Single-sex education today?

[exhaustDAD]

As I was standing outside the gate for school pick-up today, a fellow parent initiated a classic idle chit-chat. No harm, business as usual. At one point the topic went from weather, half-term, work and holidays to our children finding out with schools they will continue their education in next week. Fair enough, exciting times. But then he in a really odd manner looked around to see if anyone else would be listening in the conversation and whispered that he is planning to have his son go to an all-boy school, because girls are brutal now. And his reasoning just seemed so hard for me to understand - It is not for me to know what's best for everyone's kid, but he was talking about how the boy is awkward around girls, easily distracted, and he is hoping this would solve it.

I don't know what you - the reader of this thread - think, but to me it seemed like the absolute worst solution. Locking the boy up with only boys, having no interaction with girls his age will surely make him miss out on some evolution of communication skills when it comes to girls...

I don't know if I hurt anyone's feelings with what I am about to say - But I think same-sex schools are very outdated and I think it makes the kids miss out on being prepared for real life... Young men and women will be mixed in every aspect of their lives, further education, work, communal spaces, travels, you name it. I find it very backwards. I knew two people my age personally (one man, one woman, they don't know each other) who came from same-sex schools, and the guy was truly on the level of a teenager when it came to women (our coworkers), for example. The woman was more adjusted, but she openly talked about how much work it was for her to catch up with the world.
Back in the day, when my kids were in nursery, there was a dad who was very adamant that his daughter will only go to an all-girl school, because he doesn't trust boys. That, I feel, is also such a bad motivation.

I don't know, is there something I am not seeing, some invisible positive side?

In an ideal world there wouldn’t be bias. But realistically, there still is and it’s been baked into schools (and society) for decades. Some schools tackle it brilliantly, but plenty don’t, especially where resources are tight.

And it doesn’t magically disappear after school either. We’re still arguing about pay gaps and career progression.

The Me Too movement wasn’t ancient history it exposed how normalised certain awful attitudes still were, in school, universities and the workplace.

So I can completely see why some parents think, “Actually, I’d quite like my daughter to grow up in a space without some of that noise during her formative years.”

I’m not anti co-ed at all. But it’s not surprising that many girls’ schools are still thriving and oversubscribed.

At the same time, a lot of boys’ schools are moving to co-ed including places like Abingdon School and Royal Grammar School Guildford.

Boys-only education increasingly feels less popular, sometimes a bit outdated, even faintly “old boys’ club”. Schools adapt to demand and demand is shifting. The challenge for these schools is to attract girls, that can only happen when these biases are fully removed, which as we know, still isn't taking place en-mass.

As someone up the thread mentioned, I foresee very few girls choosing to go to, or move to, a newly co-ed, 400+ year old boys school just because said school has put together a clever admissions and marketing campaign to persuade people that they know what they're doing - it isn't going to land as easily as they might hope.

Long and short: it’s not about one model being morally superior. It’s about acknowledging the world as it actually is, and understanding why different parents land in different places.

I can totally get behind this @Neverenoughflowers :
"Long and short: it’s not about one model being morally superior. It’s about acknowledging the world as it actually is, and understanding why different parents land in different places."

There will always be bias in schools as long as there is bias in society. The children in those schools are picking up the bias of the world around them, whether that's what their parents model at home or what they are exposed to on social media. The teachers are doing their best but are as prone to unconscious bias as any of the rest of us, and if society as a whole has trained us to give more weight to the views of men than women, that will often (not always) be reflected in the dynamics within a classroom.

That is not necessarily an argument for or against single sex education, but it's naive to assume that good management can just eliminate sexism from their school community. That community is a microcosm of our (still very sexist) society.