DISSENTING OPINION: Call Off the Gender Police

As usual, the gender police have arrived on the scene with much aplomb but with little information. The criticism that several public schools—especially in New York City—have elicited over the past year for their decision to separate middle-school classrooms by gender is based on a body of unfounded assumptions, and, if anything, these schools should be praised for creating an educational environment that will enable early adolescents to learn with as few unnecessary distractions as possible.

While it is true that arbitrary segregation based on gender is inappropriate and unjustified, the facts of this particular educational initiative are more nuanced. While these schools do separate boys and girls, it is unfair to say that they “segregate” students, for any student wishing to learn in a coeducational setting always has the option to opt out of the program. Also, it should be noted that such separation exists only in middle-school classrooms and, for that matter, only in certain subjects. The schools themselves are not separated, and students are still afforded normal social interaction with peers of the opposite sex. The subject material that male and female students cover in their respective courses is identical; the only difference is that single-sex classrooms present that material in a more palatable way for students entering the awkwardness of puberty. Considering these facts, applying what is in this case the irrelevant “separate is unequal” maxim to this particular method of single-sex education diminishes both the cause of gender equality and the potential benefits of this new approach to education.

In other words, this new method is not a return to the sexual stereotyping of the 1950s or in any way a veiled attempt at recreating the “pink ghetto” of generations past; this is merely an attempt at ensuring that boys and girls learn as productively and as efficiently as they can during the brief period in which they acquaint themselves with their changing bodies and changing selves. For the first time ever, formerly sexless children are suddenly curious about members of the opposite sex, and such curiosity is confusing, disorienting, and distracting, at least for the first year or so. In a classroom setting, it goes without saying that young people of this age are preoccupied with other things besides algebra or sentence diagramming. If students spend these awkward years in single-sex rather than coeducational classrooms, the majority of those distractions are instantly eliminated. They can learn and focus in a comfortable environment in which they need not worry about the way they appear to members of the opposite sex. By surrounding students with others undergoing the same bizarre transformation, single-sex classrooms provide an atmosphere as conducive to self-exploration and self-understanding as to undistracted learning, an essential component to gender relations of any kind.

Those who unfortunately argue against this program claim that these few years spent apart might hinder a boy’s ability to relate to a girl, and vice versa, once he or she reaches “the real world.” But it must be understood that schools alone are incapable of determining gender relations. When schools segregated men and women before, such segregation was not the reason that men were allowed to feel superior to women or that women were taught to feel inferior to men. The sexism of the past stemmed from innumerable sources within society as a whole, and the schools “back then” did not create the awful sexual stereotypes; they merely reinforced them. And, since we no longer live in a society that promotes blatant sexism, we cannot therefore assume that single-sex classrooms—especially for periods as brief as a few years—could revive the disparate nature of gender relations that for so long defined this country.

What is perhaps most unsettling, though, is that this program’s detractors are discouraging educational experimentation in a time we need it the most. It is unfortunate that the unnecessary desire to be politically correct at any expense interferes with a commitment to the prospect of improvement.


James K. McAuley ’12, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Weld Hall.


Occasionally, The Crimson Staff is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting staff members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion.