With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER
OCTOBER 5, 2022
My high school years were spent with young men. Regis High School, as it was called when I attended it as a student, was an all boys, Jesuit school. Though there was talk of adding girls to the school as I was graduating, I do not remember thinking seriously about the possibility of Regis going co-ed.
Of course, I was 18. I do not recall thinking too deeply about anything that did not concern me.
As a student at an all boys school, I had a wonderful experience. I was very close to my classmates and truly felt that ineffable quality of “brotherhood” that men like me talk about after they graduate. I note here that women discuss the ineffable quality of “sisterhood” upon their graduations from all girls schools as well as I would learn years later, when I taught at the all girls version of Regis Jesuit.
As a man in my mid-twenties, returning to my alma mater and, as I mentioned in a prior post, feeling every bit of my ego, I had a significant curiosity about all boys education from the other side of the desk.
What I found in my observations was that the positives were all there. The sense of brotherhood was very strong. The connections the students made to one another were powerful. Young men felt like they could be themselves and the lack of young women represented, for most of them, space from the vagaries of dating and tension that come when adolescents are together in social situations.
But I became concerned about those very social situations and any other situation in which our students would encounter members of the opposite sex. I listened to the women with whom I was hired who discussed challenges they were facing that I was not and, taking all ego out of the equation – as much as I could – I understood the difference was our sex. I heard young women referred to inappropriately as a matter of course. I felt a loss of perspective in the classroom. As a young teacher, I saw another side of all boys education that was not as appealing to me as it was when I was a student (to be fair, I observed similar shortcomings in all girls education in the 10 years I spent at Regis Jesuit Girls Division and I will write more about that in a later post).
Looking back now as the principal of a co-ed school, I feel that this is the model of education for the whole person that works best. Perhaps I would select a different model were I in a different context, but I do not think I would. I am very blessed to have spent 10 years in an all boys setting, 10 years in an all girls setting and almost 10 years in co-ed settings.
What a gift all of this has been.
