Sex Segregated Schools Seek to Make Men Worthy of Friendship
In 2002, after decades of Title IX and a few years after the United States Supreme Court invalidated single-sex public higher education in United States v. Virginia, fewer than a dozen public schools across the country offered sex segregated classrooms. Sex segregated, all male schools, critics said, created male privilege and fostered male networks that exclude women from career opportunities.
After U.S. v. Virginia, however, advocates of sex segregated schooling gamed its framework. The No Child Left Behind Act and associated regulations allowed public monies for sex segregated classrooms or schools when programs (1) were voluntary and (2) served gender-neutral educational objectives. Sex segregated schools are deemed legal if they promote gender-neutral goals like increasing student self-esteem, boosting math and science performance, elevating test scores, helping urban blacks, or reducing behavior problems or if they actively subvert gender stereotypes. As a result, nearly 400 single-sex public schools were operating in 2022.
These victories mask a larger defeat. Opponents of single-sex schools pursue their ideological interests openly and honestly, seeking to destroy male-only sex segregated schooling for supposedly reinforcing gender stereotypes and undermining efforts to build a gender-neutral society. Advocates of sex segregated schooling can only defend it within the “different-means-to-gender-neutral-ends” framework. They cannot openly defend education that intentionally points men and women to different qualities of character or different but overlapping destinies. Soon, minds narrow and the real issue of sex segregated education is lost. That understanding must be recovered
A Single-Sex Education Vision
Until very recently, the Christian tradition and society as such rejected gender-neutral education goals. Common schooling only became really vogue in the 19th Century, when mostly different destinies for men and women were taken for granted. At first, schools were co-educational, but segregated by sex: boys and girls occupied different parts of the buildings and generally learned from teachers of the same sex. This changed with the advent of mass education. By 1900, 98% of public high schools were coeducational and a bare majority of colleges were too.
Private schools were a different story. All Catholic schools were sex segregated well in the 1950s, and a goodly share still are. Protestants seem never to have embraced sex segregation as much as private non-religious schools, of which over 60% were still sex segregated in the 1960s. Therefore, Christians must turn to the Catholic tradition for robust defenses of sex segregated schooling. Divini Illius Magistri, a papal encyclical on education from 1929, considers coeducation false and harmful—an expression of blank slate philosophy that denies original sin and the social importance of human embodiment. There is nothing “in temperament, in abilities” to suggest that there “can be or ought to be promiscuity, and much less [sameness], in the training of the two sexes.” Men and women “are destined to complement each other in the family and in society, precisely because of their differences, which therefore ought to be maintained and encouraged during their years of formation, with the necessary distinction and corresponding separation, according to age and circumstances.”
Pius XI’s emphasis on men and women occupying different places within the family and in society reflects the principal justification for sex segregated education. Most male-only schools describe their educational goals in terms of fitting men to be leaders of society or industry and, as a by-product, excellent husbands and fathers—and they assume that women will play different roles in society and within the family. Since the sexes have somewhat different destinies, they are to be prepared differently. Sex segregated schooling serves that end.
The Goals of VMI. Consider the Virginia Military Institute, the paradigmatic male-only college that was forced to admit women in the 1996 U.S. v. Virginia case. Its educational goals were sex specific. VMI’s Board of Visitors conducted a mission study in 1986, for instance, wherein VMI aimed to produce men “imbued with a love of learning, confident in the functions and attitudes of leadership, possessing a high sense of public service, advocates of the American democracy and free enterprise system, and ready . . .to defend their country in time of national peril.” VMI’s project is political and civilizational, aiming to bend male tendencies toward civic leadership. (Church attendance was also required until the 1970s.) Learning serves civilizational purposes like defending America in times of peril or promoting the free enterprise system.
VMI’s “Code of a Gentleman” seems a relic, yet it set the tone at a public institution of higher education within living memory of anyone born before 1985!
Without a strict observance of the fundamental Code of Honor, no man, no matter how `polished,’ can be considered a gentleman. The honor of a gentleman demands the inviolability of his word, and the incorruptibility of his principles. He is the descendant of the knight, the crusader; he is the defender of the defenseless and the champion of justice . . . or he is not a Gentleman.
The moral aims of leadership—as opposed to the merely technical aspects of education—are front and center in the Code of a Gentleman. Gentlemen organize themselves for honorable public service, either through military service or through public-spirited, honorable economic or civil leadership.
After stating these aspirations, the Code lists specific gentlemanly do’s and don’t’s. A gentleman, for example, “does not discuss his family affairs in public or with acquaintances”; “speak more than casually about his girlfriend”; “does not display his wealth, money or possessions”; “does not ‘lick the boots of those above’ nor ‘kick the face of those below him on the social ladder’” and “does not lose his temper; nor exhibit anger, fear, hate, embarrassment, ardor or hilarity in public.” He neither lies, cheats or steals. Domestic life is kept private. But the Code is meant above all to point men to honorable, courageous public service and leadership.
The VMI Methods. The means used to achieve the goals and enforce the Code are around what was once called the “adversative method,” which is designed to create stress, induce doubts about the adequacy of previous ways of life so that the values of the corps could be imparted. Cadets patrolled one another, as Henry A. Wise describes in his book Drawing out the Man: The VMI Story, through the honor system, the rat system and class system. This involved formal processes and some of what we might today call bullying. Such culture-building was necessary to create moral standards of behavior and instill good habits. Men who accomplished things through fire—getting up very early, testing themselves physically, enforcing standards of behavior, punishing and ostracizing men who fall short—become attached to one another and willing to fraternize. Strong peer group loyalty serves the creation of a common culture based on the Code.
New enrollees at VMI are called “rats” and the rat line is akin to Marine corps bootcamp in physical rigor and mental stress. The fraternity and peer group loyalty of rats is not unlike a sports team’s. Groups of men learn to cooperate. They practice loyalty, and sense its importance. They sacrifice themselves for the group first and for noble ideals and clear goals. Toughness and struggle are their own rewards and the price of admission to the team. Leadership is rewarded with respect bordering on adulation. The mentoring system, called the “dyke system,” along with the Honor Court, groom new rats for leadership.
Christian Variations Today. What was true of VMI is also true, ceteris paribus, of certain private Catholic boarding schools and day schools. St. Martins in Kansas and St. Gregory the Great Academy in Pennsylvania are all male boarding schools. St. Martins, where about 60 students board, combines liberal arts education, practical labor, and Christian devotion. It seeks to develop authentic masculinity, which “demands perseverance in pursuit of the arduous good. It requires constant self-denial in the service of God, family, and community.” St. Martin’s boys “will do hard things every day to counteract our deeply rooted tendency toward softness and sloth.” The random day begins with chores at 7:00 a.m., mass at 8, classes at 9:30, lunch at noon, classes at 1:30 pm, athletics at 3:30, dinner at 6, study and recreation until 9:30, and then compline at 9:30 before lights out. Other days are dedicated to farm work or construction.
Day schools, both Catholic and Episcopal, speak the same language as St. Martins, though without less emphasis on manual labor and “hard things” and without VMI’s explicit emphasis on strong peer pressure. Opus Dei schools like Northridge Prep, in Niles, IL; Western Academy in Houston; The Heights in DC; and others are a bit more low-key. One, for instance, promises to adopt a “single-sex format in upper grades” so that the school can “tailor educational approaches. . .to helping boys learn to be great men and helping girls to become great women.” Not gender neutral. Northridge cultivates a “spirit of adventure and optimism,” and, among other things, hopes “to foster in each student a courageous and optimistic attitude in the face of these inevitable difficulties. Rather than falling into defeatism or apathy, he is encouraged to see them as opportunities to grow in character and as risks worth taking for the betterment of others.”
The Episcopal school, St. Mark’s in Dallas, has been around for more than a century, in one form or another. Much experiential learning (making robots) accompanies its liberal arts curriculum, while the emphasis on character and leadership is sown into the school’s culture. Its statement of purpose, nowhere as serious as VMI’s, emphasizes “assuming leadership and responsibility in a competitive and changing world.” Its values “include the discipline of postponing immediate gratification in the interest of earning eventual, hard-won satisfaction.” More than 900 students attend in grades one through twelve.
The boarding and day schools only hire men as teachers, just like the old VMI. Men on the faculty serve as role models for the goals of the education—achievers, statesmen, risk-takers, husbands, and gentlemen. They can also challenge with methods akin to VMI’s adversative methods, including tough questions, physical challenges, mental challenges, ridicule, ostracism, shame, and (more rarely) selective praise. Remarkable about the teachers at the boarding and day schools is the quality of men who serve on their faculty. St. Martin’s faculty, for instance, consists of men who found success in business, served twenty years in the Marines, former athletes, a retired lawyer, and several more traditional teachers. Ends and means match to make sex segregated education serve the goal of drawing out the man.
The Need for Single-Sex Education
Public co-education advocates reject both the ends and the means of all-male education, in either its strong, VMI-version and in its weaker, day-school versions. Co-education slowly domesticates all-male goals by subjecting their means to strict scrutiny. Fraternity is seen as a conspiracy. Maintaining standards of civilized behavior through peer pressure is exclusionary or bullying or hazing. The success of men will be traced to discrimination. Most women do not respond to challenging or the peer-pressure the way men do—so those means cannot be used or must be transformed to be used. As the means are judged off limits, often goals are simply dropped. The reigning ethos stigmatizes single sex social spaces as such. And especially in schools.
Many today are beginning to recognize the perils of depriving society of male-only spaces. Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, for instance, defends the idea of male-only spaces as necessary for male friendships and fraternity, though he opposes sex segregated schools. Too much sex segregation, on this score, it seems, invites the restoration of all-male networks leading to men having social and economic advantages over women. As Reeves writes, “fears of the old boys club are doing more harm than good,” but always with qualifications. Any defense of sex segregated education must, for Reeves, pass the “different-means-to-gender-neutral-ends” test.
Embracing gender neutral ends, however, has spelled doom for sex segregated education in the strong sense. VMI, it seems, has changed dramatically since women were admitted, though, interestingly, no one has systematically studied how VMI has changed. Its Code was transformed, from a “Code of the Gentleman” to “The Code.” Official VMI documents speak of continuity, challenge, leadership, making people “better individuals,” as if sex integration of the school were a minor event in the school’s history. Acceptance rates have soared to over 80% at VMI. Fewer men apply to the school. A DEI office and Title IX office now regulate its honor and class systems, not to mention its rat system. While the old Code emphasized students policing themselves and stigmatized those who bypassed student-led Honor Court, taking complaints to the administration directly now bespeaks courage when it involves exposing discrimination or creating a “hostile educational environment” or “hazing.” The Title IX Office motto is “Respect, Report, Support.” The rat system, which had been designed to put new cadets through physical and mental tests with grueling workouts and shaking up new recruits, now must adhere to Virginia’s “civility in the workplace” policy.
Similarly, institutions like the Boy Scouts that have adopted gender neutral goals in the past decades and have, as a result, been hollowed out. The old Boy Scouts who aimed to inspire young men with “the histories and stories of the knights of King Arthur, of the Crusaders, and of the great explorers and navigators of the world” as its Handbook of 1911 states. A separate organization called Girl Guides (later Brownies in America) was founded near the same time, with an extraordinary Handbook published in 1918 emphasizing domestic virtues and feminine toughness for the young ladies. Under this old iteration of sex segregation, both girls and boys enjoyed nature, tied knots, camped, learned survival skills, but also learned skills and qualities of character that pointed to their different but overlapping destinies in society. The Boy Scouts adopted tamer, gender neutral goals like “personal growth” and “community service” in 1972. This move was a step toward a dismantling. The Boy Scouts remained sex segregated until 1976, when troops began admitting girls. In 2007, Boy Scouts of America required all troops make provision for admitting girls, and soon girls were joining at higher rates than boys. Within a decade, Boy Scouts of America admitted gay scout leaders and rebranded itself Scouts.
Moderates like Reeves worry that men have too few friends, but their tepid diagnosis does not match the remedy. He helpfully recognizes that men have distinct interests and character, but wants men to conceive of those interests in gender neutral ways. Instead of just making male spaces for friendship (as Reeves would), sex segregated schooling seeks to make men worthy of friendship. Sex segregated schools heighten some differences between men and women, pointing each to distinctive characters and destinies, to draw out the man and to draw out the woman from the girl. All-male schools especially bend the aggression and camaraderie of boys to foster heroic actions, academic challenges, risk-taking, and a culture of mutual accountability and high standards.
A group of men worthy of friendship is capable of changing the direction of American churches and America as such. That is why our regime opposes male-only schools, and that is why those who seek civic renewal should focus precisely on that point.
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