The Case for Segregation by Sex in Schools

 

I once worked for a Canadian college contracted to open a branch in Qatar. The one thing they insisted on, before signing the contract, was that men and women would be taught in the same integrated classes. This was a violation of local norms and customs, but was reluctantly agreed to. 

But this is a bad idea. The best studies we have show consistently that both boys and girls, men and women, do best when classes are segregated by sex. We used to know this—expensive private schools were once always segregates by sex, since we knew this gave their students an advantage.

Any teacher is surely aware, as I am, that boys and girls think differently, have different interests, and learn in different ways. If you have both sexes on the same class, at best, each of them is getting only 50% of the learning time. More often, one sex’s interests are sacrificed entirely to those of the other. Currently, it is boys who are suffering—the more so because most teachers are women. And the zeitgeist demands that girls be favoured over boys. We are losing generations of men as a result.

Leaving alone that, in a mixed sex classroom, attention wanders from the lesson to the opposite sex. After a certain age, it is an extreme distraction. And it is in the best interest of everyone that the young not be tempted or encouraged to engage in such activities earlier than necessary, and before they have full command of their passions and are in a position to raise children. The integrated classroom seems perfectly designed to set young people up for disaster.

So why did we start such a mad practice? Economics. In small rural communities: even students in different grades would need to share a classroom. But that is rarely the case now, in our urban culture. It certainly was not the case in Qatar.

There, and more generally, it is the influence of the civil rights movement in the US. Classes and schools were once, in the US South, segregated by race. And this was determined by the Supreme Court to be discriminatory: there was no such thing as “Separate but equal.” 

So the same logic was applied to the sexes, with disastrous results. 

The initial premise was false. There is such a thing as separate but equal: an example is the public and Catholic separate schools in Ontario. No Catholics feel discriminated against for having their own schools. Nol Anglophones in Quebec feel discriminated against for having their own schools. The problem in the US was disparate treatment, not segregation: the black schools were not as well funded.

The proof is that we are now at the point that US blacks themselves are demanding segregation wherever possible. As are “First Nations” in Canada. Black parents want their own schools; black students want their own lunch rooms, their own graduation ceremonies.

In the case of race, this seems relatively harmless, one way or the other. But in the case of sex, it seems obviously preferable.