Problems with Co-Education

Well!

I think that you have worked hard and i found you as an opponent of co-education. We are Muslims, and we should not forget that and in Islam, it is strictly prohibited for girls and boys meet together and having free discussions, chatting and laughing with each other (just like we see in our institutions offering co-education). So, co-education should be strictly prohibited, because it has more disadvantages than its advantages.

Confidence and sel-esteem can be developed in a single-sex class, but for it having a mix-sex class is not a good idea. Because, this usually gives birth to bad and dangerous social practices.

Thanks &
Very Well Done Hafsa

`` In females, there is an intact connection between the left and ride sides of the brain, while in males, the connection is broken. Hence, female students are more productive in the sense that they can pay attention to many aspects of their education simultaneously, while the male students can only concentrate on one aspect at a time. ``


Dear Hafsa,
The deceptively simple scheme that you have presented above, is a gross oversimplification and an unwarranted generalization of a biological complexity. It is misleading to refer to the brain as if it were connected in a way similar to hardwired electronic devices.

The neural system connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is called Corpus Callosum. There are conflicting studies about the size of Corpus Callosum, with some showing Men`s CC to be larger, while others, Women`s. The latter only succeed to prove that only one part of the CC, the Isthmus, which seems to be larger in consistantly right-handed women than consistantly right-handed men. In studies relating the inter-hemispheric interaction, it has been found that women`s reaction times are slower than men`s (Hoptman & Davidson, 1994), which means the greater size of the Isthmus, or that of Corpus Callosum as you claim, does not mean greater inter-hemispheric interaction. Therefore Steven Rose, the British neuroscientist, correctly calls the hypothesis you mentioned, ``little more than ideological fantasies.`` (Rose, 1992)


You, dear Hafsa, in your well-researched article have supported both Psychic Essentialism and Biological essentialism to establish your point.

The basic problem with your psychic essentialism is that it is based on a false premise, i.e. the assumption that some students getting more attention than others is unnatural. In all-girls classes, some girls tend to get more attention than the others. Reducing the classroom size may not help, even if there are two girls in a class, one of them will get more attention than the other.

The second problem with your pysychic essentialism is that it somehow suggests that all girls from all parts of the world, from the third-world under-developed pre-renaissance Pakistani society, to the post-modern western world, face the same problem in co-education schools. It is not convincing to talk about psychology and ignore the cultural context.

While the difference in Biological make-up is can be investigated with the tools of natural science, its profound impact on behavior can not. The crucial step in biological essentialism is to relate to the supposed difference in biological make-up to the culturally defined norms of masculinity and femininity, which is also its fundamental weakness.

Dress codes are far more important than seperate schools. As someone who has experiecned high school life here, trust me on this one.

Also, the notion that mixing sexes will sensitize boys and girls with each other...pfft. Yeah, right. A good number of my fellow males were quite scummy in their prepetual `cruising for chicks`....and I doubt either style of schooling could cure the likes of those....

The problem here is that too much is being made of scattered anecdotal information which is being palmed off as ``research``. A simple thumb rule to live by is: if it isn`t intuitive, don`t believe it. For example, I have a terrible credibility problem with studies showing that alcohol is actually good for your heart, and that chocolate does NOT cause your teeth to rot. In the same way, it looks to me that these ``feminist`` writers are conveniently using selective data, most of it suspect in the first place to propogate their perverse views. How can boys and girls studying together ever be bad? This is crap!

#24: There`s a point in this post!

I agree with Ahmed Bilal in principle but the problem is it is very difficult to decide. There is no conclusive evidence either way.Probably child psychologists have designed some behavioural tests to advice?I know there are a lot of studies comparing effect of same sex education; I dont know if any amount of work has been done looking at it from the apriori angle, that is which kind of school will be good for a particular child, based on some behavioral parameters.This certainly looks like a good field to work in.
As far as I can surmise from a cursory glance at articles and applying some preliminary logic, same sex education does have its benefits like less stereotyping for girls. Probably same sex till 10th or 12th and coed later? Ofcourse, us guys would prefer coed all the way and probably it is better for us in every way too.
ps - I rememeber reading the Mallory towers Series and these same sex schools do seem to have a world of their own.

`Enlightened moderation`

General Pervez Musharraf`s call for ``enlightened moderation`` (Dawn, June 2) unfortunately has few takers in the country, as there is a contradiction between his call and the ground realities.

Consider the following ground realities: In October 2000 he promised to change those repressive laws that were made during the dictatorship of General Zia and which militated against the minorities and women.

Procedural modifications were announced in the blasphemy law. But when he realized that he needed the clergy`s political support, the general reneged on his promise.

President Musharraf also called for changes in the Hudood laws that lay down stoning to death a woman who fails to produce ``four pious Muslims`` as witnesses to prove that she was actually raped. But when the parliamentary opposition moved a bill seeking to amend the law, it was opposed by his own hand-picked adviser on women affairs.

General Musharraf has been wooing those very parties and groups whom he has been accusing of extremism. Election laws were carefully re-written to squeeze out the democratic parties and bring in clerical parties in elections which were denounced by the Commonwealth as ``seriously flawed``.

A political deal was negotiated with these parties to allow him to wear two hats of the army chief and that of the president and also give parliamentary approval to constitutional written in the GHQ.

Two years ago, promises were made to change amendments syllabi of the seminaries some of which are accused of teaching hate material. The promise was never kept.

About a month back, a new religious affairs minister was appointed, who last week announced that he had assigned to the dustbin the report of an international organization on religious seminaries.

True, the general warned jihadi outfits on January 12, 2002 against exporting militancy across the Line of Control in Kashmir. But prior to 9/11, General Pervez Musharraf was an ardent supporter of the so-called ``jihad``, even formally declaring on February 5, 2000, in Muzaffarabad the shifting of the Afghan jihad to Kashmir.

The people need to know if the glaring contradiction in the promises and the ground realities will be addressed.

SENATOR FARHATULLAH BABAR

Islamabad

Single-sex education cannot guarantee more confident females whatsoever. It may in some cases help female students to be more confident in certain subjects as mentioned in the article but when we see these females in the broader context i.e. in practical life they are less confident in dealing with their male counterparts which is one thing which should be there after years of education.
I myself have been a student of a coed institute and have experienced quite a frank environment till my A levels. Students were free to interact with each other both inside the academic circle and outside it. We used to treat our male and female friends alike. However things have changed now that I have stepped into the university life. Here we have people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. There is a blend of a multitude of people from various schools of thought. Now I am clearly able to separate students who are from single-sex institutes from those of coed ones. Be it be a male or a female student, if he/she is from one of those single-sex places they’ll be treating people from opposite sex as beings of a different world! I’ve seen girls going all ga-ga over guys and vice versa. On the other hand ppl from coed places are normally well behaved and they don’t tend to be partial towards anyone. This is however, just an example of one case, there maybe and are exceptions. I am not by any means implying that single-sex education is not practical, what I mean to say is that it is not the only determinant of the success in female or male students which the writer seems to think.
As for moral problems a coed institution creates, it must be noted that schools are only one of the myriads of places where such things happen and that too, to some extent and not always. We were a very close lot in my school and I know guys used to smoke and the majority dated but that is by no means unusual. Go to any girls college and u will find girls coming out all dressed up and guys waiting outside welcoming them with colgate smiles. A very well known girls college has a number of its girl students who are very fond of smoking and using other drugs. This can be found in coed schools as well, and shows that moral degradation has to do nothing with single-sex or coed schools.

I don`t know why girls are so obssessed with studying with us boys. What do they see in us afterall? Be sahram larkio haya karo.

Hafsa,

You have quoted from several articles, which must make you quite the expert. Tell me, did the research which concluded that girls in A-level co-ed classes were less likely to concetrate on classwork do any studies with students ages 4-13? I fail to imagine how pre-pubescent students can be as affected as hormonally crazed teenagers. For the record, A-level boys are not likely to concentrate on their chemistry practicals if they are preening themselves for the benefit of others.

I am intruiged by your assertion that women tend to perform better in the humanities. Is this just statistical data or could it be an effect of the very few women admitted to science degrees and programmes? Does this conclusion take into account, at least in Pakistan, that many parents do not support higher education for girls, let alone in the sciences?

I am shocked that no-one else in chowk has challenged some of the prejudices in your article. That said, I am in total agreement with jang #21. Let`s get the kids educated before we begin to tear them apart from the hips, if the ideas in this article are thought through.

Lastly, I believe that if we keep the women in Pakistan constantly sheltered from the real world, they will never become fully functioning members of it. I refuse to accept that someone will become ``independent and self-assured`` with the opposite sex (and indeed with the rest of society) if they are kept away from the other half of it. I know. I studied at an all-male institution.

Rafay Alam

I think both options should be present. And it should be a matter of choice, left to individual students, based on their own personal preferences. Different people respond differently to circumstances they are put in. You can`t really generalize it. Thanks.

Here are the priorities
1. education for girls and boys
2. sex education for girls and boys
3. education for teachers
4. sex education for teachers
5. education for parents..
...
...
...
100435. single sex education

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#6 by khurram on June 5, 2004 8:34pm PT
The bottom line is that the real world is coed. So, everyone better get used to it in school.

Pretty true. If women opt for studying in a same-sex school because it makes them more confident, how do they expect to keep up that confidence once they step in to the outer world which has a unisex environment? Unless she plans otherwise.

#14.. this indeed is done by some schools in the US

If anything, in the US and western countries, single gender students are far more confident and outspoken in coed colleges. Thats because there is no lack of opportunity for them to interact with males outside the school context. In pakistan, it appears that the effect is the exact opposite? If so, it is because there are zero opportunities for females to interact with males as equals outside school?

if, in pakistan, school is the only place where males and females can socialize and interact professionally, then coed education presents a valuable opportunity for such interactions.

perhaps single-gender classes in coed schools might be a reasonable middle ground for countries like pakistan. let me cut and paste a section from that website on learning differences..

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from www.genderdifferences.org

Context enhances learning for most girls, but often just bores the boys. The choir director of the National Cathedral School for Girls and the St. Alban`s School for Boys told us that when he`s teaching the high school girls a new song, he`ll start by sharing a story about why the composer wrote this piece, who it was written for, or maybe how the choir director himself felt 20 years ago when he goofed the solo part. ``Giving the girls some context, telling them a story about the piece, gets them interested. The boys are just the opposite,`` he said. ``If you start talking like that with the boys, they`ll start looking at their watches, they`ll start getting restless. Then one of them will say, `Can we please just get on with it already? Can we please just learn the song already?```

Confrontation works well with most boys, although this technique is seldom taught in today`s schools of education. Get in their face. Raise your voice. Stand right in front of your student, nose-to-nose, and say to him: ``How do you know that, Mr. Miller? Prove it to me!`` This kind of direct challenge will motivate boys to work harder and to be prepared. Remember that boys` hearing is only about half as acute as girls` hearing. A well-run boys` classroom is LOUD compared with a girls` classroom. Avoid sofas or soft chairs: boys will go to sleep. Keep the class LOUD and keep the class MOVING. In particular, the teacher should be moving at all times. A class in which the teacher sits at the front of the class and talks in a soft voice is a class in which at least two-thirds of the boys will have tuned out. The boy should never know where the teacher will be 20 seconds from now. Keep them guessing.

Source: Shelley Taylor, professor of psychology at UCLA, has published important work demonstrating the reality of gender differences in the response to threat and confrontation. See Shelley E. Taylor, Laura Cousino Klein, et al., ``Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight.`` Psychological Review, 107:411-429, 2000. See also Professor Taylor`s recent book The Tending Instinct, New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

Small-group learning works well for girls. Girls will naturally break up in groups of three and four to work on problems. Let them. If you`re assigning class presentations, let two girls give a joint presentation. The format of one student giving a presentation to an entire class doesn`t work as well (for girls) as two students giving a joint presentation to a smaller group.

Formal terms of address work well for boys. Boys` classes work best when teachers and students address each other as ``Mr.`` That kind of formality enhances class discipline. If you treat boys like men, they are more likely to act like men.

Teaching math and science

You`ll get more out of this section if you first read our page on teaching math and science to girls. One robust difference which many teachers have told us about is that girls like to build things; boys (especially boys under 14 years of age) like to break things or blow them up. If you want to get 8th-grade girls interested in chemistry, show the girls how chemistry can be used to improve the world. Let them build natural biochemical filters to clean dirty water, so they can see how the water becomes fresh and clean. If you want to get 8th-grade boys interested in chemistry, teach them about dynamite.

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#9 nhk has valid points as the context is very different in pakistan. in the present day, in the usa, single-gender education is hardly a call for general segregation (although in the pakistani context it may well be) outside the learning situation.

nonetheless there are real biological/developmental gender differences that should be taken into account (in the preadolescence and adolescence years) by planners. girls and boys seem to learn a lot more when appropriate teaching techniques are employed (and these can vary somewhat) and these work well in single-gender classes.

there is a world-wide trend of females outperforming males in schools (and even in colleges). some of this is due to the feminization of school education and the earlier maturation of females (this seems to have accelerated in the past few decades.. environmental influences on biology!). clearly, if in the future, the vast majority of college educated persons are females, then this could lead to unexpected and undesirable consequences.

feminist organizations in the usa are definitely against publicly funded single gender education, even for a small percentage of students (although people like hilary clinton are pro single gender education). the situation seems to be different in pakistan