Boys' schools reconsidered: good news in troubled times.

• Author: Hawley, Richard

The Real mission of independent education is to conceive of good and great schools. Great schools are those that take children as far along their creative, moral, and intellectual range as they can go.

Gender composition must be understood and valued as it promotes this goodness, not for its own sake. Schools are not good because they are composed of boys, but a good boys' school could not be better composed. This is a crucial distinction. If society loses its vision of what good schooling means, and closes its eyes to what the best evidence says is really true of boys and girls, then it is running blind.

It is the relationship between all-boys composition and school excellence that requires attention and understanding. This is where boys' schools, especially strong ones, have been too timid and too lazy over the past two decades of widespread coed conversion.

There are two important jobs ahead for boys' schools, and they are much tougher than they might have been if school heads had taken a longer and deeper view in the 1970s. The first and easiest of these is to answer the boys' school-as-dinosaur charge. The second, more challenging and also more important in the long run, is demonstrating that boys' schools are a progressive and humane answer to America's, and to some extent the world's, educational malaise.

The charge that boys' schools are cultural dinosaurs rests on a fallacy involving poor causal thinking. Bad social outcomes like misogynist behavior, destructive aggression, and arrogant entitlement are placed at the feet of all male schools. If the gender composition of schools is a causal factor at all in these social outcomes, then the coed schools must be the culprits, since they have educated more than 90% of the nation's school-children since the U.S.'s founding. Today, the percentage is far higher.

In fact, there has been an almost weird reluctance to associate coed schools with gender-related problems and tensions. State coed schools are experiencing crises that have brought many of them to the brink of dissolution. David Tyack and Elizabeth Mansat's exhaustive account of American coeducation, Learning Together, concludes with the dispiriting notion that nothing about the nation's coeducational practice has produced superior results for either sex, but the authors see little chance of revising or altering coeducation, especially in state schools: "Cost, customs, institutional inertia, and now fear of litigation virtually guarantee the survival of coeducation." It is chilling and depressing to think that these are the driving forces in American educational practice. They hardly constitute a ringing endorsement of coeducation or for rushing to convert fine single-sex schools to the dominant model.

Recognizing the dinosaur fallacy allows a compelling point about boys' schools to be made - that they are in an especially good position to lead the way out of, rather than into, social inequities. At the very core of the so-called Milwaukee plan to create all-male schools, primarily for African-American youth, is the notion that, in...