Same-Sex Schooling: Progress vs. Regression

Sociology serves as a lens through which we can look a little closer at how pieces of our society function, and how these functions affect our behavior as humans. One perspective we can use to analyze our observations is called ‘functional analysis’. Influenced by Herbert Spencer and August Comte, functionalism asks us to think of our society as an organism. Society, as all organisms, can have pieces that might be dysfunctional, abnormal, or ‘ill’. Like parts of our bodies, functionalism considers parts of society to be interconnected. These interconnections make it important to analyze, and potentially fix, the dysfunctional pieces.

A highly important ‘ill’ piece of our society that we should consider is failure within our education system. Some people believe a significant portion of such problems stems from the distractions of the opposite gender. Especially during the time of their sexual and emotional developments, boys and girls can be very distracting to each other. Built on this principle, and the idea that males and females learn differently, we’ve seen same-sex schools emerge all over the world. This article in Womens Enews takes a closer look at the progress of few of these schools in California. http://www.womensenews.org/story/education/010603/california-study-single-sex-schools-no-cure-all

In some respects, the manifest functions of same-sex structured education can be a very positive thing. Children in their formative years, between seven and fifteen, will naturally gravitate towards their own sex because they can identify with each other. This would make it easier to implement a teaching strategy that is gender specific. Some research shows that women in particular benefit from same-sex education as they are more likely to score higher in aptitude tests, participate in class, develop higher self-esteem and are more successful in their careers. It’s also been observed that in same-sex educational settings, woman are more likely to chose ‘male’ disciplines like science or mathematics in their careers, and boys are more likely to explore art, music and literature.

With these positive results, however, come some unanticipated latent functions. Not to say that a boy in an all-boys school will never socialize with a girl his age as long as he attends a same-sex school, but interaction between genders will be severely limited. When children are in primary and secondary schools, the ages at which it is most common to enforce same-sex schooling, they are at their most impressionable age. Aside from some distractions, boys and girls can be a very good influence on each other, particularly as teen girls usually exhibit greater maturity than boys of the same age. These formative years are the best time for a child to be exposed to the company of the opposite gender so they can learn from and about each others’ behavior, better preparing them for adulthood when contact between genders is unavoidable.

Sociologist Thomas Cooley developed a theory that is very interesting to consider in terms of functional analysis. The looking-glass self: imagining how other people see us affects how we develop our self-concept. If there is something abnormal about our surroundings as we develop, such as being surrounded by children only of the same gender, how would our self-concept development differ from children in schools with both genders? Especially when we consider that more often than not, teachers in an all-boys school will be male, and female in an all-girls school, questions about gender socialization will be raised. Do these educational structures cross the lines of teachings such as math, science, and literature that are appropriate for school?

In this video, Dr. Leonard Sax is interviewed about his support towards same-sex schools. In the interview he relays a statement from one teacher he interviewed: “When that boy sits down, his brain shuts off”. Sax explains that “in North America especially, these boys are likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and people want to put them on medications. What these boys need is not medications, but teachers who know how to teach boys”. He also claims in the interview that many successful women are successful because of the single-sex schools they attended.

I watched another video that addresses children focusing in the classroom, (view minutes: 13:30 -17:36) and found it to be somewhat contrary to the first video. “The brain isn’t divided in to compartments, in fact creativity, more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things,” says Ken Robinson. . .

In this segment of the video Robinson recognizes that men and women think differently, but the little girl Gillian he described had the same issues focusing as the boys Sax spoke of. Ultimately, her success didn’t come from putting her in a classroom with all girls; it came from the change in teaching method. The way the boys Sax spoke of learning better when standing was very similar to the way Gillian focused better when dancing. Maybe it’s possible that these problems of focus, participation, and success among students aren’t related to gender differences at all, but rather inadequate teaching strategies.