This, I hope, will be less a rant than a refutation of a damn stupid remark and an impassioned defense of single-sex education. It's sparked by a recent CNN report on single-sex educaiton that quotes NOW Vice President Terry O'Neill as saying, "We think segregation has historically always resulted in second-class citizens."
Racial segregation, yes, without a doubt. Gender segregation, no. Not always. There are undoubtedly areas in which gender segregation works against women; exclusive men's clubs are one example because they deny women the networking opportunities that such clubs offer. I can't, in fact, think of a single instance of gender segregation in adult life that's particularly good for women or, in the long run, for men. This is not true of education though.
While there was undoubtedly a time when girls' schools could not offer the same quality of teachers or rigorous curriculum that boys' schools could, that's no longer true, and has not been since the second half of the 20th Century. Ms. O'Neill and the ACLU are badly mistaken about this, and I have to say I feel a bit betrayed by both organizations in this. It should not, at this late date, even be an issue, and I think it's a glaring example of preferring the letter of the law over the spirit of it, not to mention poor reasoning. I think the equation probably went something like this: the doctrine of "separate but equal" did not work for racial segregation, therefore it does not work for gender segregation. Unfortunately, this conclusion has no basis in evidence.
I feel particularly let down by NOW, because they're supposed to support programs and institutions that empower and improve women's lives. In this instance, NOW's official policy is not doing that. I haven't been able to discover where Ms. O'Neill got her own education, but I would suspect it was not at girls' schools or women's colleges. I've met quite a few women who went to one or both kinds of educational institutions and I've never heard any one of them say the experience was deleterious. On the contrary, many of them are high achievers and trailblazers—many more of them, proportionally than women who went to gender integrated schools. Having gone to both coed public schools and universities and a women's college, I can honestly say I wish I'd gone to a girls' school too. I think I would have had much more self-confidence in my abilities than I went into my undergraduate years with. This seems, indeed, to be the case not only with girls, but also with boys. Studies show over and over again that, in education at least, gender segregation is a good thing.
My own educational experiences are a pretty typical example of the differences between the two kinds of institutions, at least in the 70's. Girls in my public school were steered out of math and science to a large degree, unless they happened to be at the top of the class like two of my friends, or very determined, like I was. Most of the girls in the top ten percent of my graduating class, with a few exceptions (like my best friend, who was Valedictorian), had not taken AP courses and many of them were not even on the college track. Although my biology teachers (especially Kurt Schmidt) were largely encouraging, I learned nothing in chemistry class because I, along with the other girl in the class, was shunted to the side in the labs and largely ignored. We were not allowed to use the same equipment the boys were and had our experiments done for us by the teacher, as we were considered too stupid to work the glass pipettes and the bunsen burner. I coudln't even get into the physics class, taught only by the same teacher.
Two years later, I was running a $10,000 autoclave by myself as a work-study lab assistant at Chatham College, a small, liberal arts, women's college in Pittsburgh.
I did take AP biology, however, taught by Kurt, and while I didn't take the placement exam, I got a solid B and learned enough to place out of freshman biology entirely once I got to college. The reason I didn't take the placement exam was simply that I was afraid I'd flunk it, despite the fact that I'd done well in the course. My boyfriend was so much better at it than I was, and this was one way of not competing with him. I can only imagine how many other girls did the same thing for the same reason. It's so uncool to be smart in a teenage co-ed environment that many girls shortchange themselves by not trying or dumbing down. So do boys.
While I think that there is more awareness now of the differences in the way boys and girls learn, it's not solely about teaching techniques or the gender of the teachers. All of my science teachers at Chatham were men and you couldn't ask for a more encouraging faculty. There was never any question that we were capable of doing the work, no matter how complex or technical. Much was expected of us. My freshman year, after placing out of basic biology, I ended up taking what amounted to a graduate level course in marine biology. Daunting? You bet. Was there ever any question that I couldn't do the work? Only in my own mind. And I did do it, coming out of the class with another solid B. In the sciences, where the strict bell curve applies more often than not, this is a respectable accomplishment.
What I was given at Chatham was not just a good education, but an opportunity to discover what I could do because I had to, because there were no boys to jump in and take over or to divert the attention of the teacher. There was no way to be a passive observer in class because of both class size and because nobody else would carry the conversation if you wouldn't. I've been on both sides of the desk now, as both an instructor and a student and I can say how hard it is to make young women and girls speak up in a class that also has young men or boys in it. This is only anecdotal evidence but it's borne out but much more well-structured studies.
After four years of full participation in class discussions, labs, and extracurricular activities, it was a shocker to go back to a co-ed grad school and rediscover what it was like to have my comments interrupted or ignored or hijacked by male grad students and many of the profs. It wasn't something I'd noticed when I was in high school, but I had a new sensitivity to it now and it was suddenly glaring. I wasn't used to being interrupted or glossed over. I was surprised when I had to say "wait, I'm not done yet," or "I just made the same point a couple of minutes ago." I understood then why I hadn't bothered to participate much in class in high school. It's frustrating, even when teachers work to include everyone.
This isn't to say that single-sex education always works, or that it's always necessary. For one thing, it involves much more than just shunting kids off to separate facilities, as several California schools discovered. To make single-sex education work, the institution needs people who understand the different learning styles of both genders, and are dedicated to getting the most out of their students in the way that works best for them. Teaching a coed class is very different from teaching a class full of boys or a class full of girls, regardless of age. There's an entirely different dynamic in the room, depending on whether its co-ed, or all girls or boys. In other words, it takes retraining or rethinking what goes on in a classroom.
Of course, the big scary word in the middle of what should be a non-issue is "segregation." It's a word that's now loaded with the negative connotations of separate drinking fountains and sub-standard schools. Even the primary definition in the Cambridge American English Dictionary involves civil rights. That connotation seems to produce a knee-jerk reaction in people, which is not entirely surprising but still unfortunate. After all, on the rare occasions I do my own laundry I segregate the colors from the whites. Doing laundry becomes a loaded metaphor only because of our civil rights history. At least on the surface, Americans loathe anything that brings up those bad memories of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., et al.
Similarly, the phrase "separate but equal" leaves a bad taste in people's mouths, but this is what single-sex education is all about. Maybe a better phrase would be "equal but different." Americans tend to confuse equal opportunity (all of us having the same rights and opportunities under law) with equal ability (all of us being equally intelligent in exactly the same ways, which is obviously absurd). We like to think we're all the same, when in truth we don't even all have the same opportunities, regardless of what the law might say. What single-sex education is designed to do is, in that tired phrase, level the playing field in the same way racial desegregation attempts to do.
This is where the law is useful: in setting a basic standard from which to work. Otherwise, it's a blunt instrument with which to fix educational inequalities—if they need to be fixed. Education is inherently unequal; some students need more attention than others simply because of their abilities or lack thereof. Some just need to be pointed in the right direction and given the right tools. And this has nothing to do with intelligence. Sometimes the most intelligent students need the most attention; they're easily bored and lack self-direction. Teaching is as much art as science; law tends to be more about facts than about the flexibility required by classroom situations.
This is what I meant about the spirit of the law not being served by a blanket statement about segregation, and it's not the first time I feel I was let down by someone from NOW. My graduation speaker at Chatham was Eleanor Smeal, then-president of NOW and current president of the Feminist Majority. Our class was incredibly excited to have her as speaker, including me, but it was sadly disappointing. I nearly walked out of it, in fact, because I was so furious with message she was giving to young women like me, which was that politics was far more important than education. The Equal Rights Amendment was slated to be voted on that year and she insisted that working for its passage was far more important than getting an education—which is a nice conceit if you don't have to earn a living. Coming from a blue collar/lower middle class family in which I was one of the few kids to make it to college on either side, I'd had the importance of getting an education drummed into me early. It was the road to economic independence, and without that, you had no freedom to pursue anything else. This was one of my principle dissatisfactions with the early versions of Ms. Magazine. Its demographic was white upper middle class women with whom I had very little in common. That's changed now, but I still think education is women's primary path out of poverty and inequality, as it is for minorities. It's hard to fight the system when you don't know how it works or what tools you have to use against it.
And this is why I"m making such a fuss about single-sex ed. I know without a doubt that it gives girls and women a leg up in a world that's still largely male-dominated. Which is the only reason it's still an issue. But why is it an issue to women? Aren't we binding each others feet with that attitude? 
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