Single sex or co-ed schooling?
children who will live in a co-ed world. Why is segregation still considered okay during our school years?
The usual answer is that both girls and boys do better academically at segregated schools. This is a much debated area, but research has certainly cast doubt on the conventional wisdom.
Girls and boys learn in different ways and do better at segregated schools, goes the argument. Boys are said to learn better by doing, and are more physical.
Another idea, much favoured by the parents of girls, is a feminist one. Girls in segregated schools get more chance to be heard and to learn without the domineering behaviour of boys. But the idea that girls and boys learn in fundamentally different ways has been seriously questioned by neuroscientists. And research has also shown that a good deal of the greater educational success of segregated schools is due not to different learning styles or alleged girl-friendly traditions, but to the effects of social class.
Children who go to segregated schools tend to be from wealthier homes and as a result tend to do better at school anyway, regardless of whether their school is segregated or co-ed. The link between class and educational achievement is pervasive and extraordinarily difficult to break. It is, in fact, the great unsolved problem facing mass education.A major 18-year longitudinal study of New Zealand children in 1999 showed that children at segregated schools tend to come from more settled families. This means those schools benefit from less disruptive and difficult students. When these social and economic factors were taken into account, the supposed educational advantage of segregated schools is much lower than raw achievement scores suggest, the study found. The other side of the argument is that segregated schools are less likely to prepare pupils for a co-ed world. And here the evidence seems substantial.Many former pupils from both sorts of segregated schools say that they were less prepared both for working and forming relationships in a world where the sexes mixed freely. This, in the end, is the stronger argument for co-ed schools, and may be one reason why segregated schools such as Scots are moving slowly to change.