Reply #16: Yes. *Especially in HS and MS*. [View All]

The curriculum of a school is more than the course of study. The curriculum of a school is everything that happens in the building, planned and unplanned, intentional and unintentional, that is experienced by the students. There's an invisible curriculum that never gets put in the handbook, or the school's web site.

In a society where precocious sex is the norm, dating violence is present in 1/3 of relationships, women are routinely objectified by men, and homophobia is rampant, you put -- and in many cases compel the attendence of -- boys and girls in the same building, 7 hours a day, 180 days a year, then the school is responsible in no small part for the results.

The argument is made all the time that if boys don't have girls around, they won't learn how to treat them as people. Well, when they have girls around, as they do under the present system, they are trained -- trained to treat them as meat, as comfort-girls, and as inferiors -- not in the classroom, but in the halls, on the busses, in the cafeteria.

In coed schools, boys make up 60% of failures, 70% of suspensions, and 90% of expulsions. These are not the characteristics of institutions systematically biased in favor of boys.

Oh, and I'd make the same argument about our invisible curriculum of brain-dead consumerism, and apply it to school uniforms.

I'm a 30-year member of Democratic Socialists of America, a member of the ACLU for twenty, on this board since the Florida fiasco, so please spare me the 'Freeper' name-calling. I'm member of the National Educational Association. I've taught 7-12 for 20 years -- public and private, co-ed and single-sex. Public single-sex would be my choice every time, if such things existed.