Single-Sex Schools for Our Girls...Only?

When I arrived at college at a UC school, some teachers were not surprised to find out I had gone to all-girls junior and high schools. One even asked if I had done so, unprompted. I guess I answered more questions in class than many other female freshman.

While I’ve never been convinced I wouldn’t have been that way anyway, I can trace many personal strengths back to my single-sex schooling. In an all-girls school, there’s no one there but the girls to speak in class, and not just to answer questions, but to muse openly about their thoughts on topics from physics to Shakespeare. There’s no one else to be president of the student body, no one else to form a chess club, and no one else to be aggressive on the soccer field.

Too, judging by how unfocused my friends and I became during our after-school activities where boys were present, I can only imagine how much more distracted by drama we would have been if our school days were also co-ed. High school seems to be filled with enough of that with just girls alone, so far as I can tell.

In my experience, all-girls school creates self-reliant, academically accomplished, motivated, and serious young women.

Of course, most people do attend co-ed schools growing up and they turn out perfectly wonderful too. Also, issues like poor funding to inner-city schools and high drop-out rates are far more vexing education problems, especially these days. But while I watch my daughters become more aware of gender issues and the nascent concept of romantic love, I think over all-girls education for them one day, and am still on the fence.

If I had boys, it may have been different. My guy friends who went to all-boys schools in my area were the ones we went to dances with, did plays alongside and, went to parties with on weekends. On the whole, not having girls at school seemed to turn life into one big spitting contest for these boys who lacked any of the smoother edges boys from co-ed schools seemed to have. Close friends of mine confided once they got to college that they wished they’d learned how to better relate to girls on a day-to-day basis than they had in their all-boys school, that they often felt at a loss when it came to socializing with them. I’m not so sure they’d sing the praises of their single-sex education the same way my girl friends and I do.

I don’t think I’m alone in my biases. A 2009 British study found that girls schooled in single-sex institutions get significantly better test scores and stay in school longer than those in co-ed schools. Also, there’s a marked improvement if they were struggling students who then switched over to single-sex education.

But it may be that girls are the only ones who benefit from this kind of segregation. Evidence exists that having girls in the classroom is very beneficial to boys, both academically and (as I suspected) socially, and that single-sex schooling can even lead to higher divorce rates in men.

Perhaps it is an age-old scenario: The male presence may make the woman take a backseat in certain challenges, but the female tames the savage beast within to create a better human being all around. One may just want to shrug their shoulders and say, “C’est la vie.” It’s never been a more co-ed world out there than now, so perhaps everyone should get used to that fact early on.

Then again, I look at the information out there and the unbelievably lauded list of accomplished women I went to school with way back when, and the jury is still out. For me, it’s never a matter of if my kids will get exposed to the real world, it’s when. So if an all-girls school might be beneficial to them, especially if they seem more shy or more easily distractable, then they may just have to find their boys on the outside. Somehow, I happen to know, they’ll manage.