Yes that is true and even in the most strictest Islamic country, the link shows that girls are allowed to go to school. What is even more interesting is that female graduates outnumber male graduates and that was in 1999 and even I'm a bit surprised by that
Well, this went off topic really fast. This is not a topic about if we should exclude one of the genders from education nor is it about how Muslim nations treat their women. It is about gender segregated classrooms and therefore gender-exclusion is a matter for another thread.
You will probably find that it is higher than 1 in 4 Saudi men too. There is high poverty in SA particularly among immigrants. Not sure what this has to do with women in schools though
The fancy private school is an equivalent to a Rolls Royce. Competition doesn't take down the price of luxury goods. In fact, it often raises the price of luxury goods.
"Social interaction" with the opposite gender is not the purpose of the education system. Developing social skills is a by product of having to interact with other people, and that can occur in all kinds of situations - sports, church, clubs, the neighborhood.
I do not even get the argument of "social excercise", from what I remember from school, there was not really much socialising going on at all. You just sat there with your backs against each other and listened to some boring teacher yabbing for an hour before telling you to "shut up and answer the questions on page 215." On the breaks, the girls went one way and the boys another - Not much room to talk to the opposite gender at all. Furthermore, I do not really see why that is important. Talk to girls like you talk to every other human and you'll be fine.
It also provides more opportunities for both sexes to be gender nuetral in their choices, say sports or science for girls and drama for boys, without the usual social stigmas that stupidly attach somewhere in the space between cooties and contraception.
dadoalex said: ↑ There have been studies on the subject and the evidence seems to indicate that both genders benefit educationally from segregated environments starting around age 12 (seventh grade). Well, then why are the madrassas in Muslim countries not producing geniuses? Gender segregation in ordinary life is common in Islamic countries, if not quite the rule. Once Mohammed died, Islamic culture calcified quickly, & women disappeared from leadership (or their participation was covered up) roles in society & religion & learning. The madrassas have been (mostly) gender segregated for a good 1200 years @ least - if gender segregation were the ideal, they should have out produced the West ages ago. & bear in mind that Islam had a head start over the West & Christianity to begin with. In their heyday, it looked like Islam was going to conquer the West, if not the World.
There are many nations in the world where girls are not allowed to learn. http://www.tourdestfu.com/2016/02/10-nations-that-dont-allow-girls-to-go.html
Islamic society was growing and developing at least as fast as Western until about 1000 CE, it 'calcified' at about that time for a variety of reasons. Students don't learn very much at Madrassas because most are actually religious schools, particularly in areas where there is a fundamentalist government It's long been recognized that students of either gender learn better in school if the opposite sex is not there to distract them and I know from personal experience that this is not only true in school but extends throughout life. To this day I simply cannot study differential equations without being distracted by memories of Brenda Brogden, who sat in front of me in that class and had the best butt and shortest skirts of any girl in my school
"Well, then why are the madrassas in Muslim countries not producing geniuses? Gender segregation in ordinary life is common in Islamic countries, if not quite the rule. " Yes, we don't want to end up like Muslim countries, that's for sure.
Don't give Mohammad a victory, don't segregate schools. Allow girls the same opportunities as boys. Religions want to define strict divisions based on gender - don't let them win. The Bible, for example, says that women should shut the hell up in church. In 2000 years, Jesus has not once spoken up and said "look, the Bible screwed up and got it wrong about women". 1 Cor. 14:33b-36: "As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. Did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only people it has reached?" "
I think it's better in terms of life skills to be mixed, because that's how the workplace is. They need to learn how to act towards the opposite sex in both social and professional environments, and you get a little of both in school. I think there's some fear of being academically stunted by distraction from the opposite sex, but that wasn't really my experience, despite being an obviously hypersexual person. Maybe 10% of my dating was within my school, and that was entirely related to extracurricular activities, I found almost all girlfriends from other schools. I think I was more skewed than most, but people really did prefer to date people from other schools because they didn't want to deal with the judgement from their peers at school - since they often wanted to date people others didn't approve of and the relationships usually ended badly. The main exceptions seemed to be popular people dating other popular people. I was from a pretty conservative school though. The "fellowship of christian athletes" were the popular people. It was a high quality public school. One of my honors teachers invented senior projects as we know them today. Not how it was in my school at all. People cliqued by shared interests. The skater boys and skater girls hung out together. The fellowship of Christian athletes hung together - boys and girls. Cheerleaders and football players. Speech/debate boys and girls. Band boys/girls. Drama boys/girls. I noticed because I didn't fit neatly into any group so I had friends from each of these groups but they didn't mesh together. Outside of school I had groups of friends that were primarily guys, primarily girls (ex-girlfriends and their friends), and mixed.
Our society is a bit different than Islamic ones. I voted indifferent than realized there are some real benefits for kids. Religion has nothing to do with my opinion on it. Im more about having the choice to learn either way.
Yah, noted. But if the point of a madrassa is to train the next generation of religious leadership, Does it make sense to skimp on that leadership's education? & often enough, a madrassa is the only kind of school available @ all, within reasonable reach & cost in an Islamic country. Granted that they start out as training for a religious career - the point remains, if gender segregation is good for education & the students involved (the point of this thread, as I recall) then why aren't the madrassas punching out brilliant male students, @ least, even if not all of them go on to religious careers? In a polyglot, multiple church & ethnicity & national origin & everything else like the US, it's important that citizens be able to concentrate on the task @ hand. Even the slight exposure of being in the same classroom is helpful, if it allows students to see each other as people - individuals - rather than as mere personifications of some kind of ethnic or religious or what-have-you stereotyping. Given the pigeonholing that mass culture - TV & movies & the rest of the MSM - freely indulge in, in terms of assigning likely life outcomes & opportunities to the various (actor) ethnicities on offer, actual contact with real humans is more important than ever. In this aspect, public schools are a kind of microcosm of the larger society. & therefore the schools are a kind of role model - we can establish the priorities we want to see carried out in the society @ large - or we can retreat from the Constitutional goals that the Founding Fathers dreamed of for the future.
The focus is to rote learn the Qur'an. There were madrassahs in northern Pakistan that taught the Qur'an to boys who never even learned Arabic. They could recite any section of the Qur'an verbatim, but had no idea what it meant. So in terms of teaching, they were effective. In terms of content, not so much. Schools are there to teach facts, develop performance and critical thinking, not to provide a microcosm of larger society. I don't believe the goal of the Founding Fathers was to institutionalise social contact. If the data says that gender-segregated schools do the job better, they should be encouraged not least because that is an efficient use of tax-payer resources.
It's rather hard to believe that you don't have an opinion yet still feel obligated to open this up for discussion. Obviously there is some motivating issue here for you that drives this question. Segregation is segregation regardless of what we're talking about segregating. It's like we're back in the 50s and 60s all over again (oh if we just had that economy back it might seem less disturbing). However, there is this thing called "I.Q." that is relevant based on one's peers. I had a grandmother, natural in medicine, a true born doctor, but she was born in the wrong century and of the wrong gender. So we had less qualified professionals (based on gender). So in the perspective of societal interests I find it hard to understand the push for segregation. Are less qualified people in fear that they might have less opportunity? Or is it the sexual distraction issue we are talking about?
Did you bother to read your link? In every one it states that girls can and do go to school and some of those countries in that list are majority Christian or Buddhist. And none of those countries are in the Middle East. Please just accept that you were mistaken in post 32 and we can leave it there.
Well that is not true and a gross over simplification. Denying the existence of teenage hormonal changes and sexuality is simply sticking your head in the sand. It just so happens that here is this cross-over point where children have spiked sexual urges, no experience in how to manage those feelings, and by and large increasingly attractive physical appearance. And we have decided that this is the appropriate point in their lives to sit them down together and teach them algebra. That's not fair on anybody, including the teachers. The data shows that gender differences in subject take-up and aptitude are diminished in single-sex high schools. That is a global phenomenon applying to both sexes across cultures.
You think Pakistan, India and Afghanistan aren't in the middle east? Girls not allowed to attend school were the norm in the middle east just a few short decades ago. Many places there women aren't even allowed to expose their faces or even drive.
