We need each other

No cheap pun from another tradition intended but may I add to Brendan Bonner’s challenge to Scots’ principal about restrictions of single-sex schooling (letters, Jan 19) – in all of our inner cities’ straitjacketed traditions especially.

The principal of Adelaide’s Scotch College, Dr John Newton, baldly stated three years ago he didn’t understand why parents wanted to send their children to schools ‘‘where they miss out on that vital piece of emotional intelligence: how to work with the opposite sex’’.

Despite he and his wife being products of single-sex schooling they ‘‘wouldn’t dream of it’’ for their four children as ‘‘cooperating with the opposite sex was a vital skill in the modern workplace’’.

Some may balk at his longer bow: ‘‘The global economic meltdown is an example of what single-sex education does to you – men thinking like men in the international banking systems who had never learned to listen to or work with women.’’

But fears co-eds ‘complicate things’ or are either-or for academic achievement are countered by research controlled for socio-economic factors — and their products of human maturity.

We know more puritanical cultures favour separation but in Oxford-educated Newton’s 35-year experience, ‘‘graduates of singlesex schools carried an emotional handicap that could last 20 years’’. STEVE LIDDLE Napier