More public schools splitting up boys, girls.

[Le Socialiste]

If this has already been brought up in a thread, a mod/admin can delete it. If not, seems like there's a discussion to be had:


In 2002, only about a dozen schools were separating the sexes, according to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, an advocacy group. Now, an estimated 500 public schools across the country offer some all-boy and all-girl classrooms.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/more-public-schools-splitting-up-boys-girls-1.3826488

[Book O'Dead]

I read that article. It doesn't surprise me, though. Nor does it alarm me too much.

I went to Catholic school most of my school life. Up until 6th grade my classroom was divided between boys and girls, each sitting on one side or the other. In third grade my teacher, Sister Beatrice got mad at me for talking too much (now you know where I get it from!), so she sat me on the girls' side intending to embarrass me into being quiet. It didn't work. I was so delighted with sitting with the girls that I started to flirt and joke around with the them. Sister B got so mad she paddled me in front of everyone and stuck a piece of scotch tape over my mouth.

When I got home I complained to my mom about the tape and the paddling and Sister B got into trouble.

[Dumb]

I don't think I would have been able to survive in an all-guys scenario. I always had a harder time relating to males and socializing with them...I hate the assumption that I would somehow belong in a school with such-and-such people because we all happen to have dicks in common.

[Agent Ducky]

I don't think I would like being in an all-girls school. My current school has a pretty skewed gender ratio right now (which is okay) but my Spanish class last year had only 2 guys in it and I just felt alienated. There was an over-saturation of "girliness" for lack of a better word. They could all fawn over Enrique Iglesias in the video our teacher showed us and talk about shopping or whatever the fuck while I just sat there, awkwardly silent for the most part, much like the 2 guys in the class.
And that if I were at an all-girls school that might mean that, like in that class, everything is skewed/catered towards people who are more "feminine" than I am. Which in a way can be oddly more alienating to me than being in online environments and playing videogames that are skewed more towards men.
For that reason, I personally would strongly disapprove of separating schools like that, because I know I'm not the only one who would dislike that environment. Plus there's a whole slew of problems that could arise with trans* students that would just be even more alienating for them.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I think gender may actually be a secondary consideration in the motivation to promote this kind of set up.

I think these parts of the article are suggestive:

Single-sex classes began proliferating after the U (http://www.newsday.com/topics//University_of_Miami).S. Education (http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/more-public-schools-splitting-up-boys-girls-1.3826488#) Department relaxed restrictions in 2006. With research showing boys, particularly minority boys, are graduating at lower rates than girls and faring worse on tests, plenty of schools were paying attention.
...
Galen Sherwin, staff attorney with the ACLU Women's Rights Project, said its history in public schools is much darker and has roots in the South, where it was broadly instituted in an effort to evade the desegregation requirements of Brown v. Board of Education to try "to prevent black boys from being in the same room as white girls." "In the wake of Brown, many schools in the south integrated racially but segregated on the basis of sex," Sherwin said.
While I don't think the point of sex-segregation after Brown or today was really racist in the sense of white people not wanting black boys and white girls mingling (though I'm sure that that was a part of it and a way to motivate bigots to support this after Brown). I think it has more to do with our ruling class and school system trying to find a way to erode the concept of public education being for everyone. The education (de)formers in the US always say that this new test-score regime or charters or whatever else are to "help low-performers" and yet they almost all end up (outside of maybe some small test case-study schools that are basically used to legitimize ideologically promote one of these attacks on public education) making public education more exclusive.

I think really the motivation here is how to re-instate a kind of school segregation where schools can basically just house rural and urban poor kids - who will be disproportionately black and latino - in a sort of pre-prison. They would say, well boys are more rambunctious and not as studious and so that's why they have poor test scores and girls have better scores... and we'll also fund the girl programs more because we want to focus on achievement. When you look at employment - particularly for black folks, you see that over the last generation there's been a lot more unemployment or low-paid employment for men while black women have done a little better in the shift away from blue collar to service dominated job situations. I think the ruling class consensus on education is that they don't need everyone to have it as much as in the past and so they are trying to figure out how to cut back in certain areas for certain kinds of people without looking like they are just kicking the poor out of schools directly.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I read that article. It doesn't surprise me, though. Nor does it alarm me too much.

It damn well should. Boys and girls need to learn how to work with each other, and segregating them into different classes is the precise opposite of what is necessary to achieve that.


I went to Catholic school most of my school life. Up until 6th grade my classroom was divided between boys and girls, each sitting on one side or the other. In third grade my teacher, Sister Beatrice got mad at me for talking too much (now you know where I get it from!), so she sat me on the girls' side intending to embarrass me into being quiet. It didn't work. I was so delighted with sitting with the girls that I started to flirt and joke around with the them. Sister B got so mad she paddled me in front of everyone and stuck a piece of scotch tape over my mouth.

When I got home I complained to my mom about the tape and the paddling and Sister B got into trouble.

Trouble? She should have been arrested for assault!

[Agent Ducky]

It damn well should. Boys and girls need to learn how to work with each other, and segregating them into different classes is the precise opposite of what is necessary to achieve that.



Trouble? She should have been arrested for assault!

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that this was back when corporal punishment was a totally okay thing to do and if you arrested all of the people who did that you'd have a good chunk of parents and teachers in the system. I could be wrong though.

[Landsharks eat metal]

I don't think I would like being in an all-girls school. My current school has a pretty skewed gender ratio right now (which is okay) but my Spanish class last year had only 2 guys in it and I just felt alienated. There was an over-saturation of "girliness" for lack of a better word. They could all fawn over Enrique Iglesias in the video our teacher showed us and talk about shopping or whatever the fuck while I just sat there, awkwardly silent for the most part, much like the 2 guys in the class.
And that if I were at an all-girls school that might mean that, like in that class, everything is skewed/catered towards people who are more "feminine" than I am. Which in a way can be oddly more alienating to me than being in online environments and playing videogames that are skewed more towards men.
For that reason, I personally would strongly disapprove of separating schools like that, because I know I'm not the only one who would dislike that environment. Plus there's a whole slew of problems that could arise with trans* students that would just be even more alienating for them.

I know what you're saying exactly. My senior year of high school, the marching band buses were split because a few of the couples were taking PDA too far. This was before I'd figured out I was transgender, so I got shoved on the one bus with a lot of really loud obnoxious girls who were just constantly shrieking and they kept yelling about how it was "the estrogen bus". It all made me very uncomfortable and agitated and I ended up almost flipping out on them because they were playing a song on the radio and singing a totally different song at the top of their lungs. I got moved to the quieter girl bus, but I really would have preferred the boys' bus. They were also loud, but in a much less obnoxious way, and the chaperones played trivia games with them and gave them candy.

So, yeah... definitely awful for trans people. And that was just a few hours a week.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that this was back when corporal punishment was a totally okay thing to do and if you arrested all of the people who did that you'd have a good chunk of parents and teachers in the system. I could be wrong though.

I gathered that. Thankfully the law seems to be catching up with ethics these days. Even though I started my school years before they made corporal punishment illegal in UK schools (1999 I think), I have been lucky to have only been struck once by a teacher.

The previous ubiquity of corporal punishment in schools makes it all the more important to change attitudes in this area. There are still too many people who think hitting kids is a substitute for teaching discipline and self-control. Just look at the reader comments of any Daily Mail article which deals with wayward youth or unruly children.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I gathered that. Thankfully the law seems to be catching up with ethics these days. Even though I started my school years before they made corporal punishment illegal in UK schools (1999 I think), I have been lucky to have only been struck once by a teacher.I don't think there was ever a period of such punishments in US public schools... until now. Now most public schools have cops on campus, they conduct drug raids of lockers, and there have been increasing incidents of cops handcuffing extremely young children (often in poor areas) or using physical force against even elementary-age children. Often it's a principle calling in the campus police to deal with disciplinary situations.


Four children arrested, handcuffed after playground fight
Police led children, ages 8 and 9, out of school

March 30, 2012|By Peter Hermann, The Baltimore Sun

Seeking to end a spate of playground disputes that authorities said escalated well past a typical fracas, Baltimore police officers went into an elementary school this week and took four children out in handcuffs.

But news of three 9-year-old girls and an 8-year-old boy shackled Thursday afternoon inside Morrell Park Elementary School — and then held for nearly 12 hours in a juvenile detention center nicknamed "Baby Booking"— has riled relatives and raised questions about whether the arrests were proper under state law.And this quote below is from a good story by the Guardian about school police in Texas... which in that state alone gave out as many tickets to children in 2010 as there were prisoners in the entire US in any year before the 1980s!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools


In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools#) children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I don't think there was ever a period of such punishments in US public schools... until now. Now most public schools have cops on campus, they conduct drug raids of lockers, and there have been increasing incidents of cops handcuffing extremely young children (often in poor areas) or using physical force against even elementary-age children. Often it's a principle calling in the campus police to deal with disciplinary situations.

If they effectively criminalise a significant proportion of the population through increasingly draconian and prison-like schools, just where do the shitbags encouraging this kind of shit think it will end up leading?

If people are taught from an early age to expect little from the authorities except arbitrary violence and being treated like "pre-criminals" if not criminals outright, then will that not create a situation where the moral legitimacy of the authorities has been completely undermined?

It just doesn't make any sense to me. Unless one somehow thinks that fear and respect are one and the same. But they aren't, otherwise slaves would never rebel.

[Per Levy]

If people are taught from an early age to expect little from the authorities except arbitrary violence and being treated like "pre-criminals" if not criminals outright, then will that not create a situation where the moral legitimacy of the authorities has been completely undermined?

i guess, the people who come up with this think that if you punish disobidience, even childish disobidience, right from kindergarten on they will never think of doing something wrong in the future. beating obidience into the children and shit like this. i dont get it either.

[Manic Impressive]

Corporal punishment was banned in the UK in 1987 and finally in private schools in 1999. I heard a funny story about how the vote in parliament went. Apparently the vote took place on the same day as the wedding of the Duchess of York and Prince Andrew and many tory mp's didn't attend the house meaning that labour could get a majority :p

[Jimmie Higgins]

If they effectively criminalise a significant proportion of the population through increasingly draconian and prison-like schools, just where do the shitbags encouraging this kind of shit think it will end up leading?

If people are taught from an early age to expect little from the authorities except arbitrary violence and being treated like "pre-criminals" if not criminals outright, then will that not create a situation where the moral legitimacy of the authorities has been completely undermined?

It just doesn't make any sense to me. Unless one somehow thinks that fear and respect are one and the same. But they aren't, otherwise slaves would never rebel.As far as derailments go, mine probably wasn't too bad, but since there are specific gender aspects to the story in the OP that deserve to be discussed, I created a new thread about the issue of school policing.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/things-us-school-t173447/index.html?p=2478557#post2478557