Let them be children for a few more years

“Right. Just imagine, we'll have to wash our hair every night. We'll have to sleep on rollers til our scalps bleed. Then we'll have to get up at six every morning for the comb out. Your lungs will be lined with hairspray. Then you need all this equipment to push up the tits and blitz the zits and spray the pits! Then you stagger into class and you look perfect but you're exhausted, you're too tired to even think but that's okay the teachers they won't call on you anyway, also you don't want to be smarter than the boys,” says Verena Von Stefan, a character from the 1998 film All I Wanna Do.

All I Wanna Do is a prime example of one of the cons associated with co-education. Once all girls’ schools merged with boys, more time would be spent on trying to impress a boy than actually learning in the classroom. This is why co-education has been one of the most debated issues in the news recently.

Eliminating gender bias was one of the main reasons that people in the United States pushed for boys and girls schools to integrate early on. Although this is a good reason, there is more evidence to support the assumption that integrating actually put more emphasis on gender bias and less time eliminating it.

The plain truth is that boys and girls learn in different ways. Research shows that a girl's brain is different from a boy's brain. One size does not fit all. Co-education does not work for every child. Hence, the move to revisit the traditional notion of educating the sexes separately.

I am not saying that we should move back to the ideas that men and women hold the more traditional roles in society. For example, that girls should be nurses and teachers. Or that boys should be pilots and engineers, and so on. No, I view single sex education as an opportunity to capitalize on the learning differences inherent in boys and girls.

The social pressures are gentler. A child can grow at his or her own pace. Gender stereotypes are not a major factor and faculty at single sex schools understand how their students learn. They adapt their teaching styles to those specific needs.

According to About.com, “Private single sex schools are flourishing once again because parents have realized that learning is probably more important than being properly socialized.”

The exact opposite has been said when exploring the idea with students at Piedmont College who grew up in a co-educational society. Valarie Garrin, a business major at Piedmont, says, “Yes, there may be higher graduation rate or greater chance of college enrollment but what about developing social skills. The skills are pertinent in life when it comes to living in the ‘real world’ and how can one truly get those if they are not exposed to the opposite gender until they are in their late teens and early twenties?”

While this can be true, if a person would go sit in a public school that was co-educational, they would probably see boys fighting over a girlfriend, girls in mini skirts trying to impress a boy or girls walking down the hall pregnant at age 15. In no way am I advocating that students should be split because they are having sex or drinking alcohol. This could be done at any school, single sex or co-educational.

I feel strongly that children are subjected to an avalanche of pressures from every quarter to become adults before they are ready to do so. They grow up too quickly. Let them be children for a few more years. Single sex education with its gentler, more controlled social outlets is just the ticket for allowing this to happen while benefiting the educational learning differences between boys and girls at the same time.