Why abolishing boys schools is an act of woke madness

Parents are seen campaigning against Newington College's controversial decision to go co-ed. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Buck up, boys schools, you have a lot to offer.

The campaign to abolish single-sex schools, especially boys schools, is a sign of the madness of ideology and the badness of groupthink.

It reflects the dreary, dull, lifeless, joyless, small “S” Stalinist bureaucratic conformity that progressive ideology routinely attempts to impose. It’s a rush to insanity, where pressure will come on every successful boys school to become coeducational.

Let’s state the obvious. Boys schools, girls schools and co-ed schools can all be extremely good, mediocre or terrible. It’s a good thing for our educational environment, and for countless families and students, that different types of schools flourish.

It seems a pity that some boys schools with long, good traditions now feel obliged to go co-ed. They may be feeling cultural pressure.

Let me confess. I spent the majority of my schooling at a Christian Brothers school in Sydney that was for boys only. It was a great school, with wide socio-economic and racial diversity, and certainly taught its students respect for women and girls, and respect for everyone.

It wasn’t an exclusively male environment. There were female teachers, librarians, admin staff, mothers in the tuck shop. To be rude, much less sexist, towards any of these would have been unthinkable and would have earned draconian punishment.

The contemporary debate is too ideological. If a particular school has a behaviour problem, that needs to be fixed. Abolishing boys schools generally would be wretched iconoclastic vandalism.

In the Financial Review last week an anonymous business executive called for ending single-sex schools and said boys schools should stop trying to make “men” out of their students.

How weird is this? What is it that boys are supposed to become if not men? Giraffes? Oranges?

The piece reflects the confused and counter-productive campaign against masculinity. Men, like women, can do terrible things. Men are responsible for much more violence than women. I agree we’re living through a plague of domestic violence that we must stop. But you won’t make men decent, respectful and successful by telling them masculinity itself is bad.

Greg Sheridan at his first communion

Seventeen years ago, in central Melbourne, about 7.30am, a biker, who had been on an all-night binge, was beating up his girlfriend. Two men came to her aid. One was killed in the process. In giving his life to the instinct to protect a woman under assault, that man was displaying masculinity, and it wasn’t toxic.

At the school I attended more than 50 years ago, the brothers, and all the teachers, stressed that men had certain obligations to women – politeness, consideration, respect, courtesy.

The brothers taught that when walking down the street with a girl the bloke should try to walk between the girl and the road. That’s so any danger coming from the road, such as a car crashing off the street, hits the bloke first.

That may all seem hopelessly outdated. But men and women are still different. Completely equal but different. The idea that the differences are mainly the result of socialisation is contemporary ideology waging war against human nature.

Almost no one really lives their life according to the new ideology. Is there a household in Australia where, if a married couple hears a strange noise in the middle of the night, the husband turns to the wife and says: “Now, darling, why don’t you go and see if that noise is a burglar. I’ll stay here by the phone. I would go myself but I don’t want us to be trapped in gender stereotypes.”

A young Greg Sheridan, pictured far left, at a school awards ceremony.

It’s good that women’s sport is increasingly seen as the equal of men’s sport. But it’s still different. No one argues that men and women should play rugby league together. The army for a long time included boxing in its training. It’s a tough sport. Maybe its concussion risks render it no longer fit for such training. But you can see it helped soldiers cope psychologically with experiencing a physical blow but carrying on. It has never been the case that men and women enter the same boxing ring and box against each other.

The variety of human experience is vast but boys and girls are different. Co-ed can work superbly, but so can schools that focus only on boys, or only girls. Boys and girls do tend, within all kinds of statistical variation, to learn a bit differently, so boys schools can focus on the way boys learn.

Girls tend to mature earlier than boys and in that early adolescent period a single-sex school allows a boy to remain a boy for as long as necessary. And then become a man.

Cardinal George Pell once remarked that “self-confidence, directness and an instinct for struggle and competition” characterised Christian Brothers schools. That’s pretty accurate.

But boys schools also offer boys a distinctive diversity. At a boys school, if there’s going to be a choir it has to be the boys singing.

Greg Sheridan (bottom row, far left) with his year group at the Redemptoris Seminary.

The school I went to was exceptionally strong in sports. My one season as a junior rugby league player led to a broken shoulder; my parents decided I’d dispense with footy. I wasn’t very good at sport anyway but the school offered multitudes of other activities. I was always in the debating team, the chess club, sometimes the drama performances, sometimes music groups, briefly in the science club, in Christian youth groups and a million other things.

Even though I didn’t play football or cricket, and hardly excelled at the sports I did participate in, I never felt out of place. Books, learning, contention, energy, purpose, competition – it was a pro-life environment.

The teachers occasionally gave us the strap for our malefactions. Some of life’s antipathies are irrational. I greatly disliked one teacher, who warmly returned my sentiments. No doubt unfairly, I thought him a dogmatic smart alec. Perhaps we were too much alike.

I persecuted him with many pedantic questions and points of order while staying well within the rules and norms. One day, nonetheless, he sort of gave in and gave me the strap. I went home that afternoon immensely chuffed, feeling I’d won a moral victory.

PG Wodehouse in 1965

There were times, of course, when we were louts and hooligans, and needed strong direction. The school was pretty strict. Sensibly so. And it had a great tradition. Wearing its uniform meant something. We cared about it. No doubt it struck other kids entirely differently.

But it gave me wonderful treasures. In its library, in primary school, I met PG Wodehouse, my lifelong companion.

We moved house and I finished at a co-ed school. It was good, too. Diversity is good. The urge of ideological censors to hammer everything into a single monotonous conformity is as misbegotten as their demonisation of masculinity, and of the need to turn good boys, indeed, into good men.