I’m grateful that officials at my kids’ elementary school have far more sense than this:
Boys and girls at Sedalia Elementary returned to school Monday with some unexpected changes: They had to play in separate areas during recess and eat at different tables during lunch.
The decision to divide the two groups did not stem from an incident. Rather, the staff at the Groveport Madison school wanted to take proactive steps to prevent bullying and halt disruptive behavior from creeping into the classroom, officials said.
The school, located just southeast of Columbus, Ohio, had to drop its policy due to parental uproar.
So the issue is moot on the practical level, but I still can’t fathom the reasoning behind the policy. Since when is bullying primarily a cross-gender problem in elementary school? Any parent – and anyone who’s been bullied as a kid – knows that it’s mostly a matter of boys picking on boys, while girls make other girls miserable.
The daughter of one of my friends was upset for much of third grade last year because a group of three other girls who she thought were her friends played mind games with her. The Bear had trouble with another boy making cutting remarks about him at the end of third grade. There’s been some broader trouble with bullying among the boys in that class, too, but again it’s been boy-on-boy. One of the boys in the Tiger’s kindergarten class already earned the reputation of a bully, and though he mistreated girls, too, his main targets were other boys. (To our relief, the Bear’s tormenter changed to a different district over the summer, and the Tiger’s classmate is now in a different classroom.)
I’m not arguing that boys never pick on girls or vice versa, just that most bullying takes place within a single gender. And so I’m stumped when I try to imagine what Sedalia was trying to accomplish with gender segregation.
How much do you want to bet, though, that the boys were assigned to the sports fields and the girls to the playground equipment?
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
That’s just weird.
I know that some people think there is educational merit in doing the opposite (single-sex groups in the classroom, mixed in the playground) so that co-ed socialising can occur but any differences in learning styles can be catered for more easily by teachers. Not saying I agree, but there are a number of private schools over here implementing those type of structures.
But segregation to prevent bullying? As you say, it seems pointless. In fact, as I recall in my own experience, the times when I was less likely to be bullied were when girls and boys were both engaged in the same game at school. It was hanging around with (or being excluded from) groups of other girls that caused the most trauma. And my experience as a teacher tells me that boys are slightly less physically violent towards each other when girls are present.
You’re in Australia, yes? Here in the U.S. we’ve seen a number of schools institute sex-segregated classrooms. Of course private schools can do what they want, and Catholic schools are still typically not co-ed beyond the early grades. The article I cited from the Columbus Dispatch says that some Columbus schools, presumably public, also have single-sex classrooms. For some highschoolers, this format seems to work well, or so I hear from my university students who’ve come out of single-sex schools. They tell me that girls have a chance to shine during those adolescent years when their self-esteem tends to drop, and that all of the kids tend to focus more on academics and less on impressing each other. It wouldn’t have worked for me, personally, but I follow the argument.
For younger kids, I don’t think single-sex classrooms are defensible. If you want to cater to different learning styles, then test the kids to see whose style is verbal, visual, haptic, etc. Don’t just assume that all girls will be verbal and all boys visual/haptic! (I know this wasn’t your point at all, I’m just venting!)
Your point about boys being less violent is fascinating. I haven’t especially witnessed this, but I teach young adults and I haven’t been looking for it with my kids and their friends. Now I’m going to be on the lookout.
Wow. Just wow.
Like you said, I’ve rarely known a kid whose biggest bullies were members of the opposite gender.
And not until high school did matters involving the opposite gender even become the primary TOPIC of the bullying I witnessed.
This is either obliviously naive, or blatantly misrepresented.
Hi Zippa. I’m pretty sure the Dispatch reported accurately, so I vote for cluelessness. We really don’t know what the school administrators were thinking, but I just can’t come up with a train of thought that would make any sense. Maybe it was one of those ideas that come out of groupthink – who knows? Still, teachers are in a good position to observe bulllying, but in my experience, they sometimes don’t pick up on it. Possibly they also ignore it at times, not knowing how to halt it, or thinking kids ought to be able to settle their own problems.
At any rate, schools do sometimes breed strange thinking and behavior that’s out of touch with reality. Another example would be the many, many stories I hear from college students about sexual harassment incidents in their schools. That is obviously nastier than this school’s poor decision, but it too is nourished by insularity.