Three years after leaving the COVID-19 pandemic behind, our school remains committed to eradicating a much more persistent pathogen: cooties.
At least, that’s the impression you might get from our middle school and freshman advisories, which are segregated by gender. While this system has reasonable grounding, separating the sexes past seventh grade ultimately hinders students’ social development.
“We want (advisory) to not just (be) a gathering where (students) have breakfast, but also have meaningful conversation,” said guidance counselor Rylan Smith, who oversees the middle school advisory program. “We want to build a little family.”
Families, more often than not, consist of more than one gender. Why should those on our campus be any different?
“We have (advisories) separated by gender in sixth through ninth because … it’s much easier to approach some topics when you’re looking at it just from one gender standpoint, rather than trying to address things (for) every child in one space,” Smith said. “We’re specifically looking at the developmental changes that happen at that time period.”
The Head of School Advisory Committee recently revisited the structure of advisory in a two-year survey, upholding the longstanding gender split in sixth to ninth grade. The decision stemmed from developmental concerns for younger students, particularly in light of their isolation during the pandemic.
“I always say, ‘Whatever happens in advisory stays in advisory,’ and so those girls do talk about things that might make boys uncomfortable,” middle school girls’ advisor Ann Skippers said. “It’s important to create that safe environment so that they can take that sense of community and safety and create it elsewhere.”
Gendered advisories are thought to facilitate more meaningful dialogue about friendships and conflict resolution, for example, which young boys and girls usually approach in vastly different ways.
Ensuring kids feel comfortable discussing these topics, especially as they adapt to a new school, is essential. However, continually shielding them from the potential discomfort of mixed-gender spaces neglects an equally important developmental concern: ensuring kids can socialize universally.
“This segregation, when we have it imposed within advisory … bleeds into the normal friend patterns,” former freshman boys’ advisor Greg Wedel said. “We end up … with these giant all-boy and all-girl cliques, maybe three, four, five of them per grade level.”
Wedel observed much more cross-gender interaction during his time at Lake Howell High School. He attributes this largely to the lack of situations where gender division is normalized, like it is on our campus.
On the other hand, Skippers noticed similar self-segregation while teaching at a public school, even within the mixed-gender archery team she coached. To some extent, this inclination may be unavoidable.
“When boys and girls are together, they kind of just separate into their own groups on their own, and it’s just awkward sometimes,” eighth grader Arya Gandhi said.
Senior Reha Nagda recalls the boys and girls in her advisory choosing to sit entirely on opposite sides of the room in their first year together. Wedel has seen a similar trend this year among his sophomore advisees.
If children are inclined from birth to socialize with their own gender, it’s all the more pressing that we break students out of that mindset sooner than 10th grade. Mixed-gender advisories in eighth and ninth grade could give students the push they need to forge and maintain strong bonds with those of the opposite sex.
Single-sex advisories also run the risk of allowing students’ negative gender tendencies to resonate, inadvertently bolstering behaviors like rowdiness among boys or cattiness among girls. The gender balance in mixed advisories might mitigate this outcome.
“In the history of the world, the more men or boys get together, the more foolishness occurs,” Wedel said. “If you have a bunch of immature young people, which let’s say most ninth graders are, having people (of) the same (gender) actually encourages them to commit those behaviors together.”
Though it might seem silly to place the burden solely on advisory when students spend 90% of their school week in a mixed-gender environment, the unique framing of advisory as the school’s center for holistic growth makes it the key space to set students up for long-term social success — or failure.
“As you begin to interact more and more … you come to see the other sex as less of an alien creature,” Nagda said. “It teaches you some of that maturity when you have to interact with the other sex, especially (in) a supervised space like an advisory.”
Healthy families reject division instead of reinforcing it.
The Voice’s editorial board supports this opinion by a 7-2 vote. Dissenting and concurring opinions are expressed to the side above. Please send comments to [email protected].
