The wrong prescription

Last week, the Department of Education made it significantly easier for public schools across the nation to open same-sex schools in their districts. To me, this seems like an attempt to remedy issues with the American education system by misdiagnosing the situation. Supporters of same-sex schools believe that because of the inevitable social pressures at school, kids aren’t learning as well as they could and by removing the presence of the opposite sex, these pressures will dissipate and the educational process will be improved. Unfortunately for them, there is no basis for this assumption in studies, the law, or even in common sense.

Studies done on this method of education are currently woefully incomplete. So far, the Department of Education has declared that there is “a lack of high-quality research” in this area and despite these studies not taking into account high-impact factors such as socio-economic and student ability levels, they show no difference in college test scores, graduation rates, or graduate school attendance. At this time, there is no solid proof that same-sex schools work. In fact, it would seem that there isn’t any proof that they work.

Another wrench thrown into the same-sex education machine is Brown v. Board of Education, the famous Supreme Court case. This was a famous civil rights lawsuit in which the Supreme Court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” At the time, the immediate effect of this was the integration of schools that were racially segregated.

This ruling does not necessarily need to stop at racial segregation. According to the Supreme Court, any segregated public school is inherently unequal and therefore, illegal. Same-sex public schools could be created with the best of intentions, but it would be impossible to guarantee that separate facilities would always be equal. (Keep in mind that this ruling doesn’t apply to private schools - they can do whatever they want.)

Despite all this, it is important to keep in mind that a person’s education, especially pre-college education, is so much more than learning English, math, social studies, and science. You also learn to take responsibility, work hard, organize, deal with stress, and perhaps most importantly, to get along with other people.

By removing half of a student’s peers (and to make matters worse, the more confusing half), you are eliminating an essential part of that student’s education - their experience in working with and interacting with the opposite sex.

As a male, I know that working and interacting with women is very different from working and interacting with guys, and I am sure that it’s the same the other way around. With going to a co-ed high school, I would have never learned one of the most important lessons high school has to teach: figuring out the opposite sex, both socially and professionally.

While supporters of same-sex schools will claim that students of all-boys or girls schools will have the opportunity to see the other gender outside of school or at special activities, these extracurricular interactions are too infrequent and idealized to truly allow the sexes to learn to deal with each other. Going on a date and struggling to finish a project before a deadline are two very different social encounters, but one should be competent at both to be a functioning member of society. Students at same-sex schools are deprived of the experience necessary to excel at the latter.

I have had it with educational activists attempting to remove social stresses from schools, and this attempt at bringing same-sex schools to the public arena is just their latest effort. The fact of the matter is that learning to deal with bullies, stress, and the opposite sex is exactly what grade school is really all about, and when you attempt to remove all these things, you will just end up with a bunch of wimps who are afraid to talk to people but can do triple integrals in their head and name every king of England since 1500. Same-sex schools do not belong in public education.