Single-Sex School

By: Beisenbay Mukhanov

Before 19s there was not any choice to take single-sex or coeducation for American students, all schools were only boys’ or girls’ education institutions. Nowadays, the majority of schools in the U.S. are coeducational, and parents have opportunity to make a choice in which type of school their children will study. However, what kind of school has more advantages and more encourages the students to attain advanced knowledge is a matter of a controversy among different Americans. One part of the aforementioned issue is whether it is reasonable to renew only girls’ schools. Today, I will describe an article written by an opponent of the idea to return single-sex education.

In the essay titled “The Trouble with Single-Sex Schools,” the author Wendy Kaminer debates against the advocates of the revival of all-women school because the distribution of this type of school can cause the return to the division of sex roles. According to the writer, the studies claiming that the aforementioned institution encourages girls to reach higher education achievements than coed school do not actually provide solid evidence for this conclusion.Conversely, many social studies show that differences in female and male natures do not require isolated education to improve education results.Moreover,coed schools do not “shortchange” girls as some proponents of all-women school says because actually girls’ grades and educational skills have become higher for the last time. One of recent examinations reveals that differences in oral skills between girls and boys have reduced significantly and differences in math success are slight and lessening. Furthermore,some proponents who illustrate statistic data to support their position make the common error of mixing “correlation with causation”. The author exemplifies M. Elizabeth Tidball who made the aforementioned mistake when she did conclusion about the level of single-sex education according to the statistics that the rate of woman-college graduates who went to medical school or got doctorates in the natural or sociological sciences more than their rate among all graduates without considering such significant reasons which could explain this fact as female colleges’ features, socioeconomic privileges of their graduates. In addition, the Tidball’s study actually shows that coeducation generates female scientists as well as women’s colleges. Further, Kaminer asserts that the survey results provided by the advocates of the all-women education, demonstrating the low percentage of happy coeducational girl-students is useless because the interpretations of an answer “happy the way I am”proposed in the survey is highly subjective. Also, the contention that girls lose self-esteem in coed schools during their teens is not valuable because of the lack of the similar analysis of boys, so maybe it happens with boys as well as with girls because of adolescence or other reasons. In the end of reading passage the writer maintains that schools should be separated by genders only if there is experimental evidence that this leads to the higher rate of student successfulness. Moreover, a hundred and fifty years ago when women were excluded from men’s academies, the creation of first all-women schools was indeed a progressive step in fight for the equality of woman rights. However, today women have become freer as sexes have become less separated.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/04/the-trouble-with-single-sex-schools/304661/