However, I survived, and I swore if my sons are ever that unhappy with school I will find them an alternative that doesn’t have them suicidal and does get them educated.

I seem to have engendered two social butterflies, but I keep that in mind.

I think my private college was great. But I think gender segregation in public schools would do more harm than good, even when it’s done with the best of intentions.

At the very least it needs to be limited to special programs, and not be extended to full classrooms or, god forbid, entire schools.

Even if girls and boys do benefit from some same gender activities, I can’t see these benefits lasting very long if they aren’t involved mainly in mixed groups. Even if little girls participate more when the boys aren’t there, shouldn’t they also be taught how to speak up when they are?

But those are all lies or behavior codes fed to us by a society that devalues women.

I never said women were inherently like that. They’re encouraged to behave that way because straightforward aggressivity is not accepted in girls, so they express their aggressivity in a more indirect way.
Besides, I don’t actively refuse to form friendships with women at all. One of my closest friends is a woman, but I tend to be around men more because my tastes and activities are generally more popular among men than women (for instance, I listen to a lot of metal: you don’t see many women at metal concerts). I don’t necessarily feel like I’m “one of the guys”, I tend to have more in common with men than women. I don’t see why one should necessarily try to bond with people of one’s gender. As far as I’m concerned, gender (just like race, sexual preference or whatever) is irrelevant. If I find someone interesting and friendly, I don’t care if it’s a woman, a man, a dog or a gremlin.

The idea in separating them was to get the girls used to interacting and injecting ideas early so that when they did go together the participation of the girls in the classes didn’t drop off as commonly happened in the data looked at. The curriculum was the same. I don’t know how’s it going so far.

This a little different than in the story.

Also for the record, I hated Lord of the Flies though it was mostly because everyone in my class pronounced the name of the damn shell as Conch, ending in the CH sound. That is a correct pronunciation but by God, the more common one is “Konk” and by God I swore I would say “Konk” or die.

As you can tell I had little adversity in my English classes. I also summarized the opening of Beowulf as a “kegger.”

But maybe “normal” would have been different in a same-gender environment. Maybe I wouldn’t have been seen as bucking the social norm.

Let’s face it, members of a community want to enforce their ideas of social norms. One way to do that is to pick on them, laugh at them and generally degrade and devalue them.

Yes, they are private and thus draw on a group that is willing to work their butts off

*sighs*

Class privilege? Whatsthat? America is a meritocracy. The rich are rich because they work their butts off, unlike all those lazy working class kids who work menial jobs and don’t concentrate on their studies. Those bums!

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Misread me, BlackBloc. Really! I was referring to the points raised above in response to the first comments on women’s colleges producing strong leaders. Private schools have greater abilities to selectively take students than public schools, and greater leeway in kicking out the ones that don’t work out. Something which a public school – particularly a public elementary/secondary school as was under discussion in the original post — doesn’t have as many choices about.

Even the lazy bums are not only allowed but required to get an 8th grade education, after all — whether they’re rich and lazy or poor and lazy. (And I’ve taught in a few NYC private schools; those planning to live off Daddy’s and/or Mommy’s money for the rest of their lives can be even lazier than the worst of the middle- or working-class kids I’ve seen.)