More on Coeducation
January 12, 2011
EXPATRIOT writes:
I’ve long thought that coeducation is one of the major factors behind the dysfunction of the modern world. Just as important as the academic problems it causes are the socio-sexual ones. Since most boys have very little of the status and power that attracts the opposite sex, the ones who end up being most popular with girls are jocks and badboys, who in turn become the role models for the rest of the boys. (And of course, badboys are a lot easier to emulate than jocks.) In an all-male environment, boys can be valued for other qualities, whether of intellect or of character, and proper male hierarchies can develop, in which individual boys with different strengths and weaknesses can find their place, gain in confidence, and grow into men. In the past, it was only after these formative years that young men were exposed to all-out competition for the attention and affection of young women.
Of course, the same thing goes for girls. Homely girls or late-bloomers who in earlier times would have had to dread only the occasional party now find themselves evaluated on a daily basis in comparison with their more attractive and confident sisters. I wonder how much of feminists’ venomous hatred of men has its roots in the humiliation felt by scrawny, pimply or bookish girls. Likewise the feelings of bitterness, frustration and rage felt by so many men no doubt go back to a sense of non-stop rejection experienced in adolescence. These emotions are an unavoidable by-product of forcing boys and girls into close proximity with each other day in and day out at the very time in their lives when they are most sensitive to the other sex’s assessment of their sexual desirability and thus most emotionally vulnerable. Add to this the fact that young people often compensate for this vulnerability by being gratuitously cruel in their judgments of others, and the fact that most of the time they are not under adult supervision, and you have a recipe for disaster.
And this all exacerbates the academic disparity between boys and girls. Lots of girls find academic competition a welcome escape from this other kind of competition. Boys who study hard, on the other hand, risk being seen as overly compliant and eager to please—in short, as unmasculine. Better to be defiant or act like you don’t care—then at least you’re not a nerd. For a teenage boy, being at the top of the class grade-wise is a poor substitute for being popular with the girls.
Laura writes:
These are excellent insights. Your last point is dead on. To be a good student in a coed school is often a threat to a boy’s identity. In fact, doing anything that the girls are good at is a threat and must be avoided. One sees this in the gradual takeover of school orchestras by girls.
Single-sex education, however, is contrary to the ideology of mass government schooling and is unlikely to appear in anything but token form until that government monopoly is seriously challenged.
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John E. writes:
