The Scoop on Single-Gender Schools
It’s a dull, grey morning outside, the leaden midwinter sky doing little to brighten the glass and steel and concrete of the office towers and condominiums that surround St. Joseph’s College School, an all-girls’ Catholic high school in the heart of downtown Toronto. But all is bright and buzzing in Jennifer Martens’ Grade 9 science classroom. Students in crested sweaters and plaid skirts are huddled in small groups at lab stations to prepare their final year-end presentation. As I interrupt their activity to chat, I ask the obvious question: Is it a drag to be at a school where there isn’t a single solitary high school-aged boy to be found? Beyond the teacher’s earshot, the girls give me some surprising answers. “When I was in a coed school, if you didn’t play a certain sport or dress a certain way, then you weren’t popular. Here, you can be your own person,” says Holland Philpott, 14. Others offer similar responses. “When I came here, I thought it would be kind of weird because I was used to having boys around. But this school allows you to be yourself,” observes Helen Israel, 14. But don’t they feel like they’re missing out on something? “Just a lot of drama,” says Olivia Moran, 14, her two lab partners nodding in agreement.
Okay, but surely a few minutes up the road at St. Michael’s College School, a single-sex private academy known for excellence in sports, the roomful of boys I visit in Father Patrick Fulton’s Grade 10 theology class will tell me a different story. They do not. As I stand in front of straight rows of desks filled with young men clad in navy jackets and ties straight out of Dead Poets Society, student after student tells me about the camaraderie, the ability to focus, and how nice it is to be free of worries about their appearance. “I feel more comfortable. Guys act differently when there are girls around, but here you don’t have to think about it,” says Stalon Lambert, 15. The rest of the class murmurs their approval. “School is just part of the day, and after that you leave and meet your other friends. But you need your concentration most at school, so it’s good to be in a single-gender environment.”
An old concept that’s gathering new steam, single-sex classrooms are becoming increasingly common, especially in the United States, and have emerged as a hot topic for academic researchers seeking better educational solutions for today’s students. Although still relatively rare in Canada—Ontario, for example, has just 16 publicly funded schools offering this option—some feel that this is an idea whose time has come, again. A growing body of neurological research is highlighting differences in the ways boys and girls learn, even at a very young age, sparking a recent push for single-sex elementary schools. But the most common place to find single-sex classrooms continues to be in middle school/junior high and high schools. Dr. Heather Blair, a professor in the University of Alberta’s faculty of education who has studied gender and education for more than 15 years, notes that this is a key time in the lives of students. “This is a real watershed for girls, around ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Am I pretty?’ and ‘Am I smart?’ and ‘Is it cool to be smart?’ And for boys, there are few models about what it’s like to be a man, beyond the ‘tough guy’ image.”
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