Single-sex classrooms

As the article points out, studies have shown that when boys go to single sex classrooms they end up closing the large gender gap and even surpassing the girls in single sex classrooms. Boys would be achieving a lot more in an environment that is male friendly. Women know this and are threatened by it.

Also, it is dangerous for a White male with conservative views to teach in a public school classroom. Especially one who will demand students meet standards. One false accusation of sexual harassment and – BOOM- your life is over.

Single-sex classrooms
by C.R. on 03/01/2013

Hugs Schwyzer writes:

When it comes to what we’re taught about men, sex, and self-control, most of us learn one maxim early on: “a hard dick has no conscience.” The wording may vary, but the claim is always the same: guys, especially young dudes who are still in or just emerging from the testosterone tsunami of puberty, are powerless in the face of their own libidos. Women must protect themselves from men (and men from themselves) by being careful not to provide the sort of visual distractions that can lead to erections and the disasters that might follow.

Nah, that’s not really what “we’re taught” or what “we believe”. Most people just believe that men are generally more prone to lusting which can get them in trouble with polite society. It’s not that men can’t function at all, it’s that in a given population, more men than women will make more poor choices because of lust. Men can tamp down that force of nature, but it is generally more difficult for men to restraint than for women.

The point of Schwyzer’s argument is to dispel the notion that boys often suffer academically because they are distracted by girls. The title of the piece is “Hot Girls in Tight Clothes Do Not Keep Boys From Learning”. The answer to that strawman is, no, of course girls in tight clothes don’t keep boys from learning. But it perhaps hinders their educational outcomes.Schwyzer is responding to a piece from The Atlantic in which a female teacher claims that female students need to cover up their bodies so that they don’t tempt their male classmates. A similar discussion is being had at The Good Men Project over the allure of yoga pants, though that discussion is not focused on school. Schwyzer writes:

But what about the boys? Lahey’s slutshaming couched in feminist rhetoric is so exasperating that it’s easy to miss another obvious problem: the insistence that young men can only be thoughtful when they’re not turned on. “I hate having to worry that being able to see a girl’s underwear will so addle the boys’ brains that they will be unable to concentrate in science class,” Lahey laments. She’s hardly alone in making the calculation that visible panties lead to a rapid transfer of blood from the male brain to a straining erection. To the modesty peddlers, male cognition and compassion hinge on flaccidity; with boys already supposedly falling behind in school, keeping dicks soft is presumably the way to keep their owners’ grades up.

I thought that research on single-sex classrooms might push the discussion in a positive direction.Schwyzer might not like the conclusions of much of this research which suggests that not only is the sight of girls in tight clothes distracting to boys, but the mere presence of girls in the classroom hinders boys’ education. Schwyzer’s rebuttal would probably be that boys aren’t socialized to have to deal with sexual impulse the same way that girls are which is just a grand assumption not based in any fact… even after all of these years of blank-slatist hand-ringing.

Now, research on single-sex classrooms is not definitive; there is still a lot of controversy over whether or not single-sex classrooms are beneficial to all students. Race and class are important factors in the discussion.It is plausible that wealthy kids from intact homes would perform better in co-ed classrooms. They often fare well despite all sorts of potential distractions.

Research conducted by Kathy Piechura-Couture provides an interesting starting point. She looked at reading scores for Florida fifth-graders.Controlling for various variables, she found that 68% of boys in co-ed classrooms were proficient versus 95% of boys in single-sex classrooms. Girls likewise increased, but less dramatically. Seventy-five percent of female co-eds were proficient while 91% of girls at single-sex classrooms reached that threshold.

Piechura-Couture’s look at 4th grade test scores found the same trend.Boys’ proficiency increased from 37% to 86% and girls’ from 59% to 75% at co-ed and single-sex classrooms respectively. The big caveat here is that these are elementary school classrooms. I tend to think that the distractions for boys reach an apex during their high school years.

This suggests two things:single-sex schools are beneficial to students in general in terms of academic performance (socialization is another question, perhaps), and boys stand to gain the most from a switch to single-sex settings. We can hypothesize as to why boys would improve the most: fewer discipline problems arising from the very boy-like need to show off for girls and to try to get attention from girls, and a greater ability to concentrate on schoolwork.

A further point: Schwyzer claims that a lot of the behavioral problems that manifest in boys stem from them being socialized differently than girls. What’s off about that argument is that the higher rates at which boys are disciplined by schools suggests that they are being socialized in a certain way. Yet they continue to exhibit greater discipline problems and certain discipline problems centering around lust.Basically, schools socialize boys to be less boy-like and more girl-like, yet boyishness sustains and grows into something else during adulthood.

Source: http://glpiggy.net/2013/03/01/single-sex-classrooms/

 

I don't know. I always picture single-sex classrooms as boring with everyone dressed in the same clothes.

Although in my early grade school years I would have been happy to have all the girls shipped off to concentration camps or somewhere else out of sight.

Imagine the surprise on my face when sitting in a treehouse with a couple friends around that time in my life when I was informed of what use girls really were. "No, you guys are kidding me! ....That's impossible!!"

 

Reminded me of the time when I was about 14... trying to talk a girl out of her knickers.... she said, "I'm NEVER going to do that".

 

I went to an all guys private school for 3 years before convincing my parents to let me go back to a coed public school lol. They were at the top of the state in academics and athletics though. No distractions really in school except sports. Everyone was required to play sports there, but they had a million options and they did allow debate to count as a sport for the nonathletic lol.