doesn't say, and what is also not surprising, is that boys also do better in single-sex schools, especially when taught primarily by male teachers. And, in fact, the disparity is rather greater than for girls.

(Of course, I'm also not at all surprised that we have an article like this commenting on the benefits to girls, but not a corresponding article for boys. Despite the fact that girls do better than boys at school anyway, and have done for many years. Despite the fact that, with the occasional blip here and there, girls pull further ahead with each year. And despite the fact that our mixed-sex schools are structured with a very strong pro-female bias.)

But...

One of the things that invariably gets missed in discussions of this sort, and also the inevitable raft of condemnations that follow from yet another improvement in the pass rate in exams, is that there is more to education that pure exam performance. Indeed, not everything that needs to be learnt at school is academic at all.

There is also a social aspect to schooling that gets neglected. Indeed, I completely missed the importance of this at the time, because it wasn't flagged up. It's only in hindsight that I realise that something has been missed.

And, indeed, it is because of this social aspect that school is often referred to as, "the best years of my life". (Though, obviously, not my life.) Those were the years when most people had most friends. That was the time when they were forced to deal with all manner of people, and not merely isolate themselves from anyone they found even slightly annoying, as is so common these days. They were also the years when most people had their best ever access to members of the opposite sex, rivalled only by university.

Single sex education removes that. It removes pupils from interaction with fully 50% of the population, and indeed the 50% who are biologically and culturally programmed to think in a distinctly different manner, at the crucial time when they are best able to actually learn the social interaction skills that they will need later in life.

Note: that's need, not would like. Those skills are at least as necessary as reading, writing and arithmetic, and a whole lot more necessary than French, Geography, Art, or many of the other pointless things we were forced to do to fill up the hours.

So, it's fair to say that I'm not a fan of single sex schooling, and even less so of home schooling. And also single-faith schools, single-race schools, or any of the other -ism schools that one might dream up (many of which are nobly motivated by ideals of equality, but many of which undermine the very social inclusion that they hope to foster).