Irish Teacher: Why I believe children in single-sex schools are trapped in a fear-control model

I feel uncomfortable when I see little children in square blazers heading to their single-sex school

Jennifer Horgan. Pic: Larry Cummins

I was relieved to see Norma Foley roll back on her ‘interim’ plans this week. I admire anyone who is willing to change their position. Let’s hope real and meaningful reform follows.

The whole saga has got me thinking about how politicians go about leading their countries and how we often mirror their behaviour in schools. This is particularly true when it comes to the age-old combination of fear and control.

Politicians are so often demagogues. They appeal to emotion rather than rationality. They stoke up fear in citizens, before offering the promise and possibility of order and control to secure their votes. Tony Blair made people afraid of teenagers before introducing his infamous asbos. Bush made people afraid of terrorists before going to war. “Be afraid, be very afraid,” he said. Trump made people fear immigrants before building his giant wall.

The approach comes at great cost, turning us into cynics and pessimists, hardening our hearts to one another. Speaking in a video address to Commemorate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, our beloved President Higgins hinted at this when he said we are responding to “a politics of fear rather than the emancipatory promise of the politics of possibility.”

Why is it then that this same fear and control model is so often how we deal with children in schools? And at what cost? Do young people leave school inclined towards possibility? Or do they leave school already turning away from it?

This fear and control approach is a global phenomenon. In England, school children are as closely monitored on CCTV as prisoners. We’re not so bad here but a surveillance creep is happening, particularly in our secondary schools. In parts of Japan, schools have rules about the colour of student underwear. White underwear only. I can’t see that happening here, but parents opting children out of an updated relationships and sex curriculum is part of the same fear and control dynamic. Better to control the narrative; better to feed our fears about genders mixing and learning about one another.

Here in Ireland, too many of us are still faithful to de Valera’s envisaged Ireland “whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths, and the laughter of happy maidens.”

Well, athletic youths and happy maidens work together in my classroom. Recent studies confirm that gender makes no difference to academic outcomes, but Irish parents are trained to believe that mixing genders is inherently dangerous.

This is especially true in Cork and Dublin. For the most part, boys are seen as a threat to girls: a distraction.

But what are the consequences? Last summer, on their last day of school, a group of boys from a single-sex school made their way to a neighbouring single-sex girls’ school. One of the boys climbed on top of a friend’s shoulders, to a chorus of cheers, to stick a phallic sex toy above the girls’ school door. Within their own school, some boys stuck up posters about teachers checking their students for penis size. When I shared the footage and posters with people they laughed. I didn’t see the funny side then and I still don’t.

I also can’t imagine it happening in my school.

Then, there are uniforms. My school has none. We don’t believe that leggings, hair colour, piercings or make-up have any impact on learning. Conversely, a child of a family friend told me last week that her school is so strict on uniform, she’s not allowed wear her school coat in the classroom, even when it’s freezing. Fear and control. There is no rationality in ordering a child to remove their coat, other than the slippery slope argument — a child brazen enough to wear a coat indoors might rebel against everything.

Fear. Fear and control.

My students might have green hair, but they also have boundaries. Such boundaries don’t come from a place of fear; they are rational and ethical. When I started out as a teacher I used to spend the first class going through a list of ‘do nots.’ Now I write the word ‘respect’ on the white board. Students rise to the expectation, to an ideology of possibility and growth. We all do.

I feel uncomfortable when I see little children in square blazers going to their single-sex school. I see them as trapped in a fear-control model.

Young people are a country’s greatest asset. We should give up on being so afraid of them and tell them that more often.