White House Proposes New View of Education Law to Encourage Single-Sex Schools. The Bush administration is planning to reinterpret the nation's education law to encourage the creation of single-sex public schools. By Diana Jean Schemo. [New York Times: Politics]
Is there no stupid idea these guys won’t dust off and trot out? Sure, there have been a few studies showing potential advantages to same sex schools. But nowhere near the volume of data needed to justify a conclusion.
I went to same sex high schools, more or less. But they were private schools. It a RBI (really bad idea) to institutionalize segregation. If you want your children to have a same sex education, send them to a private school. But don’t expect they’ll be any safer from Bad Influences. They won’t
Like I said, the same sex schools I went to were more or less. At Carmel High School, in Mundelein, IL, a rather drab, 60s religious chic campus across the street from the Pope’s North American official residence at the expansive, ornate St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, with its thousands of acres of winding roads, private lakes, golf courses and countless dramatic structures in the height of classic overblown Catholic architecture (which, BTW, Hugh Hefner tried to buy for years for a fantasy Playboy resort), there was a girl’s side, run by nuns, and a boy’s side run by Carmelite priests.
The only co-ed class was Greek, no doubt by design to encourage enrollment in an otherwise less than interesting subject. Boys couldn’t go on the girl’s side and vice versa. But we shared a common lunch area and there were many co-ed social activities. Plus, it was an open campus, so we mixed quite a bit.
At the end of my freshman year, though I had done quite well academically (3.9 GPA) with almost no effort, I was asked not to return. It wasn’t so much that I’d been caught doing Bad Things – though there had been an incident or two – as it was that the priests were convinced I was a ring leader, a trouble maker, a Bad Influence.
In truth, I was just another kid. But I was a crossover kid. I was a wrestling star, started on the football team as a freshman and was the MVP of the baseball team. But I was also a freak. It scared them that I could hang with jocks, freaks, nerds, the black kids, pretty much everyone.
That, my test scores, and the rumor that I had gotten laid on campus several times, which was, sadly, untrue, was enough to convince them that I might subvert their carefully regulated agenda.
These were people who showed us ‘Cool Hand Luke’ for our freshman retreat. I was excited. For all of their grey flannel Catholicism, here they were celebrating the indomitable spirit of man adrift in a seemingly existential existence were perception supercedes reality but not the soul of man. But I guess I missed their intended message. Their point was freedom of mind is a wonderful idea, in the abstract, but you got to know when to toe the line, bubba. “What we got here is a failure to communicate.” No shit.
Anyway, even with my rep as a Bad Influence, my test scores and academic record made me an attractive candidate to a bunch of top prep schools. In fact, it got me into a school I had been turned down by just a year earlier, Campion Jesuit High School for Boys in Prairie du Chien (translation: dog plain), WI, the last of the great Midwest Catholic prep schools.
Campion really was all boys, just over 300 of us, another 100 or so assorted staff and lay teachers staff and maybe 30 priests and brothers. Jesuits are a different breed. To be ordained a Jesuit priest, one must have two PhD’s; one in theology and one in the chosen field of study. With only one PhD, you’re stuck as a lowly brother.
The Jebbies may or may not be the only remaining direct decedents of the Knights Templar, though personally I don’t think so, but there is no doubt that they are the intellectual warriors of the Church and recognized around the world for their academic achievements and intellectual independence, even from Rome..
There’s an old joke that gets to the heart of the matter. “What are the Three Mysteries of the Catholic Church?”
“I give up. What”
”What’s under a nun’s habit what are the Dominicans really thinking and are the Jesuits Catholic.”
As an example of the Jesuit mystique, during my college years, also at a Jesuit school, I landed a job tech directing the annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the theme of which was coupon and contest fraud. I kid you not.
I was hired by a company that printed some 70% of the coupon inserts that appear in daily newspapers across the country. They were sponsoring the conference. Part of my job – they tapped me because I was a theatre student with multiple technical skills – was to stage a dramatic “trial” of a coupon fraud con, complete with a celebrity judge, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Before we arrived on scene at Pinehurst, NC, I’d already worked up the script and taken dozens of stills to tell the story by slideshow behind the live action. I gave the judge the shot by shot and we ran through it without a glitch. He hated wasting time as much as I did and made sure he got it right first time through. He then declared rehearsal to be over. Took about half the actual running time.
My Hot Shot bosses stammered, “Um, maybe we should run through it again.” Picking up on the judges mood wasn’t hard, so I said, “I’ve got what I need. Judge, you need anything else? Anyone else need anything else?” Silence.
“Great,” the judge said, “let us retire to the lounge for refreshment and reflection.” I immediately like the guy. And he liked me. After being mostly ignored for an hour or so while the judge and I chatted about things arcane and bizarre, the Hot Shot president of the company that had flown me down from Detroit in their corporate jet, handed me the company credit card and said, “I’m going to bed. You take care of the judge. Whatever he wants, he gets.”
The next afternoon the judge wanted to play golf, which worked well for me as there was no way I was going to Pinehurst without clubs. The judge insisted I accompany him, so we played Number 2, the most famous of the six Pinehurst courses, which, BTW, are but a few miles from the Golf Hall of Fame, with an ATF agent and a Secret Service agent rounding out the foursome.
During the front nine - I shot 39, only 3 over par, thanks in great part to a series of impossibly lucky shots out of the thick beds of pine needles that constitutes rough at Pinehurst and some clutch putting - the judge and I had a lot of time to talk while sharing a 6 pack.
At one point he asked me were I attended school. I answered, “The University of Detroit,” I answered.
“That’s a wonderful school but a terrible answer. I happen know U of D is a very good school, but imagine, if you will, you are in Bangkok and someone asks you the same question. Your answer would be meaningless. If, however, you merely answered, ‘I was educated by the Jesuits,’ they would immediately know that you are a man with which to be reckoned.” Turns out the judge had also been educated by the Jesuits.
At the turn we had more beer and sandwiches with the Feds. Playing as well as I was capable of and, more importantly, playing lucky, I was 5 strokes up on the closest Fed. Lunch was great.
Tooling up the tenth fairway, the judge asked me if I smoked pot. I told him that yeah, I smoked pot pretty much every day and had for years. He said, “You seem very much the intelligent sort. You’re well educated, conversant on any number of subjects; you do your job efficiently and well. How harmful can it possibly be?” I told him in my opinion it was less harmful, overall, than alcohol and we discussed it a bit.
We teed off on the eleventh and got back in the cart. The judge had been quiet since before the tenth green. “Tell me,” he suddenly says, “do you have any marijuana?”
“Um, you mean on me? Well, um, yeah, I have a couple of joints in my cigarette pack. Why?”
“I’ve decided I’d like to try it. Let’s smoke some marijuana”
“Now? Your Honor, there are two Feds right over there playing golf with guns on. I’m not sure this is the time or the place. Maybe later we can…”
“My dear boy, there are certain advantages to being a Supreme Court justice, even if it is only Pennsylvania. This is one of them. They will see nothing I don’t tell them to see.”
So we smoked a joint of some pretty decent California pot while we played the eleventh and, as the judge had predicted, the Feds either didn’t notice or chose to not notice. I was still paranoid as hell until we cleared the fifteenth green, when I finally realized the judge had set me up.
Not to be busted, but to provide him the chance to step outside of his normal life for a brief period. He knew damn good and well from the whiskey talk the night before that there was an excellent chance I’d be carrying. What better opportunity for him to see for himself what the fuss was al about than with some obliging college student from Detroit he’d never be connected to in any way?
Besides, I shot a 76 on a world famous championship gold course. Best dam round of golf I ever played. By contrast, I shot a 133 the first time I played Pebble Beach.
Anyway, my point is “Educated by the Jesuits,” often means one smart motherfucker. We’ll get back to that in a bit.
In the meantime, back to Campion and the all boys atmosphere that wasn’t. First off, we had the town girls of Prairie du Chien, a town with one stop light and a pervasive stink of cow dung. We represented the best opportunity a lot of those town girls would every have. They couldn’t eat the beautiful scenery of the bluffs along the Mississippi and the Wisconsin River delta.
We were very popular, at the cost of the occasional beating if you were caught outnumbered by angry townie boys in the company of a town girl. But we had more than the town girls. Also located in Prairie du Chien was the Wyalusing Home for Wayward Girls. I shit you not.
Wyalusing was the Last Stop for affluent suburban girls, Bad Girls who had run afoul of the law or were beyond all parental control. It was ostensibly a private school, but it was run more as a prison. And the girls escaped. Often.
They were Bad Girls, not stupid girls. They knew damn good and well they had a much better chance of finding quick fun with the rich kids at the boarding school, well supplied with drugs and other enticements that only cash brings, than with the local cud chewers.
We had an ever changing gang of Bad Girls who, because they were on the lam, were always in a hurry. They wanted instant gratification in the form of drugs and sex and they wanted it right damn now, before they got caught and thrown into segregation, which really meant isolation, which meant it was unlikely you’d ever see that particular Bad Girl again. IOW, it was a fifteen year old Catholic boarding school kid’s wet dream.
But the point I was making, which, honest, will eventually tie back into the original subject – same sex school, remember? – is that the Jesuits are, if you’ll excuse the venal, goddamn smart. They figured hey, they were really horny. We must be really horny, too. After all, don’t ask, don’t tell worked just fine with buying 12 packs of Old Milwaukee for $1.99 out the back door of the tavern the Jebbies were sitting in, sloshed.
So every so often they’d ship in a girl’s school. A few times a year, Homecoming, etc., they’d import an entire Catholic girl’s school, usually an all female boarding school, for the weekend.
Lines of yellow busses would ring the quad as the 300 of us gathered to watch the girls, always from bigger schools, meaning we had 2 to 1 or better odds, pour off the Swans. Some would group shyly, others would go right up to a boy.
In all of my teenage years, all of which happened in the 70’s when casual sex really was casual, I can’t recall any more vibrant collision of pure, hormone saturated biological imperative than those first few minutes when we saw, we paired and sometimes we even came.
To be sure, most of it was just deep, wet kissing, dry humping, grabbing and giggling and a little heavy petting, but not all. They’d put the girls up in the old senior’s dorm, a remnant from when Campion was a much larger school. The campus was laid out in a huge quad. As is common in Catholic compounds of a certain age, the campus was riddled with secret tunnels.
At one time some of the tunnels carried coal from building. Others were truly secret tunnels that connected various parts of the campus and had been used as part of the Underground Railroad. Some of these tunnels terminated behind fireplaces or built-in bookshelves or in some other gothically cliché way.
The important part is we could use the tunnels to get into the girl’s dorm at will. After that, it was merely a matter of luck and probability. Like sperm seeking an egg, we’d creep from door to door, quietly knocking, every once is a while being let in to much giggling. The trick was to find a safe port before you were turned in.
Let me tell you, the rumors about Catholic girls and blowjobs are mostly true. You know the old joke. You want a Catholic girl to stop sucking dick? Marry her.
Anyway, my point is, though the intention of same sex education was to remove distractions and prevent premature liaisons, the reality is it just doesn’t work that way.
Yes, during my time at public high school – I was asked not to return to Campion, too, this time for getting caught in flagrante delicto in a tent just off campus with a lovely young town girl – there was plenty of sex. But because boys and girls were together all day, every day, there was actually much less of an emphasis on sex. When it’s right in front of you, you don’t tend to obsess as much.
Same sex educational segregation won’t give you a class of more attentive more focused students with superior concentration. Instead, it will give you a classroom full of hormonal volcanoes spending every spare processing cycle on how they can get laid, or at very least, actually have direct contact with someone of the opposite sex to whom one is not related.
Cheers,
Dusty
4:19:17 AM 
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