Those of you who are loyal daily readers of my writing (for which I thank you) may have noticed something of a theme this week: I’ve been focusing on the propensity of politicians to do two things. First, to chase headlines in August when the news is quiet. Second, to distract from their inability to solve big problems by inventing small ones to focus on instead. This story, doing the rounds this week, is a good example of both:
The higher education minister wants to see an end to single-sex schools, stating “society would be better” with a co-educational model of learning.
Raising concerns around increasing “aggression” and gender-based violence, Patrick O’Donovan stressed the importance of educational integration from a young age.
One might have expected, reading Minister O’Donovan’s statement, to see some evidence for his concerns that single-sex education is related to “aggression and gender-based violence”. Alas, we got no such evidence.
In fairness, his statement fits in perfectly with the faith-based assumptions made about young men by most adherents of the new national creed that is progressivism: Listen to the average Irish NGO or liberal commentator, and you might be forgiven for thinking that violence and sexism is the default state of the Irish male, unless they are civilised in the education system with a series of classes on consent and respect. The idea that single-sex schooling might lead to more violence and sexism fits in perfectly with this, with the explicit idea of abolishing such schooling being that those young men, in particular, will be civilised and improved by early exposure to the female of the species.
Indeed, the Minister went on to say as much pretty explicitly:
“Mr O’Donovan, who worked as a teacher before entering politics, added: “That’s not to say that people who have shown disrespect to women have all come from single-sex schools. That would be a very simplistic way of doing it. Suggesting that everybody who has shown disrespect to a woman has come from a single-sex school, that’s not what I’m saying.
“What I am saying is that I think there needs to be, at a much earlier stage, an integration around education to show that respect has to be something that is shown no matter what.””
“Not every violent man comes from a single sex school” is a magnanimous concession, I’ll grant him that. Not least because this writer is a non-violent male who proceeded through single-sex schools at both primary and post-primary level. Whatever about my allegedly thuggish co-educatees, I at least am grateful for the acknowledgment.
That said, one might think that charges as serious as these – effectively arguing that a substantial number of the country’s schools are contributing to violence against women – might need to be backed up by evidence. If you were to lay such a charge against any individual then you would need evidence, or likely face defamation action in the courts. Be a minister, however, and lay that charge at the feet of the thousands of teachers and boards of management of such schools, and you face no such risk. Indeed, the media will grant you largely uncritical coverage to make your case, primarily because it’s a faith-based case expressing a creed they all share.
Now, on the substantive issue, yours truly has no particularly strong views other than it seems to me appropriate that parents should have as much choice as possible when it comes to choosing a school for their child. There are, after all, other faith-based views on single sex education that might come into play here: Parents of a son or a daughter might feel that in an important period in their lives, single sex education would have the benefit of taking typically intense teenaged romantic entanglements off the table: Nobody wants their child doing the leaving cert while going through their first terrible break-up, for example, and parents may feel that single-sex education might just postpone serious romantic engagements for a few years. You can sneer at that if you wish, but it strikes me as a valid consideration some parents might have.
Others may prefer single-sex education for the very reason that the Minister opposes it: If you view mixed schools as a programme for civilising young men, then one might just conceive of parents of daughters who might think that it’s someone else’s job to civilise other people’s sons, and be content with having their daughter focus on her studies in the absence of a troop of (as the Minister might have it) baboons in need of her feminine wisdom as an example.
Yet more might think that single-sex schools offer more gender-specific opportunity: That an all-girls school, for example, might be a better environment for young women to take part in sports, or that it might be better able to focus on activities which generally draw more interest from young women – perhaps it might offer a school tour to Paris to view art, rather than a trip to Switzerland to go skiing.
Whatever your views on these things, it strikes me that this is a choice that the country benefits from having available to parents. It makes us more free, less uniform, and allows a healthy competition between schools with differing ethos. Indeed, it is entirely possible that single-sex schooling might disappear on its own, if parents are just not demanding it any more.
The Minister, I’m sure, knows all this and more, which is why I think it very unlikely that we’ll actually see any meaningful action on this idea. It should be seen instead for what it is – a Minister inventing a problem that he can talk about in the absence of any ability to fix the real issues in education.
There is a shortage of 1,000 teachers this September, for example. There is a shortage of several thousand homes for third level students. Those are problems he cannot or will not fix, which is why like so many of his Government colleagues, he is inventing a fake problem to talk about instead.