I've been thinking a lot over the past few days about our discussions of sex segregation in schools. Recently, my 14-year-old niece has been having problems at school with different boys teasing her and touching her. Her complaints have been mostly ignored by many of her teachers, who tell her to stop talking to so many different boys or to just stay away from them. However, they refuse to change her seating assignments and continue to assign group projects where she has to regularly work with the same boys. So she asked me the other day what she was supposed to do. Other than getting really frustrated by the attitudes of her teachers, I really had no good answers for her other than to talk to her parents to see if they can figure out a better solution with the school.
To me, she would benefit from a sex segregated school, and I wonder how many other teenage girls go through the same things and would benefit from a sex segregated solution. Apparently, a school in Georgia was thinking the same thing this week. I came across this story on MSNBC.com.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23338384/
What if sex segregation would make the girls feel safer as my niece implied? Yes, we don't want to be protectionist when it's not necessary, but what happens when a school refuses to protect individual students because there is no good way to keep them away from the other sex?
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When I was in 7th grade, my school tried an experiment. They separated boys and girls for one quarter. At the end of the quarter, they decided not to continue. The primary reason I remember for the decision was that, while the program seemed quite beneficial for the girls in many respects, the boys were nearly uncontrolable! The boys focused on out-doing each other with pranks and disruptive behavior. The teachers had a very difficult time getting the class to focus on school work. Not all the boys behaved badly, but the ones who did distracted the others so badly that lessons went uncompleted. The teachers couldn't stand it any longer. On the other hand, the consensus was that the girls focused better on school work, raised their hands more often, and were generally more engaged in the lessons. As far as grades, girls improved that quarter while the boys' acheivement declined. As a female, I am all for sex segregation! However, if I become a mother and have a boy, I might not be so eager based on my past experience...
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