johns hopkins vs. smith

BJM8
Sun, 23 Apr 2006 10:06:49 +0000

At Smith, 100% of the student leadership roles are filled by women. That means that women have a much greater opportunity to rise to the top and to learn from it than they would at a co-educational institution.

MWFN…that’s the beauty of a college like Smith. I have read many books on the sub-standard way girls are treated in coed classrooms throughout high schools in the country. Read books such as “Reviving Ophelia:Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls” by Mary Pipher, and “Failing at Fairness: How Schools Cheat Girls” by Myra and David Sadker and you will get my gist. These books provide hard evidence of the discrimination women face from the first day of school. The Sadkers’ book gives a very detailed view of how schools cheat girls by marginalizing their roles in the classrooms of America. The statistics regarding the perfromance of females at all-girl schools are impressive, and are of great importance, since co-ed institutions often seem to neglect girls to a greater degree.

The Sadkers show us how far women have come in the last century, in claiming their place in the classrooms of schools from elementary to graduate school both in front of the class, and behind the desk. They also show us how different that place is from the space filled by their male counterparts, and how sexism has seeped into every aspect of the female educational experience. The Sadkers studied the numbers —counting everything from female faces and names in textbooks and among teachers/professors, to school budgets for athletics, to questions and kudos offered to girls by teachers in the classroom. These numbers show that girls attend schools where the bulk of a teacher’s attention in the classroom is focused on boys, their studies are centered on men and their achievements, they are taught by men (secondary education and beyond) and the bulk of their schools’ budgets (including special ed and athletics) are spent on the boys. It is no wonder that the hopes and dreams of young girls are diminished as they enter adolescence, with doctors settling for nursing degrees, and chemists turning to cooking! They found that in intellectually rigorous girls’ schools, few incidents of sexism were uncovered. These schools focused on the intellectual growth, academic curiosity, independence and self-esteem of their female students.

This, IMHO, is what Smith does best. Do some research about females in schools, particularly in their adolescent years, and you will find that they receive quite a different education from their male counterparts. If you have a daughter planning on attending Smith or already attending, be very proud of what she has overcome to get there.

Oh, heck…let’s start a new post with this one shall we??