Fixing America’s education system has become a fashionable thing to do of late; ever since No Child Left Behind was enacted (with the promise of fixing education once and for all) there seems to be no end to the wacky ideas that some people have come up with. In case you have any doubts that public education is broken, look no further than Kozal’s Savage Inequalities. It is an (entertainingly) dim view on the failure of public education. I should know, cause even my school, Bowen James High School, is included. There is nothing more inspiring than picking up a book in college and finding out just how bad adults failed you when you needed them most. But I digress, we were talking about those wacky ideas that people have about public education, and no idea is as simple as separating the boys from the girls.
We seem to think that by removing the bad influence of boys, we can create a challenging and comfortable environment for girls to prosper. At the same time we can remove the influences of sex and make everything nice. Who would argue against this, after seeing girls excel in math and get improved test scores? Probably the same people who have to work with men and women, that’s who! Separating children based on their sex is just a bad idea. While it may be that some girls do perform better in math or whatever subject you wish to test them on, the undeniable fact is that society is made up of both sexes. You risk creating dysfunctional adults. Women who find themselves fascinated by the opposite sex, but who are uncomfortable around men. The same scenario applies to men. If not think about what you are saying to children: that girls cannot compete with boys, so you are in fact lowering their standards, and for boys, that perhaps they cannot comport themselves around girls, so they have to be separated from them?
The problem is gender, but after so many years, we still have not addressed it properly. We still expect girls to be nice and pretty, and boys to be rough and athletic. We perceive sexual drive in boys as natural, and in girls, well it is just plain naughty. Ultimately, the sexes are not equal, because we are still perceiving their success on different standards. If we were to apply the same standards to both sexes, like we were suppose to do twenty years ago, we would not be having this conversation at all. Today we talk about how boys are being left behind, how they cannot compete against the girls, how we expect boys to be quiet like girls, or how girls are not as successful in engineering, or how women still earn less than men… we still have not solved gender discrimination, we just talk like we did.
As segregating by sex is likely not the answer, why do school’s segregate by age? Shouldn’t at least one class a day be of student’s of mixed ages so that younger students can learn from older students and all students learn to have more respect for each other and learn to get along? Why do we segregate so strictly by age? I know two people who turned out very well and they went to one room school houses.
I never thought about segregation by age, but I think you are right. Even though I never played sports in school, I would have to say that the older I get, the more I see sports as a great model for building character and respect. The problem is you really need to have the right coach and too often finding a coach who can win games and who is also a great teacher is hard to find.
Yeah, we tend to segregate ourselves by age even as adults since that is what we are taught in school.
I like that in tennis I can play high school kids and senior citizens and learn alot about how people think at different ages in their lives. Young tennis players tend to think that the harder they hit, the better but it usually backfires and they get frustrated quickly. Older players are craftier and usually calmer but don’t move as well and will tell you about their latest surgery that you really don’t want to hear about!