Bizarre notion: private good for boys, girls will do well anywhere

[duchesse]

Has anybody else encountered this weird logic that private school is good or even desirable for boys, but that their sisters will do well anywhere so can go to the local state school? It was this bizarre statement from my MIL that ensured that I went back to work so that my daughters could go to the same fee-paying schools that their brother was attending.

Is it a generational thing? And is it utterly sexist or on the contrary, a compliment of girls' ability to knuckle down and perform regardless of what's going on around them (which obviously is not the case for many girls). My feeling is that it's an antiquated utterly sexist thing- that there's no point educating girls as much as boys as they'll just leave education and get pregnant. What do you think?

My son was utterly failing in state primary (completely disengaged in classes of 36) by the age of 6, so we took the hard decision to send him to prep school from year 3. Hard because I was dead set against private school back then. I just did not want to see my bright bright boy unhappy and failing for ten more years.

My MIL offered to pay his fees, which bless her she has done ever since then. But she maintained that state education was fine for girls because "girls do well anywhere". I could not accept that classes of 30-35 and no sports or clubs or extra-curricular stuff was fine for the girls but not fine for the boy, vs the 15 in a class, individual attention, 8 hours a week of physical activity and multitude of extra-curriculars offered at our son's mixed prep. Having endured the same situation in my own family I was buggered if I would allow it to be repeated, so I was propelled back into work when my daughters were 4 and 2, which has been overwhelmingly a good thing. I just wanted to be in a position to pay my daughters' fees, which I have done ever since.

They are doing extremely well where they are (very good selective academic schools with wide range of extra-curricular stuff) and I absolutely do not believe that they would be doing as well had they gone to the local state schools. For a start they would not have been able to do triple science, Latin, Greek and play in the orchestras and music ensembles they have access to. There is only one grammar school around here and even that does not offer them these opportunities (apart from the triple science). The lure of not having to spend any money on them would have been quite appealing had it not been for the huge and unfair divide it would have created between my children. Either I would have had to let my son fail in the state system (seriously he nearly "failed" his KS1 SATs aged 6, or would have if we hadn't withdrawn him from school. now don't get me wrong, I didn't give a shit about SATs and was not about to put pressure on him to perform in them, but I did not want him to feel like an academic failure at the age of 6).

So what do you: sexist or based on fact?

I don't like this gender stereotyping as I think it can be misleading at best.

My eldest DD would greatly benefit from a private education; she is very sporty and at her local primary there are virtually no sports; she is very academic and she is not stretched, resulting in her feeling demoralised and demotivated quite a lot of the time; and she loves invidual one to one attention. She also dislikes the boys in her class with a passion and always asks whether it would be possible to be in an all girls' school!

My DS1 is a gifted boy and very quiet and impeccably behaved. He is gentle and not interested in sports at all, would sit down with a book anytime over running around and loathes disruptive boys with a passion. Generally in both my eldest classes, the disruptive boys are low achievers, probably due to their behaviour. I don't know whether he would benefit from a private education, but he certainly wouldn't be too bothered with the sports side of things and would certainly not like an all boys environment, as he mainly plays with girls.

This is only my experience of course.

yes, it greatly depends on the child of course. not all boys steal horses, and not all girls study hard. its just statistically possible.

I have to agree with what you wrote Kris123 as it is the rule although there are exceptions.

Duchesse Do you think MIL has offered that view because she wants to help your DC and would love to help all her DGC, but only feels able to help one of them?

I imagine she feels very guilty about paying for one DGC and not others and so has sort of convinced herself of this argument?

Perhaps she's secrety torn apart about it all, and was hoping you would take the action that you did - i.e. pay for the others yourself. She may not have felt able to say to you "I will pay for this child, but you will have to pay for the rest" so she instead offered you that viewpoint.

Just my opinion.

I should imagine there is quite a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram 'unreconstructed right-wing sexist' and 'would send children to private school', and this may explain the instances of this attitude. It's not something I've ever come across before.

joan my uncle said there was no pont inmy cousin going to university as 'she would just get married' - he wored his whole life in a warehouse.

although he'd have been 'unreconstructed left-wing sexist'

liberality/ feminism does not increase further down the income scale, far from it.

I wasn't talking about income, more about sets of beliefs, though.

'would send children to private school' - if this is a live choice for even one child, that means a fairly high income.

and you wish to associate 'right-wing' with sexist. - i think you'll find just as much on the left-wing.

anyway, yes i think the ops MIL's view is sexist. plainly.

Just as another point of view, I'd heard this before in the context that boys who are clever are more likely to get picked on by their peers for being a "geek" or a "boffin", whereas it's more acceptable amongst teenagers for girls to be clever, so boys do better in an environment where the peer pressure to mess around and not do so well isn't as present.

It did seem to ring true at my secondary; the girls in the top set were popular, but the boys in the top set tended to be loners. There were boys in lower sets who seemed able but just didn't bother to do the work as it wasn't "cool".

However I was a girl who was bullied/teased for being "a boffin" so I think it can go both ways. There's no way if I had two children of different sexes (and could afford it) I'd be able to justify sending one but not the other to private school.

Not really in the same vein but I used to believe that girls did better in single sex schools at secondary but boys were better off in a mixed school. Now that I have children of my own (ages 1-6) it is another pre conception that I will have to analyse at some stage in the next few years!!

I didn't mean a live choice. Hence 'would'.

MistyB - your believe is correct. Girls do better in single sex schools, and boys do better i mixed schools (at later stage - vide Wesminster).

i have a problem however with sending my girls to a single sex school, as i think that academic qualifications are not most important, and i have heard a lot about ladies from single sex schools, who simply did not know how to talk to a man when they arrived at uni.

Boys will once again get by, but a girl needs to be, in my opinion, somewhat gently introduced into the world of men, their behaviour, their weaknesses and strengths, their attitudes. Dating, dancing, kissing - its all part fo growing up. Most women at 18 in the emerging world are already mothers and wives, and their bodies and hormones tell them that they should be. This is why i am in general against single sex schools for girls aged 16 - 18 - and will aim to have mine at coed schools, even if they are academically inferior.

there is no point to blindly pretend, like some people have done in the past, that men and women are the same. They are not.

Views?

If numbers of pupils sent to Oxbridge is a measure of excellence, then St Pauls' Girls and Wycombe Abbey,and a few others compare with any. (Malvern is not particularly academic, but doesn't claim to be).

Surely the fame you are referring to is bestowed by money -ie, resources and facilities and history, which is what the boys' schools have and girls' schools don't because their inception has been about four hundred years later and they have not benefited from Money bequeathed first by royalty and later by successful male past pupils. Society's rich and famous females have been smaller in number, less rich and and more recent than the benefactors of the boys' schools. Thus their schools have beeen more modest and less well endowed. How far their education is inferior I don't know. Perhaps someone with boys at Winchester/Eton and girls at Wycombe/Cheltenham Ladies' could tell us?

And in answer to the OP, the idea is sexist and you did the right thing in affording both sexes similar opportunnities.

Earlier: 'Now i have a girl who's a self-starter academically but has totally given up on all the music and sport and actively rebelling against the strictures of an academic independent school. She'd be brilliant in a state school which'd be much lighter touch. Even if the teaching might be a bit less stretching .'

WTF?

Anyway, my girls GS was full of girls whose brothers were at private schools (probably cos they'd failed the 11+!). It was quite common.

Jajas- As I just said, I went to a girls GS too, but I genuinely feel the boys at the single gender school had far more trouble socialising with girls than the other way around! The 'good' thing about our girls school, til 16 (beyond which I feel gender separating is a bit odd) is that it allowed the more geeky and perhaps less pretty girls to get on with their academia un-teased by the 'cheer-leader' style girls and laughed at by the boys. It has been my experience that, as an adult, just about all of my female friends who had a great time at co-ed secondary are attractive, confident women, thus would have been in a strong social position at school.

The academics at Eton/Winchester are not superior to WA/CLC but the teaching is very different. They work to boys strengths and the girls schools do the same for a girls strength. The atmosphere, however is totally different. The superselective girls school are highly pressured and full of insecure (many with eating disorders) overly competitive girls. The less slective girls schools tend to have a more happy nurturing feel. As a parent with one boy at Eton, I will not be sending my DD to CLC or WA but probably Downe House.

The boys schools have a healthy competitive attitude and if a boy doesn't come top then it's not the end of his world. The boys are quite niave and pleasant and are in awe of girls so treat them like Ladies. Probably a product of not witnessing the bitchiness of girls!

But Blessing - do you yet have a daughter at one of these schools? Are these assertions always true in your experience? Are our daughters really as unpleasant as opinions about girls' schools on here would suggest?

I am genuinely curious as I often wonder if the "girls' schools are all bitchy and hyper-competitive and full of anorexics" isn't, in its way, as mysogynist in its attitude to our daughters as the parents who think their sons'education should be prioritized over that of their daughters.

As to specifics of schools, I was under the iimpression - and please correct me if wrong - that Downe House, while I am sure a fabulous school with lovely girls, is more popular with families from the higher echelons of society and wealthy, successful London families than the other two you mention, which wouldn't make it necessarily easier in a social or academic sense would it?

Blessingsgalore Yes, I agree. I have a lovely DD at a superselective and it is very pressured. My DD is 15, well-mannered, intelligent, attractive but very shy with boys - and acts the 'clown' with her friends; perhaps your son at Eton would like to correspond with her and they can boost each others' confidence with the opposite sex.

But Gorgeous, is she unhappy?

Gosh, NO, she's not unhappy. She's vey happy; but don't us mums worry about EVERYTHING?

My tuppence is:

Girls are more likely (than boys) to be self-starters. That's a trend, not a guarantee. It's much harder to be an academic high achiever in the state system without native strong self-discipline. This is why the OP's MIL bias can tend to be correct and not necessarily unfair sexism. I don't agree with her blanket assessment, but I can see why she thinks that way. I have a self-starting DD who is thriving in a state school.

My son attends a co-ed private school; I put DS in there for social (not academic reasons). The pupils are overwhelmingly boys, and most (I believe) were academic underachievers, put in the private school precisely to give them extra support they couldn't get in crowd-control-atmosphere of the state system.

Blessing, I have a similar concern as Timebends. Went to Downe House website, and while it appears more relaxed then say CLC or WA, it is essentially still an all girls school, and the problems that GorgeousX mensions would most likely remain? Ironically I guess that i am very much pro co-ed school for my DDs (hence difficulty in finding the academic enough one).

Timebends, and some other mums too, I would argue against the assumption that by willing to send boys to public school and paying, and girls not necessarily so, I am sexist and prioritizing education of my son. I want all my kids to have excellent education. Even on the contrary, I have great hopes for a "proper career" for me elder DD, hopefully in medicine (she wants to follow grandads shoes and she certainly has the heart for it, vs for instance the younger DD who is just a pure devil), and in summary, I feel that a good grammar (ideally co-ed) will be in fact very good preparation for a medicalal school - despite being free. Surely I do not have to pay for a school just to feel that I am being "equal" to all my kids?

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On a different note, BlessingsG, I have sent you a PM via MN. Would be grateful if you could check your inbox. Many thanks, k.