Those who have experienced the blessings and burdens of single-sex education feel a certain affinity with one another. When I mention that the high school I attended is all-male, I get alluring looks from teenage girls, sneers from teenage boys, and warm smiles from members of older generations.
However, what once was the prevalent manner of educating youth in this nation is coming to an end. The stories of Holden Caufield and Stephen Dedalus will soon serve as only distant reminders of what once was.
Last fall, during the first week of my senior year at Regis Jesuit High School, I saw something unprecedented in the school’s 125-year history: some 350 girls filing into the gym to celebrate an all-school Mass. I, along with 850 other boys, discovered what my parents meant when they said girls could be a “distraction” as our prayerfully bent heads snapped to attention, trying to catch a glimpse of the phenomenon of Regis girls.
As the well-dressed young ladies took their seats next to squirming freshman boys, I realized I was witnessing the culmination of a six-year struggle involving administrators, faculty, alumni, parents and students to decide whether a girls’ division should be added to the Regis community.
For the first time in nearly five centuries of educating youth, Jesuits were offering single-sex education to girls.
Although all 28 Jesuit colleges and more than a quarter of all Jesuit high schools in the United States are now coed, Regis is the first to experiment with “co-institutional” education – an attempt to preserve the separate learning environments for boys and girls during school hours while encouraging social interaction after school.
Although this may sound benign, many students and alumni protested that allowing girls at Regis would undermine the existing brotherhood – a brotherhood that prided itself on being spirited, smart and “open to growth” – not, however, open to the idea of sharing a campus with girls.
The class that graduated last weekend experienced firsthand the tumultuous transition to co-institutional education. We could hear teachers’ rhetoric change as the school’s motto, “Men for Others,” was expanded to “Men and Women for Others.” We could see a new, $14 million school being erected for the boys and the existing building undergo a $1 million renovation to accommodate girls. We could even smell the redeeming aroma of perfume subdue the odor of boys who had not showered in days.
In Aurora, the Jesuits established a new order even more remarkable than the new odor. The integrated sports teams (cross-country and track) and clubs (from Model United Nations to fencing) became among the most popular activities at Regis almost overnight. The student sections at football and basketball games overflowed with the addition of dedicated female fans, and countless young men began brushing their hair and teeth in an attempt to look like respectable gentlemen.
Slowly, it dawned on me why the sun is setting on single-sex education: It’s just not natural in a society where the sexes mingle freely. Girls did so much to increase the students’ enthusiasm and motivation that I cannot help but think that being removed from “normalcy” for four years had put Regis students at a disadvantage. Although we found the brotherhood of Regis, we had lost touch with the sisterhood of the world.
The changes of the last several years were the first steps toward providing Regis with a much-needed balance. However, is co-divisional education the final answer to the question of whether a school based vaguely on the principle of separate but equal succeed? After all, the boys who graduate from Regis four years from now will still not have experienced the intellectual presence of girls in the classroom. They will never see a girl raise her hand to answer a question that stumped the rest of the class or discuss birth control, abortion and other moral issues that profoundly affect women. They will never watch a girl make a presentation about the role of women in the French Revolution or learn her views on religion.
Regis has revised the tradition of single-sex education by trying to balance the best of both worlds. It has fostered the spiritual, academic and athletic growth of young men for 125 years and now hopes to do the same for young women. My own guess is that co-institutional education will ultimately prove to be an interim step toward complete co-education – and that this final step for Regis will not be another 125 years in the making.
Michael Koenigs, a May graduate of Regis Jesuit High School, will attend Harvard in the fall.
