Welcome to Gaia! ::

That's a bad experience? They were probably just misreading signals. Trust me, a stolen kiss isn't so bad, compared to what could have happened.

[ Message temporarily off-line ]

I think everything is good as long as you have variety. When I was in high school, we had a very good mix of people, not just with gender, but racially, religiously, and socio-econimically, etc.. This seems to ensure that you're able to deal with all people, no matter where they come from. Now I'm in college, and the college is no where near as diverse as from where I come from. What's sad is that recently, I've seen so much hate for other races, religions, and sexual orientation. This hate is for no good reason except for sheer ignorance. Most of the people who go to this college are white, middle to upper class people who only know Christianity and think anyone that isn't the same skin color will rob them or that the pagans will try to make them go to hell.

It distresses me very much that the women of your school and the administration is anti-men. It just seems a step backward for everyone that will create more unneeded hate in the future. But that's just my opinion.

I think the entire idea of our public school system is bat s**t ******** crazy. The primary example of why is the example of expecting kids to be/become responsible. Clue train to stupid society: where the hell is this responsibility supposed to come from? Out of thin air? The school system the way it is designed expects this! Removing the kid from their parents most of the time, placing them into an artificial society where the only other people they can really learn respect from is people of the same age.

Seriously, people think public school is better than home-schooling because your kids get to socialize, right? But what in the world makes people think that sort of socialization is necessarily healthy or desirable? In a healthier society kids would be socializing with other kids of varying ages and more adults and would learn directly from them about what it means to be responsible! By forcing kids to really only interact with other people their age they completely break any possible chain of learning from the older generations, education in general becomes a sterile, isolated learning experience with less world-value connection, and most importantly it creates the previously-mention artificial society which is absolutely nothing like the real world! (Well, japanese high schools in anime are better since they have to manage projects during culture festivals, often with a goal of making money.)

That entire rant may seem almost unrelated to the issue in this thread but actually I'd argue it's worse. See, I think the sorts of problems I was talking about would only be worse in a single-gendered education system. Possibly not the age-segregation problem, but most definitely the artificial society problem. But, I dunno, I find most of our society takes common actions for granted when the underlying premisses are down-right stupid and completely unjustifiable.

On another note, it just occured to me that all-girl schools might simply attract militant feminists instead of creating them... where else would people like that go to stay in a delusional bubble?

I still see a problem with the high-school volunteer system; it's still optional and not really the same sort of community as the students are in with eachother. It's better than nothing but still feels closer to teachers getting help instead of encouraging inter-age friendships. See, the "help out" is still all about the education and helping the younger generations educationally, yet socialization is the reason people say home-schooling isn't good. It looks about as good a bond as a student-teacher bond, which is good, but not quite enough.

Of course, that also demonstrates a fundamental problem with even trying to fix the problem with our current system. If there were a group of high school students talking with eachother outside an elementary school you'd bet that somebody would call the police. Also, who knows how many generations it would take to fix the problems created in the first place?

Yeah, step in the right direction, but still leaves kids in an artificial environment with artificial non-real-world-value education. You don't want to recreate the "real world" environment... you want to introduce them to it! You want to walk them through it! It's all ideal, though, possibly not practical for everybody to do.

(The final point here is that, if your local elementary/middle/high schools (and college) are like mine then they're completely separate from eachother, on the other side of town, etc. Segregation by age...)

Well, to get back on topic, do you feel that single-sex schools are less adequate than integrated schools?

Feel free to start a discussion on education systems in general.

Right... getting more on topic, then...

Home schooling is completely different from the single-sex school situation, though. A single-sex school is a place where a kid will spend most of their day in the same place with people of the same gender and their major interactions and friends will be completely limited to one gender and that's what we're recognizing is inheritly worse about a single-sex school.

Home schooling, however, is NOT sitting on your a** at home for 8 hours while a parent or tutor drones over a book. That's what happens at school and many people who home school do so because they believe that situation to be unhealthy. Although there will be some home schooling done that way, the home schooling I've seen is less "pump crap into their head" and more "teach them stuff that they want, help them interact with the real world, encourage their natural curiosity." Interesting stuff is brought to home school kids by forming local groups and people can teach classes. I say people because the group I know sometimes has kids teaching other kids some stuff such as programming languages and the basic Computer Science data structures.

Anyways, long-winded way of saying that they're completely different. I can agree with a same-sex school generating socialization and world-view problems.