Westminster School and the sad decline of boys’ schools

Westminster School, one of Britain’s oldest public schools, has announced it will go fully ‘co-ed’ from 2030. Having first admitted girls to the sixth form in the 1970s, the school will now admit girls from the age of 13. This decision means that soon there will only be four remaining boys’ boarding schools left in the UK: Radley, Eton, Harrow and Tonbridge. Westminster says the decision is ‘based on a desire fully to reflect the community we serve, and to shape that community by educating brilliant young men and women with a commitment to making a difference.’ But the decline and fall of boys’ schools is not something to celebrate.

There are roughly 800 single sex schools left in England, but most of these are for girls. That’s good for parents looking for an empowering education for their daughters, but bad if you have a son who would benefit from a single-sex education.

There are about 24,000 schools in England. If paying fees is beyond you (which it is for most) then your chances of finding a state boys’ school are slim: only 157 state schools offer an education just for boys. Many of these are grammars who cling to their single-sex traditions. Single sex schools, and particularly those for boys, are disappearing fast as more and more schools follow Westminster’s lead and go ‘co-ed’. So much for diversity and choice.

These schools appear to have convinced themselves that boys somehow ‘need’ girls to civilise them (imagine the same being said in reverse) and that boys do better with hard working girls to pull them up. The evidence is not all one way. An academic study conducted in 2003 found that boys did better in an all-boys classroom when other factors had been controlled for, something the researcher claimed ‘directly contradicted the educational myth that males performed better in classrooms if females were present’.

When academics got together and looked at the data for single sex schooling, they concluded it didn’t really have much impact on exam results. It is the social side of school where this makes a difference.

Being a teenager is hard enough without the added stress of the presence of the opposite sex. Some boys will do well with the supposed civility of girls, but, for others, mixing with the other sex during their teenage years will make life harder. In the end, parents will know best – but that is pointless without the choice.

You don’t have to be a parent of a boy to understand that boys and girls are wired differently. A school that can structure its education just for boys should then be something we welcome. But they are quickly going out of fashion.

‘Boys don’t feel that schools are listening to them or taking the problems they face seriously enough. The emphasis has to be on schools to take more care of boys,’ Mark Brooks, a co-founder of the Men and Boys Coalition, told the Times earlier this week. He’s right – and we should start by protecting those schools that offer education only to boys, before it’s too late.

The demise of boys only schools should leave us wondering where boys can learn to be boys; an environment just for them. Parents should have much greater choice in education, allowing them to decide what is best for their son or daughter. After all, we will regret the loss of boys’ schools once they are gone.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/westminster-school-and-the-sad-decline-of-boys-schools/ ?

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The Yeshivas Story the Times Deems Unfit To Print

It’s passing strange, at least to us, that the most important development in yeshiva education all year hasn’t been fronted, if it has been covered at all, by the New York Times. Since September, the Gray Lady has published more than a dozen stories deriding the education provided by chasidic yeshivas and alleging all sorts of misconduct in its schools — particularly the failure of some of them to teach profane subjects that the schools deem heretical.

Yet it’s now been more than a week since a New York court ruled that the state’s education bureau has no power to do what the Times so clearly is campaigning for — that is, to shut down chasidic yeshivas that won’t provide a secular education like that of public schools or to mandate that parents transfer their children. The ruling is a breathtaking defeat for the Times’ campaign. Yet the cat has seems to have got the Gray Lady’s tongue.

The Associated Press, the Daily News, and the Sun all have covered the ruling. Yet the Gray Lady is mum despite her ambition to own the chasidic beat. Times reporters have been practically begging regulators and legislators to meddle in the education of thousands of religious Jews to ensure that their secular studies are up to snuff — with, at least, what the Times’ readers think chasidic youth should be learning, nevermind their parents, let alone God.

The so-called paper of record likes to take credit for new regulations introduced in September. Why not cover the fact that the regulators of schools were blocked by a court a week ago from enforcing their rules in yeshivas? The rules, which were passed two days after the Times’ first piece about the yeshivas, aim to subject yeshivas to oversight by the public schools from which parents are trying to protect their children.

Its reporters also overreached in its of coverage of a recent bill in the state senate against corporal punishment in schools — claiming it was introduced because of the Times’ reporting on discipline in yeshivas. Yet Senator Julia Salazar, who introduced one of the bills, tweets that the bill was introduced “because the law should *explicitly* ban corporal punishment in all schools.” She adds: “I haven’t seen any evidence of it being a pattern in yeshivas.”

That’s been the Gray Lady’s modus operandi in its investigation into yeshivas. The paper has cherry picked stories about New York’s fervently Orthodox Jews — largely from those who left the community. Schools and operators about whom the paper wrote claim the Times’ reports were riddled with error. An entire community feels that it has been misrepresented at a time when antisemitic attacks are on the rise.

Plus, too, it turns out that the Times has been tilting at what the court says is the wrong target — and yet the Times won’t even cover the court ruling for its own readers. The paper claims that yeshivas are “flush” with state and federal funding and misusing those funds by not providing secular education. Yet such funds are not tied to substantial equivalence. They are merely for providing mandated services, such as attendance and immunization records.

What the court said is that education regulators have no power to close schools or to mandate that parents transfer their children — making substantial equivalence regulations on schools essentially unenforceable. Compulsory education law, the court ruled, binds not schools but parents. In theory, it looks like New York State could pursue parents for freely exercising their religion. If the state does put parents in jail, no one will begrudge the Times the credit.

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-yeshivas-story-the-times-deems-unfit-to-print

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Federal judges announce they will refuse to hire clerks from Stanford Law School after woke students and diversity dean ambushed conservative member of the bench

Two federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, both appointed by former President Donald Trump, have announced that they will no longer hire law clerks from Stanford Law School.

The boycott is in response to the mistreatment of a fellow judge during a recent visit to the California school.

Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch had previously announced a similar boycott of Yale Law School last year, after a series of free speech incidents in which they complained about the school's approach to 'cancel culture.'

The boycotts will only apply to future students and not those currently enrolled as law students at the school.

'We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future,' Ho said during a speech to the Texas Review of Law and Politics.

Yale and Stanford Law Schools are some of the most prestigious law schools in the country, having produced numerous prominent leaders, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford, at least five current US senators, and four current Supreme Court Justices.

Ho called the treatment of Fifth Circuit appellate judge Stuart Kyle Duncan 'intellectual terrorism.'

Duncan was shouted down by hundreds of students and berated by Stanford Diversity Dean Tirien Steinbach during his visit to the law school last month.

Students called him 'scum,' asked why he couldn't 'find the c***,' and screamed, 'We hope your daughters get raped.'

Steinbach is currently on leave and Stanford has ruled out disciplining the hecklers, who by the school's own admission violated its free speech policy.

Duncan was greeted with posters along the walls of the prestigious university - saying he had committed crimes against women, gays, blacks and 'trans people' in reference to a case.

He was asked to give a speech at the famous law school earlier in March about the circuit's Court of Appeals by the student chapter of the conservative Federalist Society but was met with abuse.

Fifth Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan eventually asked for an administrator when the heckling wouldn't stop and in stepped the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach

Associate Dean Steinbach stepped in during the screaming, but instead of calming the students down, she started piously lecturing Judge Duncan for six minutes using pre-prepared notes.

Law School Dean, Jenny Martinez, and Stanford President, Marc Tessier-Lavinge, have since 'formally apologized, confirming that protesters and administrators had violated Stanford policy' days later.

In his speech, Ho argued that the treatment of Duncan reflected 'rampant' viewpoint discrimination at elite law schools, some of which do not employ a single center-right professor.

'Rules aren't rules without consequences,' Ho said. 'And students who practice intolerance don't belong in the legal profession.'

He implied that a more politically diverse faculty and less ideologically uniform administration would go a long way towards lifting the boycott.

'How do we know everyone's views will be protected, if everyone's views aren't represented?', Ho asked.

'What some law schools tolerate and even encourage today is not intellectual exploration—but intellectual terrorism,' Ho suggested.

'Students don’t try to engage and learn from one another. They engage in disruption, intimidation, and public shaming. They try to terrorize people into submission and self-censorship, in a deliberate campaign to eradicate certain viewpoints from the public discourse,' he added.

'Law schools like to say that they’re training the next generation of leaders. But schools aren’t even teaching students how to be good citizens—let alone good lawyers. We’re not teaching the basic terms of our democracy.'

Ho's announcement is the latest and most dramatic effort to hold Stanford accountable for its treatment of Duncan, and he hopes his colleagues will follow suit.

In a subsequent interview following the Standford incident, Judge Duncan said the entire debacle was an embarrassment that made him fear for the country's future.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11929519/Federal-judges-announce-refuse-hire-clerks-Stanford-Law-School-woke-students.html

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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