Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive

Mar

2009

Sex-Segregated Classrooms

Posted on 13:31, March 10th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

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The New York Times today published another article about single-sex classrooms. While there’s no mention of what happens to genderqueer kids or kids who otherwise present gender outside the traditional binaries in schools that divide the girls from the boys, they do at least include a few statements about how such classrooms reinforce stereotypes:

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said separate classrooms reinforce gender stereotypes. “A boy who has never been beaten by a girl on an algebra test could have some major problems having a female supervisor,” she said.

The best evidence of how problematic these sorts of classrooms can be, however, comes perhaps not surprisingly from the male teacher of an all-boy classroom:

he said he can “be a little more stern” with his students now. “If I get in the face of a girl, she would just cry,” he said. “The boys respond to it, they know it’s part of being a young man.”

Girls “just cry”. If this is the sort of attitude that a male teacher holds about girls, what do you think classroom conversations about girls and women are going to sound like? Despite their best efforts, apparent in this article, it’s impossible to select books that entirely exclude female characters: every little boy needs a mother. The way a group discusses a less-privileged group in the absence of any of its members has never been pretty.

Moreover, even if the girls spend time learning about strong women, they will certainly also read books with male protagonists. To avoid this would require avoiding too much of the canonical literature: the girls will learn about men, but the boys will not learn about women. This replicates the requirements of a patriarchal society in which women must know about men in order to survive, but men need not know much beyond how to derive pleasure from women’s bodies. Sex-segregated classrooms provide little opportunity for this paradigm to be challenged.

Finally, the all-girl classroom described would have been an absolutely miserable place for me growing up. Working in small groups (a method chosen because of girls’ supposed cooperating and nurturing tendencies) was always Hell for me; I would always have been the girl depicted in the article as left alone at her desk with her face in her hands, and no “I’m surprised at you” talk would have changed that, or if it did, I would have payed for it at recess or lunch. Then again, my Aspergian tendencies mean that some people would class me as having a manly brain, which to me seems like just another way of dismissing whole classes of women who don’t fit stereotypes, whereas classrooms like these simply try to erase such individuals.