Skimming 4

Skimming for gist
Exercise 6
Read the first sentence of each paragraph in the following text.
Mixed and Single-sex Grouping in Secondary Schools

Fashion and doctrinaire belief can influence educational practice, even
when almost every rational argument - or just plain common-sense should pull us in the opposite direction.Educational planners in the
U.K. and most liberal societies have taken it for granted over the last
few decades that coeducational schools are as desirable in our new
egalitarian age as are mixed-ability classes. The effectiveness of the
latter in improving overall education has been questioned for some
time now by students of school achievement, and that of the former is
beginning to give rise to some doubts in the minds of those concerned
with the individual attainment-levels of girls and boys.
For the purpose of this article I shall assume that there are overpowering arguments for the coeducation of children up to the age of
eleven and after the age of sixteen. It is the middle period which
seems to demand closer inspection
In the field of mental development, it has long been apparent that girls
mature more rapidly here as they do physically, at least up to the age
of fourteen or so. Yet in mixed schools, girls are presented with the
same intellectual diet as boys, despite their different appetites (how
would the community react if boys were only allowed to eat as much
as girls at this stage?). The loss of valuable learning time and resultant
frustration are accepted by teachers in the interests of 'civilisation':
'The boys need girls around', they will say, 'They're such a civilising
influence!' This argument might hold good after sixteen when the boys
have, as it were, caught up to some extent. Before this, the girl and
boy groups in a class are usually so polarised that mixing may even
exacerbate aggression.
On the emotional score, there seem to be distinct advantages in

segregation. Both boys and girls become emotionally supercharged at
this stage, but again, the girl's emotional drives put her at a relative
disadvantage in the mixed classroom, especially if she is bright.
Whilst bright boys are driven to argue and assert themselves and to be
intellectually ambitious, bright girls are torn by the desperate need to
be attractive (doubly desperate if they sense that they are ugly) and to
play down their own intellectual abilities. If they choose to suppress
instinct and instead assume an independent, achieving role, they will
be ostracised both by boys and by other girls. If they can be in school
for academic learning, and spend leisure (social-learning) hours in
mixed company, it seems that girls may be able to be true both to their
intellectual potential and to their emotional drives.
On all scores then, there seems to be some case for segregation
between eleven and sixteen. If society is to benefit fully from the
intellectual and emotional potential of women, we shall have to ensure
that they retain without shame their different qualities, and this may
well be achieved by a period of separate education.
What society needs from women newly emancipated from domestic
chores is a genuinely different view of life; and the foundations for
this may best be provided by separate schooling at the critical
time. Such schooling has advantages in terms of both solidarity and
polarity; solidarity as a bond with other women who have experienced
the same kind of physical and emotional development themselves and
have matured there-after in diverse ways: and polarity as a true
alternative to the male approach to life. The world cannot afford to
have more aggression, more egocentricity, or more ambition than it
already has.
Even in the Soviet Union, where coeducation was the rule from the
time of the Revolution up to the Second World War, the consideration
that "... because of their differences, equal treatment must involve
separate education" led to the segregation of secondary schools which
lasted for about fifteen years, from 1943 to the late 1950s. The
decision to segregate the sexes was reversed, not because segregation

had proved unsatisfactory, but because it had proved impractical to
provide separate facilities and teachers, especially in outlying areas.
The education of girls in the USSR, with its large number of cultural
and religious minorities, presents special problems:
In Turkmenia, it is said, the least well-educated girls command

the highest prices, while the cheapest of all are those with higher
educational qualifications; . they know too much and will not
submit to their husbands as dutiful servants.
Practice in other cultures leads us to the question of provision for
minority groups in our own society. If all state schools are
coeducational, as most already are, this fact alone will contribute
greatly to racial tension. Many girls whose backgrounds prescribe
different behaviour for them from that which is expected of girls in
our society, suffer intensely if forced into close contact with boys. It
will not do to say, as many egalitarians do, that if they are in Britain
the families of the girls concerned must accept our standards, for it is
not only the disapproval of the family which is at stake: the girls
themselves are torn between a sense of family and group loyalty
which drives them to conform with one code, and a sense of peer
group and school solidarity which drives them in the opposite
direction.
Recent work on classroom relationships suggests that there are
discrepancies in the type of criticism meted out to girls and boys. Boys
are criticised far more often than girls, but they are criticised for
different things. Boys are usually criticised for sloppy presentation:
this is surmountable. Girls are more often criticised for intellectual
content: this is less easily surmountable. Again, boys' work is more
scrupulously corrected than girls' work, as though there might be
something impolite about pointing out a female child's errors to her.
Finally when they do fail, boys and girls tend to have different
attitudes to their teacher. One example quoted is that of Jill and

Matthew
... who are equal bottom of the chemistry class at the end of the
second year. Jill says she's no good at it. Matthew says the
teacher's a fool and besides, he's been bunking off. Jill is going
to drop chemistry, Matthew isn't
But why do girls immediately attribute failure to their own inadequacy
so much more readily than boys do?
Paradoxically, the comprehensive system which was hailed as the
great opener of closed doors, seems to be closing almost as many
doors as it opens. In particular, the polarisation of boys and girls into
science and art blocks respectively seems much more marked in
mixed comprehensives than elsewhere. This is probably due to
pressure of social class. Sex stereotypes are much stronger in the
working-class tradition than in the middle-class. In most middle-class
families it is not usually considered effeminate for boys to study
languages, nor is it looked on as unmanly to show an interest in
general culture. It is, however, extremely difficult to teach a language
to a mixed group of largely working-class children, where there is
little overlap of interests between the sexes. The boys will refuse to
accept topics like shopping: the girls will groan or go silent at sport or
cars: and neither will tolerate items of historical or general cultural
interest.
It is fashionable to refer to the hidden curriculum whenever one talks
of schools in any context. What does the hidden curriculum teach girls
in mixed comprehensives? It teaches them something about hierarchy:
they see that women seldom reach top position (principal, head of
department, even in departments like modern languages where there is
usually a preponderance of female staff), that women invariably do the
secretarial work of the school (under the direction of the male
principal) and clean the building (under the direction of the male
caretaker) . The situation is quite different in girls' schools where all

jobs are usually done, and no less competently done, by women.
As the prevailing egalitarian movement gathers strength, there seems
little hope that segregated teaching between eleven and sixteen will
come back into fashion, just as there seems little prospect of the
establishment of a system of schooling which separates those who,
given encouragement, want to learn and are psychologically capable
of doing so and those who do not.From the age of eight onwards, in
my 5-to-14, three class elementary school, I was a martyr to Sam
Cross and Billy Whitwell. Neither of these two gentlemen, having
reached the age of twelve and thirteen respectively, could read or
write, and it was my appointed task to sit between them for an hour
every day to teach them these skills. They made my life a misery,
pulling my plaits, kicking my shins and generally convincing me that
boys were uncouth and insufferable. The County Scholarship to the
local Girls' High School which I won at ten was my passport to
freedom from Sam Cross and Billy Whitwell. I pity many of the bright
and ambitious girls of today who are destined to suffer Sam and Billy
throughout their schooldays. There are few passports to such freedom
for intelligent girls these days.
(Barbara Cowell, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 165-172,
1981)

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Skimming for gist

Mixed and Single-sex Grouping in Secondary Schools

On the emotional score, there seem to be distinct advantages in

decision to segregate the sexes was reversed, not because segregation

In Turkmenia, it is said, the least well-educated girls command

attitudes to their teacher. One example quoted is that of Jill and

caretaker) . The situation is quite different in girls' schools where all

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