Do single gender school still have a place in today's society?
Posted by: Lucky123
11th Jan 2024 06:32pm
Many schools are no longer single gender schools like 'boys schools' or 'girls' schools' and many are moving away from this idea. Are single gender schools of any use or value in today's inclusive climate or are they now an old fashioned idea?
You must be a member to reply to this chat topic. Click here to sign in.
Help Caféstudy members by responding to their questions, or ask your own in Café Chat, and you will get the chance of earning extra rewards. Caféstudy will match these and donate equally to our two chosen Australian charities.
Australian Marine Conservation Society are an independent charity, staffed by a committed group of scientists, educators and passionate advocates who have defended Australia’s oceans for over 50 years.
ReachOut is the most accessed online mental health service for young people and their parents in Australia. Their trusted self-help information, peer-support program and referral tools save lives by helping young people be well and stay well. The information they offer parents makes it easier for them to help their teenagers, too.
Comments 2
jtmorri
They are old fashioned. It did provide the basis of a good education with an instilled values system without distractions of the opposite sex. The genders are shifting and generally more accepting of each other and everyone, so I can see single sex schools becoming obsolete. The principle of such schools is for academic success and leadership, that is a pathway to uni and being the leaders of tomorrow, so if co-educational schools prove to be able to foster and develop such people the transition away from the old system will be easier.
harry31626210
In these days, is single gender education still relevant?
Though I have graduated from a single-gender high school over 10 years, I do not think it is relevant or workable these days. At least, according to my younger brother’s experience, the first-ranked high schools (most of which are single- gender and public) in Taiwan began to accept the applications from both genders due to sub-replacement fertility. Besides, I think this gender separatism for high school education is downright ridiculous in the first place. First, people have various gender identities. If single-gender education is created for the students to focus on their academic performan
Why do single gender schools still exist?
Good question. Why does anything that’s built on regressive traditions still exist? I think because there’s still a forceful contingent of people, in any city in any country in the world, who believe that stuff - who are 100% convinced, because of how they’ve been raised or whose opinions they’ve been exposed to, that there should be girl schools and boy schools, and the “two” sexes shouldn’t mingle, because who knows what might happen - maybe sex will happen oh NO. Boys just can’t HELP themselves. And girls are just ASKING for it. We must separate them to avoid sex, at all costs. Our dear little children, all of them, all of them who would never possibly be queer because they’re good children - we must protect them from each other! Oh no!
It sounds perfectly ridiculous but we all know those people. They’re still out there. They’re still principals and board trustees and senators and prime ministers - they’ve still got sway, and they still care enough to make their sway count. What they believe is completely, unbelievably, harmfully divorced from reality - but good luck changing their minds, these far-gone white Evangelicals in their fifties, sixties, seventies, who grew up thinking “gay” means “pedophile” and “transgender” means “transvestite drag queen [pedophile]”. These are the contingent who’ll argue until their last breath that girls and boys need to go to separate schools.
And sometimes, to be fair, the people who believe this stuff are not so comically over-the-top bigoted. Sometimes it’s the TERFs who leap out of the woodwork yelling that gender is a strict binary and girls and boys are two distinct non-overlapping, non-fluid biological facts of nature (which is not what gender OR sex are, by the way. In fact they’re both fantastically varied). Sometimes you get well-meaning people, like my grandmother for instance, who still believes that a girl needs to dress modestly or risk being assaulted. There are a lot of these people. They’re not all evil, they’re not all the Mike Pence evangelical crowd. (Though those types are way more fun to talk about and make fun of, because they make it absurdly easy).
Luckily there are few all-girls or all-boys schools where I’m from. There are a couple scattered here and there - my sister was talking about one she’d heard of. We both agreed it doesn’t make sense, me 19 and her 10. The next generation is going to figure this shit out.