The Ineffectiveness of Single-Gender Schooling

Single-gender classes have recently come back into vogue. According to GreatSchools.org, over 400 schools have implemented it to some extent, but despite its newfound popularity, this practice is outdated and antiquated, and should have been retired long ago, as it pros are far outweighed by its cons, such as difficulty in assimilation, the inherent oversimplification of gender-related behavior, and lack of empirical data.

School does not take place in a vacuum; it is meant for the express purpose of preparing students for adult life. This means more than learning how to balance a checkbook or do long division. It also means learning how to work in harmony with others, especially with those of a different background and life experience, which is arguably the largest part of being an adult. While extracurricular activities may also offer the opportunity to those currently attending single-gender schools, those activities are generally voluntary electives chosen by the child, and do not provide the same diversity of perspective as going to a coed school. This sheltering will only make adult life harder when students of single-gender schools are thrust into the real world.

Separating students by something as arbitrary as gender can only be harmful, enforcing rather than abolishing harmful social gender norms. The training teachers receive in regards to treatment of gender relies on a few generalizations: girls enjoy working in groups; boys prefer a more competitive environment; and so on. If schools were to uniformly switch to single-gender classes, what would happen to those that did not fit into that narrow worldview? Humans as a species are simply too unique to thrive on a template.

The single-gender schooling movement grew in response to the 1992 paper Failing in Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls by American University professors Myra and David Sadker, which made the claim that girls thrived in classrooms without the intervention of boys. This was followed six years later by a paper from the American Association of American Women called Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls, which contradicted this view. It postulated that, in fact, the quality of the learning experience relies more on the quality of the school than the gender ratio of the class, stating, “When elements of a good education are present, girls and boys succeed. Elements include small classes