Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!think!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!labrea!agate!jha%lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK
From: jha%lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK (Jamie Andrews)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Girls' schools (was Re: Women Wizards?)
Message-ID: <12620@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 26 Jul 88 10:24:12 GMT
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In article <12366@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> David Collier-Brown writes:
>  A close friend and serious techie (in biology) carefully placed
>her teen-aged daughter in a religious private school....
>  When I have mentioned this as a positive measure, various people
>have commented on how "sexist and narrow-minded it is to send a
>girl to a girls' school".

     You will find a lot of support for this from Dale Spender
in her book _Invisible Women_, about women and education.  I
think it's a perfectly valid individual response to the wider
social problem of the neglect and discouragement girls face in
mixed-sex schools.  (Though this is neglecting issues of elitism
that sometimes arise in private schools.)

     This shouldn't preclude us from still trying to change
mixed-sex schools, possibly from within -- ie. demanding that
our children get equal treatment there.  But we still have to
do what's best for individuals, which in some cases means
single-sex schools.

--Jamie.
  jha@lfcs.ed.ac.uk
"Mayan skies sleeptalk with voices of lovers"

p.s. hi to the old *.women gang

[But how good are the science programs at single sex schools?  At
the University I'll be teaching at next year, (it was the women's
campus of the University of North Carolina system till the mid-sixties)
there isn't even a computer science major.  TR]