Global Breaking News - Saturday, May 4, 2024

Are Same-Sex Colleges Still Relevant?
Last week, the board of Sweet Briar College, an all-women’s school in Virginia, announced that it would be permanently shuttered in August due to “insurmountable financial challenges.” The school’s president, James Jones, Jr., attributed the close, in part, to the declining number of “young women willing to consider a single-sex education.” Is there still a place for same-sex colleges? Do they play an important role in education, or are they outdated?
* relevant = 관련 있는, 적절한/ permanently = 영구히/ insurmountable = 대처[극복]할 수 없는/ attribute A to B = A를 B의 탓으로 돌리다/ outdated = 구식인 

 아직도 동성 대학의 자리(위치)가 존재하나요? 교육의 중요한 역할을 하나요 아니면 구식인가요?

1. An Up-Hill Battle
The popular idea that single-sex education benefits women comes from anecdotes about female leaders who were educated in an era when elite colleges did not admit them.

2. The Best Place for Me
As long as misogyny and violence against women exists in our society, open environments like women's colleges remain relevant.

3. The Success of All-Male Schools
Institutions solely dedicated to teaching and encouraging males to achieve — when society often expects so little of them — remain important.

4. Same-Sex Schools Perpetuate Notions of Difference
If we really want women and men to compete on even playing fields, they have to be raised and educated in a truly gender-integrated way.

5. The Freeing Powers of Single-Sex Education
Single-sex schools allow black and Latino boys to feel comfortable and express their emotions, changing notions about a one dimensional image of masculinity.


Sample Essay

Same-Sex Schools Perpetuate Notions of Difference Between Men and Women

Whether at the K-12 or college level, the existence of single-sex schools perpetuates the myth that males and females think and learn differently. This is just one reason why they are outdated and ultimately not beneficial in preparing young people for today’s gender-integrated society.

Overall, women have done very well academically since the passage of Title IX and integration of most universities. They now earn some 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 63 percent of master’s, and 53 percent of doctoral degrees awarded each year in the U.S. However, they are still woefully underrepresented in engineering and computer science, fields that are not typically strong at all-women’s colleges. (Sweet Briar does not formally offer a computer science major.)

The question, then, is: How do we keep girls interested in math-intensive fields and on track toward STEM careers that still look mostly male?

Make sure they are comfortable playing with the boys. Single-sex education is often predicated on the notion that females and males have inherently different cognitive and interpersonal styles and, therefore, need sex-specific pedagogy to best reach their potential.

But the truth is that sex differences in math ability, spatial skills, assertiveness and competitiveness are much more a product of gender socialization and segregation. In other words, it is precisely because girls and boys spend so much time apart, practicing different skills and relational styles, that they walk into college classrooms with different types of academic confidence and career ambition.

Neuropsychological research has identified very few innate differences between males and females and for most academic and interpersonal skills, the sexes actually overlap much more than they differ. If we really want women and men to compete on even playing fields, they have to be raised and educated in a truly gender-integrated way, where no one is excluded and both sexes learn how to respect, collaborate with and lead each other through shared experience.