So why is this part of the schools?
The schools around here spend a shitload on it.
Great question.
Yeah, I think they’d be willing to throw high school girls under the bus to keep their academic cred.
Because in the same way we can easily tell men from women by looking 99% of the time, we can also recognise patterns of behaviour, personality characteristics, interests etc as male or female, and a large majority of people do fit our expectations in these areas, even though many differ on a subset of them. I don’t know if anyone has tried to test this - maybe I’ll have a look later.
I think these natural tendencies do influence what behaviours are coded male and female. Eg greater male risk taking means more men do dangerous jobs, they commit more crimes, drive more dangerously, etc. Obviously humans didn’t evolve with cars, and the specific jobs needing doing depend on the society, but we see these patterns across different societies because of the underlying personality differences.
Even if you include getting pregnant as female risk taking, that’s still going to lead to differences in other areas.
Yes. The teenage years tend to be the time of peek self-consciousness, and the strong desire to impress or avoid looking foolish in front of the opposite sex is not helpful here.
I disliked team sports at school, and I’m not particularly interested in watching them, but other people evidently enjoy these things, and high school sports seem to be a valued part of US culture for many. AFAIK participation is voluntary, so why the desire to take them away from people who do enjoy them, over what seem to be relatively minor issues?
Maybe there’s an argument to separate competitive sports from schooling, but I think you’ll find that reduces opportunities for disadvantaged kids to take part, since they won’t have the same access to clubs outside school.
“Hey, women! We are punishing all of you because a few activists made a stupid point! How do you feel about THAT?”
No, not a fan… Can we rethink that idea please?
These were sports teams that people were on?
When I was in high school, I was not an athlete, so I took Physical Education, or PE. This was, indeed, a coed class with both boys and girls doing various sports throughout the year.
But that’s because I wasn’t an athlete. The school teams were sex segregated (well, technically, there was one team that was open and one team that was for girls, but given that we live in a universe where there are very significant physical differences between boys and girls, there were no girls on the open team).
So people who were just moving around a field to get their blood pumping - like me - were in coed classes. And I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t have been.
But people who were athletes on sports teams - like my wife, who ran track and played soccer - were on separate team. And obviously, this is a very good thing, because regardless of “expectations” my wife wasn’t going to qualify for the boys’ track or soccer teams; no girl would.
That explains a lot. But in that case there’s a cultural disconnect here. Our casual athletics, IE what school kids do as an activity as part of a lesson, is called PE and it is already coed, just like the UK. While we do have club teams like they do, our schools ALSO have their own, school run “semi pro” teams as well, that are split by gender, just like UK semi pro teams.
So the question isn’t “should schools separate sports by sex”; it’s actually two separate questions.
Should casual physical activity lessons for children be separated by sex? No.
Should athletic competitions, and the teams that participate in those competitions, be separated by sex? Yes, absolutely.
The logic in the quote you included above is almost Lamarckian somehow. It’s like they think each generation, runners can train their proteges to be a little faster than they were. And this process is totally separate for men and women?
Well I was only at the good school for a couple of months, but at the bad school we were told that in some subjects like french we were close to a year behind and we’d need to catch up in our own time.
I actually did well at my GCSEs btw, the real life regret was doing my A-levels at that same school…
Sure, but this is the kind of thing I was trying to ascertain.
My meaning is that, here in the UK, we played team sports like basketball, baseball as mixed gender. And I don’t recall any issues with girls getting hurt or anyone feeling it messed up the games. So if the issue with mixed sports is some seeing it as inherently unworkable, well it was fine IME (though I can only speak of my own experience and there’s at least one poster here whose experience differs)
But flip the words round, from team sports to sports teams, and they were indeed segregated and arguably have to be.
To a degree. But in practice the biggest driver has been status and numeration; high status, high status jobs have historically gone to men while low status, low pay jobs go to women. And if the status and pay of a job change, so does the gender composition.
Women were not only by replaced with men in computer programming, but a widespread and largely successful effort was made to erase them from the history of the field. And “secretary” used to be a high paying, high status male job; then when it become a low status, low pay job it became a basically all-female role. With the few higher status examples typically given a different title like “administrative assistant” to ward off the cooties and handed to a man.
It’s going to be massively culturally influenced.
It isn’t just that. It’s that even when the same jobs need doing they’re coded differently. Weaving, farming, specific types of hunting, particular types of child care, particular types of cooking – if I had time to do the research I could find lots more.
And again whatever underlying personality differences there are on average, they get exaggerated by the society. Ours encourages boys and men to take risks, and discourages girls and women from doing so – at least, from taking risks not associated with their culturally-defined roles. Cooking in this society used to involve combining open flames with long loose clothing – a risk that everybody just assumed had to happen.
Those issues may look less minor to those kids who are bad at them; especially when so much stress is placed on their importance.
That’s a point. Though maybe the society should fund such clubs separately; and transportation to them. That might remove them to some extent from the category of “things all children should be good at but most of them aren’t good enough”.
It often isn’t coed in the USA.
And it’s often horribly run, so that the kids less good at it are also shamed in gym class. Not all such classes are like that; but a lot of them are. That of course isn’t a gender problem; but I think it’s strongly influenced by the extreme stress in many US schools on competitive sports.
You want to blow the minds of Texas Republicans, tell them their football programs are DEI.
I’d say it’s the other way around. We care more about getting people to a basic level of competency in academics, because without that they are going to find it pretty hard to be productive members of society. Athletics doesn’t translate to productivity nearly as well, except for at the very top end.
Well, yes, of course.
High school PE is for people like I was, who aren’t competitive or athletes.
High school sports, as in the teams that are part of the athletics program that go compete in regional and state competitions, are for competitive people. That’s why you typically have different levels (Varsity, Junior Varsity, etc).
If a school or community has enough interest there might also be intermural sports teams, which are casual just-for-fun teams or leagues, and those are often coed. But when people talk about a school’s sports teams, they’re generally referring specifically to the Varsity/Junior Varsity teams, and any feeder teams the school might have for younger ages; not to recreational sports.
A Varsity team is meant to represent the school at the highest level of competition it can achieve. Those other things are reasons why you might want to join a team, but the team’s goal is to be competitive.
If you don’t like that, don’t join a Varsity team (or a JV team whose job is to build up students for the Varsity team, etc); play intermurals, or join a recreational club, or do any of a bazillion other activities that aren’t about competition.
Then be clear about your argument. Say “I want to abolish all competitive sports at undergraduate educational institutions”. Don’t try to sneak your way there by… Allowing men on the women’s team? I don’t see how this will lead to the desired end goal - presumably, that there are casual leagues at these schools? It would seem like if you just let men participate in women’s sports, you wouldn’t create two casual coed leagues; you’d create two competitive men’s leagues.
When I was in high school, while they did meet out of school, athletes also had their period that would have been PE dedicated to their team. They either did practice or generic exercise to build strength and fitness in the off season. So school athletics were definitely part of the school day.
But as noted, no one had to be there. You could just take PE instead. (And you only HAD to take PE for 2 years, not 4. Athletics students were the only ones who had an athletics period in junior or senior year.)
Okay, so it is similar. We also had PE lessons, which were mixed sex, and then there were a few sports teams who had practices after school, and they went and competed with other school teams outside school hours. I’m sure these were single sex, though I didn’t know much about them. School sports are a bigger deal in general in the US I think, and that outsize importance might be what @thorny_locust is objecting to more than their existence.
I think possibly yes, at least when it involves teams sports. Both because it tends to be demoralising for girls (I don’t think it was only physical differences that put the boys ahead, most of them were more sporty in general and had a lot more transferrable skills, even if they hadn’t played a particular sport before), and because it can be distracting for both sexes.
It should be the school’s job to catch you up. And even if you did, won’t they still be teaching your classmates stuff from the previous year? Or did they just skip months of material and expect you all to keep learning somehow?
Good for you with the GCSEs, but ouch. I suppose they were hardly going to advise you to go somewhere else, but you could have done A levels at college, or moved to a sixth form at a better school. I had a friend who went to a rough school, and he dropped out and never finished his A levels. It’s a shame.
I’m glad my school didn’t have a sixth form; I had lousy GCSE results but got good A levels after moving to a better school for those 2 years.
Because those people are stupid and inferior, as evidenced by the fact that they like the thing I don’t like; therefore I should be able to tell them not to do it, and they will all thank me once society is better off having been restructured in my image. DUH!
/s
Ahhh, but sports are dumb and bad, therefore taking them away from disadvantaged kids is a good thing, because it prevents them from becoming dumb and bad too. Don’t you know that athletics programs are parasites that feed on the strong bodies of disadvantaged youth?
/s
What I did in PE includes team sports, like basketball, soccer, etc.
The way PE worked is that every few weeks we’d start a new “unit”. OK, weather is nice, we are outside playing soccer for a few weeks - practicing passes, dribbling, and then having some games on the fields. A few weeks later, it’s rainy, time for rope climbing in the gym; a few weeks later, weather is clear again, to the blacktops for basketball.
That was all coed. Our PE is just like your school sports class. Some individual sports, some team.
When people talk about high school sports, they’re not talking about Coach Smith taking the 30 PE kids to the blacktops and splitting them into four teams to play two parallel games of basketball. Apparently there are places where that’s still sex segregated - so I am told - but I’ve never experienced anything like that, and I was at school about 15 years ago.
When people talk about high school sports, they’re talking about sports teams. The kind you guys call “clubs” (except that we have clubs here too; but they cost a bunch of money, so well off kids play on their school team AND on a fancy club while poor kids just play for the school).
It’s not that I don’t believe you, but I have never heard of a public school splitting PE classes by sex.
At the start of the PE period we had 5 minutes to go into the locker room, change, then line up on the blacktop (there was a grid of numbers from 1 to 30 stenciled on the pavement and we all had assigned numbers, so the teacher - sorry, in PE they were a “coach” - could immediately see who was absent). Those five minutes were the only time we were split up.
Which public high schools still segregate PE in 2025?
Sorry, this is happening in real life, or in cartoons about middle school?
I remember that plotline in the show Recess, but not in real life.
That isn’t “of course”.
That sort of competitive sports isn’t “of course” part of the school system. It may indeed be “of course” part of society, because there is indeed something about humans and competitive sports, especially for some reason ball sports. But it isn’t part of school systems everywhere, and it hasn’t been part of all school systems in the USA all through US history. It certainly is part of school systems in the USA now; but that’s not an immutable part of the nature of school systems.
I’m not trying to “sneak my way there”. I’m trying to point out that the reasons given for not having co-ed teams in schools all rely on the idea that seriously competitive sports to be played by only the few best students are the only reason to have sport teams in schools at all.
So again: paid for and supported by the school.
Did they do this for students with all other interests? If there were a dozen or two students who wanted an advanced-level-only gardening course, or advance-level-only sewing class, or whatever, did they get a classroom and a class period to have it in?
Pretty much true.
It’s only distracting when you’re not used to it. And the boys being “more sporty in general” is probably rather circular – if the boys are always being selected out as being “more sporty”, they’re likely to continue to be so. We’ve seen plenty of evidence in the last century that there are a whole lot of girls quite willing to be “sporty” if given the chance; and there are certainly also boys who aren’t. There may be a difference on average – but again, the society is encouraging and stressing that difference, and thereby causing it to be greater than it would otherwise.
Where, precisely, are you finding that in this thread?
I don’t know. Maybe they’ve quit doing it. When I check my local school district’s website, I don’t see PE, I only see athletics. When I click on athletics, I only see the intramural competitive stuff; which is telling in itself. I know people with children in the schools, I’ll have to try asking.
I wonder if you made two lists of jobs and/or hobbies, male coded and female coded for each culture, whether people unfamiliar with it would be able to guess which is which? What do you predict?
We’re not living in the 1950s. If this different encouragement exists it’s pretty subtle; almost all kids these days are discouraged from taking risks to an unhealthy degree, IMO. Nor is fighting encouraged or ignored among boys; rather they seem to pick up these tendencies despite discouragement from parents and society. Kids do conform their personalities according to gender roles, but I think it’s mostly to fit in with peers and because they are emulating role models, rather than something they are taught.
Surely it would be possible to reduce their importance without abolishing them completely? For example, by providing other clubs and activities where kids with different skills can improve and excel?
Is this still true? AFAIK the youngest poster here is @Babale and he has kids of his own. We’re not exactly getting an up-to-date view here.
Yeah, this is true. And in the US you do have programs to develop the skills of academically-talented kids; it’s a much better education system. UK suffers from severe tall poppy syndrome.
You’re responding to me out of context, so nothing you said is relevant to my point… Here’s what I was responding to:
When people talk about “high school sports” they aren’t talking about PE. They are talking about school sports teams, IE the Varsity team, Junior Varsity, and teams that feed into those if the school is big enough.
These are competitive teams in competitive leagues, by their nature.
You can argue that these leagues should be divorced from educational institutions, at which point, yeah, we will probably rename these things from “high school sports” because they won’t have anything to do with a high school.
But the group of entities we currently call “high school sports” will remain, by nature, competitive - whether or not they are linked to schools at some future point in time. And because of that, they should remain segregated by sex.
You seem to be using the term to mean “any physical activity done as part of a school program” which is simply not how the term is used in the US. No one would call PE “high school sports”.