Different curricula for girls and boys? Why??

[SuiGeneris]

Has anyone heard of different prep school curricula for girls and boys? I have just received the prospectus for a well-known London group of prep schools, and the boys' prep covers all the usual subjects, including classics, at Common Entrance and scholarship level, while the girls' school has a third of the teachers, does not do classics and does not seem to have a scholarship option either.

Up to now I had quite a good opinion of that particular set of schools (after all, that's why I sent for a prospectus), but have now changed my mind- would definitely not send a girl there, and probably not a boy, who would get the impression that girls' education is less important and dumbed down.

Has anyone come across anything similar? Why?

It may depend on the senior schools they feed and whether they take the majority of girls at 11+ rather than 13+(CE) and use their own admissions tests to determine entrance and scholarships. No such distinction is made at dc's school but independents are free to determine their own curricula.

DD's prep is part of a "family" of schools and for the 11+ the girls do VR and boys NVR, this is supposed to play to each gender's strengths. Actual curriculum is the same though.

And at my prep school, (and others I know of) Classics was strictly for those who couldn't cope with the challenge of Latin or a second MFL at CE so I wouldn't be too worried that it wasn't offered.

Sorry, non-native English speaker: what are VR and NVR? I used classics as shorthand for Latin and Greek (though in that particular school only the former is part of the curriculum, the latter is a club).

Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning.

It's very dangerous offering a different curriculum for boys and girls; it will take us back to the dark ages.

I've just been reading 'Women in Cambridge' about the struggles the women who founded Newnham and Girton went through to get women accepted at Cambridge University.

The founder of Girton was adament that women should do the same as the men. Henry Sidewick who founded Newnham was less sure about this, but that's because he was very unhappy about the men's curriculum and thought it needed reform. (Too much Greek and not enough science).

Anyway, if women were campaigning for girls to get the same education as men in 1870, then we don't want to start offering something different.

Sorry to sound so political!