This House Believes Single Sex Schools Are Better For Education

I apologise. Unexpected opportunities for socialising arose. Well, you haven't really refuted my argument, you merely took the opportunity to focus entirely upon the academic aspect of education. Instinctively I suspected that there was far more at play than a simple coed / single sex dichotomy. Indeed, I know from personal experience that single sex schools are likely to be both highly selective and expensive. Satisfyingly, my thoughts are corroborated. "As Faye Crosby, a professor of psychology at Smith College, and other critics have observed, Tidball did not control for characteristics of women's colleges, apart from sexual homogeneity, that might well account for the success of their graduates. She did not allow for the socio-economic privileges shared by many graduates of elite women's colleges or for the selectivity of the schools."[1] Furthermore: "Tidball's subsequent finding, that single-sex schools produce more female achievers in the sciences and medicine, also collapses under scrutiny. Faye Crosby and her Smith colleagues found in a comparison of similarly selective single-sex and coeducational schools that "women's colleges are not more productive." There are no definitive comparative data on the benefits of single-sex colleges for women. "Data are slim," Crosby writes, "but they indicate that coeducational schools are as likely to produce women scientists as are women's colleges."[ibid. p.2] In the same article, there is also a comment by sociologist Cynthia Epstein regarding the apparent superiority of single sex schools: "There does not seem to be research support for this perspective". It does not seem to be true, then, that your study is reliable. Even if I were to grant the truth of your study, what would this prove? Apparently, that single sex schools are better for girls. My issue with this is that we are discussing education for both sexes, and so you must prove it is better for both. I notice that your arguments have, on the whole, been rather feminist - discussions of 'sexual harassment', the focus on girls, and the idea that men are the 'aggressors' (a key feminist tenet). In the debate over coed and single sex education there is in general a rather sexist attitude - boys are incapable of keeping their hands off the girls, who are in turn 'frightened' and 'bullied'. These are two classic genders stereotypes, and they are always perpetuated by the side arguing in favour of single sex education. This is suggests to me that instead of challenging sexual inequalities through education, those in favour of single sex education are in fact promoting sexual inequalities by pandering to gender stereotypes. In my eyes, the position of those in favour of single sex education's superiority are in this mindset: 'Rather than teach our students how to coexist with the other sex, separate them!'. If you desire to create a world where males and females are equal and cohesive, then they must be educated together, for if they spend their education believing that men and women are irreconcilable, then they will likely believe this for their adult lives too. [1]http://www.theatlantic.com...