by Athena Garner

Created on: July 15, 2008

As a veteran of all-girls' schools I believe strongly that single-sex education is an excellent way to turn young people into better students and more self-aware human beings. The current opinion on all-girls' schools is that they are places where women can excel without the pressure or distraction of male classmates. All-female schools have becoming more popular in recent years. In fact, now there is a move to create more public single-sex schools, thus enabling children from low-income families to attend. According to an article in USA Today entitled: "Critics are too hasty: All-girls schools may help," "The Bush administration wants to encourage more experimentation by removing the legal barriers that restrict all-boys and all-girls public schools" (1). This trend is partly due to the desire to improve girls' math and science abilities and test scores. Although this segregation is done with the best of intentions, it appears that this does not necessarily solve all educational problems. The girls may feel more confident and free to express themselves in such classes, but when tested, they do not come out much higher than girls in coed situations. So the main advantage of all-girls' schools seems to be the fact that girls have an easier time focusing on academics and feeling confident in them.

The focus of all-boys' schools may be to keep out the distractions of girls or to train boys for the military. In the first case, the driving idea is similar to that of girls' schools: learning is easier in a single-sex setting. Since up until the 20th century, the military has been virtually void of females in this country, military schools were naturally all-male institutions. The problem many boys' military schools are facing now is women wanting to enter and attend the school. Now that women are beginning to attend military schools, those schools that have remained all-male can no longer defend this status by saying that women simply do not belong in military schools. Their mission statements do not give any information as to why they remain single-sex. A good example is the mission statement of the Army and Navy Academy from the Boarding School Review website: "The mission of Army and Navy Academy is to develop scholarship and honorable character in young men and motivate them to realize their potential" (3). Schools such as The Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute have been forced to admit women in order to keep their outside funding. VMI actually considered

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>