Dear Linda: Calling the desire to establish a separate academic environment
for girl's education apartheid, is a little extreme. Given the current well
''entrenched, unflexible, ungiven, dangerous, destructive an utterly
sexist
curriculums and attitudes girls are exposed to in ''regular' schools single
ex education is not an althogether unreasonable solution. Of course I have
to agree with you that it would be terrific to start removing some of those
obstacles by challenging the legal system but that appears not to be an
easy
alternative to some people including myself. However I would not hesitate
to
bring a lawsuit against my daughter's school if necessary under tile IX. I
believe that there has to be a well coordinated effort by major women's
organizations to begin a well thought out and well founded legal effort to
help parents who have a legitimate complain against a school (which most of
us have at one point or another) in order to begin putting this issue were
it
should be, Into the legal system for tests and results. It seems to me by
my own
experience that once school authorities realize how serious one is about
possible legal action you inmediately begin to see results in terms of
''fixing'' the problem even if its only a ''band aid''. The good thing
about
this is that although only a temporary solution at least you accomplished
the
objective of making educators more aware of the problem. I believe that it
is
better for a girl to be in an educational positive environment were she is
given the respect she deserves than to have her go through
all the truly horrible negative experience of sexist public schools. I
have
been pleading with my daughter to be home schooled but she has been
resisting. Some people find this overture on my part as an attempt to
isolate my daughter,
and although there are some possible negative aspects to this, the way I
would do it is I would find a hundred other ways to compensate for it. If
there was an all girls school in my area my daughter would be the first to
enroll. That way she can grow emotionally, socially and academically,
because
the way I see it through my daughter, she spends more time trying to fend
off
negative social attitudes among her teachers and peers ,than she does
putting
her energy in a positive personal academic experience.
Lesemann
C123S105L@aol.com
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