Dialogue: Girls gain from being schooled with boys

Girls' schools have nothing to fear from having to take in boys. In fact, going coeducational is in their pupils' best interests, says KEN HAVILL*.

The recent Herald article on how single-sex state schools fear that education law changes will force them to take students of the opposite sex reminded me of Professor Eileen Byrne's work The Snark Syndrome.

The title was inspired by the Lewis Carroll poem The Hunting of the Snark, which contains the words "I have said it three times, so it's true."

The article quoted the principal of an Auckland girls' high school as saying that research showed girls did better academically in single-sex schools.

The Snark syndrome, of course, means that everybody knows that. In other words, if something is repeated often enough, it becomes true. The effect becomes one of ensuring that people internalise such statements as "Single sex schools are better for girls."

As Eileen Byrne has pointed out, most of this received wisdom has no empirical base, the substantive primary literature does not support it, and some of it isn't even common sense.

Dr Byrne was brought to New Zealand in 1994 by the Ministry of Women's Affairs in recognition of her involvement in a major, federally funded Australian study of women's access to and progress in science and technology in higher education.

She came with a background of long participation in education and gender issues, including work as a full-time consultant to the European Union, in which capacity she prepared the first research-based report on sex equality in education.

One of the Snark myths which Dr Byrne has sought to expose is that single-sex schools advantage girls. She examined assertions such as the one that single-sex schools produce more women physicists, and revealed that the evidence came from Britain, the United States, France, Australia and Ireland, where all of the single-sex schools surveyed were private, elite, fee-paying, middle-class and academically selective.

The fact that such outcomes are a function of class and ability, not a function of single sex, has been upheld by subsequent major New Zealand research.

Roy Nash and Richard Harker's study "Progress at School" (1997) followed 5383 students in 37 secondary schools from the third to seventh form. That is a 10 per cent sample of the annual population cohort.

The project was designed to detect the influence of individual schools on the examination performance of students once the students' initial ability and social characteristics had been taken into account.

Nash and Harker found that the popular belief that girls will do better academically at single-sex schools was not upheld by the data. Comparisons made after adequate control for background and ability factors showed no evidence of the academic superiority of either type of school.

Given that the conventional wisdom is so clearly false, it is interesting to consider the issue of other reasons some families might feel compelled to encourage girls to flee from coeducation. It certainly seems to be strange that it is still occurring in the 21st century.

Our own experience at Western Springs College is that girls not only sustain an academic focus throughout their coeducational years at secondary school but also develop a very important set of personal and social skills during their time here.

The result is that they are better equipped for living and working with male counterparts, whether as fellow plumbers, hairdressers or physicists.

Parents who intend to protect their daughters by sending them to a girls' school are misconceiving the situation. Certainly, adolescents are put under enormous pressure by the constant media barrage of messages about sexuality. Yet surely the absence of members of the opposite sex in everyday situations serves only to increase anxiety for young people about contact when it does occur and about the nature of appropriate relating.

At our school, I see strong, assertive girls mixing easily and confidently with students of different ages, races, socio-economic backgrounds and with boys.

They enjoy friendships with many boys and girls; very few are isolated in relationships.

Every day in a coeducational setting, students get to know each other beyond the skin-deep level of superficial stereotypes. They are able to expand their sense of what it means to be male or female.

When our girls are asked if they think our college is a good school for girls, they respond with an enthusiastic "Yes." They point to a staff which is dedicated to making sure that all students get a fair go, and that everyone has an equal chance in the classroom.

They argue that dominant personalities are just as likely to be female as male, and that the vast majority of boys do not dominate. Teachers simply handle all of this as one facet of basic classroom management.

For us, coeducation is all about providing a natural and healthy learning environment where girls and boys are given the opportunity to develop mutual respect under the influence of excellent same-sex and opposite-sex role models.

Any remaining sceptics should scan the academic results achieved by the huge range of successful coeducational schools in New Zealand.

Whether they be large or small, high or low decile, rural or urban, these schools measure up in terms of both academic standards and those other important aspects of personal and social development which distinguish an excellent all-round education.

*Ken Havill is the principal of Western Springs College.