Bringing up Britain - radio 4

[AsTreesWalking]

Interesting discussion about single-sex education. But I started yelling at the radio when an American expert came on to argue against them - citing the most regressive, stereotypes of gender to show that we should mix girls and boys in order to expose them to the full range. Bloody hell, she was implying the things like an interest in maths might not be encountered if education is single sex...

How odd...when afaik the statistics show significantly greater uptake of subjects such as physics, maths, FM,and comp sci, tech subjects by girls in single sex schools than in mixed ones.

I do think context (and country) matters in these things. A lot of the 'famous names' girls schools here were set up by (proto)feminists. But there was some experimentation with girls schools in the US in the nineties (I think) that were really quite sexist in the way they were set up (there was a piss-take on the simpsons) and in Ireland for example girls schools often didn't teach higher level maths etc. Actually, i fyou look at subjects offered by single sex schools in Ireland, there is still a difference (home ec in all girls schools, woodworking much more). So I think you need country specific research, I don't know why they had an American on.

That's very interesting, River, I didn't know that. It does really change the context - so why did they have an American commentator I wonder?