Single-Sex Education

Name: Seowon Jung

Class: ESL100

Date: 5/12/2008

North-Eastern Asian countries have been affected by Confucian ideas. In South Korea, there is a sentence so far that when boys and girls become 7 years old, they can’t sit together. Moreover, approximately 500 years ago, women were not able to show any portion their skin except her face, hands, and feet. So, there are a lot of single-sex middle and high schools in S.Korea and Koreans are familiar attending single-sex schools, meetings, and military service. Someone, who wants to meet and talk to the opposite sex, would attend church. In contrast, western civilization has been magnanimous to sex and the educational experts have started to raise a question regarding the effects of this magnanimity.

According to The Australian Council for Educational Research, both boys and girls who were educated in single-sex classrooms scored on average 15 to 22 percentile ranks higher than did boys and girls in coeducational settings (2000). As boys and girls are in single-sex classrooms, they lose interest in the opposite sex and concentrate on studying and their duties. For example, many high school students in S.Korea study hard in order to meet the opposite sex because, almost all of the universities are coeducational.

Moreover, the sex crime rate can also be reduced through single-sex classroom because, while they are at school, people who they meet are all the same sex. Thus, they will lose interest in the opposite sex.

However, boys and girls in their adolescence can have some problem that we wouldn’t expect. By separating genders in school, the adult might be able to think that students will not cause some sexual incidents, but I think that they would have a greater interest in the opposite sex than a reductionist interest in the opposite sex due to curiosity. Moreover, they might have misinformation about the opposite sex. Indeed, through sex education in school, teachers can prevent sexual incidents of students but, if teachers try to restrict students desires more and more, students will have more curiosity.

These days, the experts are studying only about how the students can make higher test scores than before. Of course, young people are our hope and future of our countries. However, before we worry about how many more points they can earn, we have to make them become decent people. The percentage of low-educated people who are criminals is higher than highly educated people but, the highly educated people can be criminals, too. Therefore, the government decides to separate students from a coeducational system, the politician have to consider what the effects of single-sex education. As I mentioned, young people are the pillar of the state.