Barbara McCarthy Same-sex schools next on list of things to go
‘SO WHAT can we liberalise next?” eager talking heads must surely ponder in the afterglow of repealing the Eighth Amendment.
Still riding on the vestiges of a commendable victory, campaigners and politicians are souped up like Rocky Balboa running up the steps of Philadelphia Museum of Art, punching their fists in the air.
Buoyed by oversharing personal stories with people who were also oversharing personal stories, self-congratulatory activists theorise about what barriers they can break down to make Ireland even more “open, equal, proud” than it is – if that’s even possible.
Now women can have abortions, a 32-county Republic and a formal separation of Church and State in the Irish Constitution are next.
Separating religion from schools is already in the works in this pluralistic nation of ours.
All Catholic primary schools will be prohibited from giving enrolment priority to baptised children in cases where they are over-subscribed, effective from September 2019. Nine out of 10, or 3,300, primary schools are Catholic.
A programme lead by Education Minister Richard Bruton will also examine transferring existing schools to multi- or nondenominational patronage.
“Parents of pre-school children are being surveyed in 16 areas across the country, asking if they would like to see more choice in their area,” he said.
What’s peculiar though, in these times of female empowerment and the dismantling of old boys’ clubs, is that parents still send their children to all girls’ and all boys’ schools.
Our society is so hell-bent on equality it’s odd that educational apartheid is still in operation and even encouraged. Does it not mean we are different when we are meant to be the same?
More girls need to become electrical engineers and forklift drivers, while boys need to do feminist dance in order to close the non-existent pay gap. How’s that supposed to happen if young people spend their formative years in same-sex enclaves? Do they teach feminist dance in boys’ schools?
Obviously tradition is hard to break, plus there are some excellent same-sex schools, which put emphasis on sports and achievement, so why open them up now after generations apart?
It wouldn’t make sense. But you have to ask – is there a subliminal message in same-sex institutions that students can only reach their full potential through the lack of male or female counterparts; also known as ‘gender distraction’?
In the past decade or more, girls have been outperforming boys. Last year they did so in every Leaving Cert subject, except maths. Those educated separately are even more likely to do well.
All we hear is rhetoric skewed towards the education of girls, whatever about the attainment of education for boys.
In 2016, 77 school-age children committed suicide, 66 of them boys. Clearly they are suffering way more, but that’s for another day.
Surprisingly though, girls in single-sex schools endured higher levels of exam stress compared to boys, a recent report by the youth group Comhairle na nÓg called ‘So, How Was School Today?’ showed.
It interviewed 3,242 young people in a survey which found girls in single-sex schools tended to be more negative about their experience of school than boys.
On the other hand, boys had
Our society is so hell-bent on equality it’s odd that educational apartheid is still in operation and even encouraged. Does it not mean we are different when we are meant to be the same?
greater support amongst their peers.
Girls are more competitive and, let’s face it, jealous too.
I can’t imagine growing up without boys in school. I went to two non-uniformed, mixed non-Catholic schools and we learnt the art of platonic male friendships early in life.
I can’t imagine not getting slagged by the boys and laughing my ass off in construction studies class, where I was the only girl.
When I left school for college, you could spot the slightly repressed, convent schoolgirl a mile off. Even now you can tell what school someone went to, 20 or 30 years after the fact – all-girls’ schools, private schools, mixed nondenominational schools, no school at all.
I feel sorry for those who missed
cornerstones of the teenage experience, which occur well before third-level education starts.
IN these PC times, where young people are fearful of relationships and sex, the last thing they need is more awkwardness derived from not hanging out during school breaks and teasing each other in the classroom. As a society, we’ve established that it’s not all about grades.
Across most of Europe, people just go to the school closest to them or the one that suits their capabilities. Here, parents bust their balls to send their kids to expensive, segregated private schools just to get an educational leg up, which may or may not bare fruit.
Obviously there are more mixed educational, non-religious opportunities across the country now, where they call Christmas holidays “winter holidays” in order to not offend anyone, which means there’s more choice.
Exclusivity isn’t in line with modern reality. We’ve all seen the effects that strict all-girls nun schools and all-boys Christian Brothers schools had on generations.
Many girls’ schools are nurturing fourth-wave feminism behind sequestered walls, which isolates and scares young men, while all-boys’ rugby schools get an awful bashing for their students’ apparent lack of respect for women, as the recent rugby rape trials in Belfast highlighted. So what’s the benefit?
We have to deal with each other after we leave school, so why not get it over with? Also, you’d miss boys around the place.