Single Sex: Singular Problem

I don't know how many countries, like the UK, require learners to take an exam when learning to drive but imagine how inadequately prepared you would be for driving on the roads if you had all theory and no practice.

Education in the abstract is nothing without education in application. Any decent parent knows that successful child rearing involves doing what works for your child not abiding come what may to the strictures of books and experts.

Any decent parent also knows that a proper education, a full education, involves a great deal more than book learning and exam results. Children becoming adults need to be prepared for their whole lives not just a set of exams: in the same way that a couple preparing for marriage need to be able to look, think and plan far beyond their wedding day.

I've been thinking about that a lot in the context of the calamitous publicity endured by my alma mater Eton over the last few weeks. Alma mater, ironically, meaning 'nourishing mother'. The opening lines of the Eton Leavers' song 'Vale' are: 'Time ever flowing, bids us be going, dear Mother Eton far from thee...' There is something intensely paradoxical about the wellspring of the patriarchy being imagined in maternal terms.

I've watched the opening part of Will Knowland's controversial video presentation and didn't feel any need or enthusiasm to watch it in full. I don't particularly want to comment on his dispute with the school save for observing that that his video, the school's response to it and the ensuing publicity have been like an arrow directly in Eton's Achilles Heel.

Notwithstanding any impression created by our current Prime Minister there are many things Eton excels at and well equips its pupils for. Living in a world of women is absolutely not one of them. Once was a time, and it was a long time, I'd suggest about 550 years of the school's history, this wasn't in any way a problem. But now, is it satisfactory or acceptable to send boys out into the world without the faintest real idea of what girls and women are beyond what they've gleaned from their sisters and their friends in the holidays?

This narrowness of experience, understanding and exposure, of course, does not just apply to the opposite sex. Racial, cultural, economic homogeneity all tend toward a narrowness of thinking and perception of the world. I've written before about privilege, its purpose and its perpetuation. A school like Eton is able through scholarships to diversify the source of its pupils to mitigate the worst aspects of being partitioned by privilege.

But when it comes to girls and women the best it can do is describe, discuss ideas and suggest reading. All abstract, all theoretical. When you choose your child's education are better A Level results worth the loss of formative time spent with living, breathing representatives of half the human race? Mr Knowland's eye-catching hobby, which he has displayed on his YouTube channel, is powerlifting; through it he will know that if you only train one part of the body you risk overdeveloping the part to the detriment of developing the whole.