Queen Elizabeth Hospital School has said it will admit girls into the Sixth Form. This is a great step in the right direction by a school which was founded in 1590 and until now has been exclusively for males. It is the last all-boys school in Bristol and that’s a positive thing. Single-sex education is not just out-dated, it is damaging.
The school’s headmaster Steven Holliday has been quoted in the Bristol Post as saying that the move will “ensure that our students leave here well prepared for life beyond QEH.” He is right, adding that students at Sixth Form age are “mature” enough to work together – one should hope so.
People who support single-sex education argue that girls feel less anxious and are more willing to perform and take up subjects that don’t fit their gender role like sciences and maths. Boys, they say, can concentrate without the distraction of trying to impress the girls by acting cool.
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I went to an all – girl’s school and it is true that lots of students did take up sciences and maths and got good grades in them, but everything else about it was awful. It was an academic grammar school and everyone had the “drive” to “do well” but it was competitive to a painful extent.
My school had a uniform but girl-on-girl judgement was still all-pervasive. We weren’t strictly allowed to wear make-up, but it was still worn. If you wore too much you were “slutty,” if you didn’t wear enough you were “boring” and “ugly.”
Instead of looking for attention from boys, attention was turned to judging peers. Being messy awkward or flat-chested meant, without other distractions, you were the source of amusement.
It is no surprise to me when I see headlines about the “anorexia epidemic” and self-harm amongst top girl’s schools, with one school in London being named “Anorexia High.” Friends who have been there, talk about pressure and bullying. Stellar grades for girls, feminist success? Well, in too many cases its at a cost, A girl who gets an A• but cuts herself and is unhealthily underweight is not empowered.
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The Sixth-Form I went to was co-educational but a girls’ school in the lower years. I could see that, for the girls, emotionally it was a better school because it didn’t impose uniformity. Feminism, rather than authoritarianism, was the order of the day. It was drummed in, in every assembly, that equality is the most important principle and that improvement and bettering yourself and the world was more important than pure grades.
In Sixth-Form the boys also quickly became respectful feminists. My view on the matter is that these are values they obtained only by being in an environment with girls who in the future will be their co-workers. Girls who are taught to be true to themselves, rather than castigated for being different.
Girls and boys should learn about what it means to have an empowered sense of self, to be a girl doing science and a boy doing dance, to be a boy with long curly hair and a girl with a short messy bob. This they should learn together. Real freedom, they should understand, does not involve conforming and being successful in a pre-determined system- it’s about spiritual as well as physical fulfilment and changing the status quo for the better.