If George Bush, Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy all agree on
something, it’s probably too good to be true. That’s my initial
take on the administration’s recent proposal, backed by key
Democrats in Congress, to encourage
single-sex public schools.
Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison summed up the rationale
in a form designed to please everyone from conservative Christians
to militant feminists:
“Many boys do better in a single-sex atmosphere without the
extraneous distractions of girls,” she said. “Similarly, many girls
do better, especially in terms of speaking up and being assertive,
without the extraneous distractions of boys.”
The website of the National Association for the Advancement of
Single Sex Public Education (NAASSPE) offers evidence for
this and other claims on behalf of his-and-hers education. No doubt
they’ve got a strong case, for those who put stock in social
science.
But as a survivor of six years of all-boys schooling, I’m not
ready to lend my endorsement. I’m grateful for the good teaching I
received and the friends I made, but I can’t see why the presence
of girls should have interfered with either of those.
What makes people think they can keep the opposite sex off
adolescent minds merely by keeping it out of sight? I’ll bet my
classmates and I thought more about girls than we would
have done had there been any nearby.
Or rather, we fantasized about the female images offered us
through the media, starting with the likes of Olivia Newton-John
and Farrah Fawcett-Majors, and quickly descending to the featured
models (names long forgotten) in Hustler and
Club.
It’s hard to imagine even the geekiest eighth-grader bringing
such hard-core fare to school (as half a dozen of us regularly did)
when there’s the danger of being humiliated in front of female
classmates.
Teenage libido is a fact, and sign, of life. As long as your son
or daughter is going to have lustful thoughts, wouldn’t you prefer
some of those thoughts to be about flesh-and-blood peers — whose
hearts and minds he or she might actually get to know and
respect?
This is not an endorsement of underage sex, which has more to do
with cars and lack of curfews than with co-ed algebra classes. On
the other hand, as long as boys and girls meet at parties and other
after-school activities — and nobody outside the Taliban seems to
be calling for a ban on those — there will be opportunities for
mischief.
Indeed, if the two groups never get together except at dances,
how are they supposed to think of each other in any way but
romantically?
Not that such occasions are necessarily swing fests. In my
experience (admittedly a bit out of date), the result is less often
passion than humiliation.
I remember one dance at which the chaperones, mothers who’d
obviously forgotten their girlhoods, insisted on pairing everyone
off using numbers picked out of a hat. Naturally several of us,
after learning whom we’d drawn, found ourselves needing to visit
the men’s room. (Our sports teams were called the Cavaliers, but
chivalry was as common as actual horseback riding.)
You may object that, in co-ed schools, such rejection goes on
five days a week instead of the occasional Friday night. But a
single smile or kind word makes up for lots of rebuffs and bungled
overtures. Surely high school isn’t too early for boys and girls to
start learning the real differences between them, as well as their
common humanity.
