Making herstory
MEDIUM RARE
A batch of little girls who are five years old are making history.
They’re the first cohort of kindergarten kids to crash the gender wall at Ateneo de Manila in Loyola Heights, Quezon City, an all-male bastion of learning exclusively for boys in the grades since 1859. You’ve come a long way, little ladies, as in 165 years.
A total of 200 girls enrolled in kindergarten and grade one, or something like 30 percent, or one girl for every three boys, last Aug. 1. In junior high grade seven, there are 161 girls out of a total of 696, or 535 boys. This means, sighed an alumnus without acknowledging surrender, that Xavier School in San Juan is now the only Jesuit school exclusively for boys in the Philippines. Post Covid-19, Ateneo’s age-old rival, La Salle Greenhills, has been accepting girls, though the latter comprise a small minority.
From the little that I have seen, the Ateneo girls’ uniform does not consist of a white top and blue skirt, but white top and blue pants, light or dark. Or maybe the video I saw was taken on a p.e. day? (How many women of whatever age can be seen wearing skirts these days? Only pregnant women, I think; and then again not every one of them.)
The mother of a nine-year-old boy enrolled in Xavier observed that “it seems an all-boys school that suddenly goes co-ed by accepting girls seems to be more successful (with the switch) than an all-girls school that decides to accept boys also.”
Why is that? As far as I know, Catholic schools in the Philippines, with the probable exception of my alma mater, University of Sto. Tomas, prefer to keep the sexes apart, in different classrooms. (In my time, there were separate elevators, staircases, and cafeterias for boys and girls. But because of the limited enrollment in Philosophy and Letters — being the smallest college — boys and girls sat together in the same classroom; our college was probably the only exception, or one of a few.)
What were the benefits, if any, of separating the sexes in a classroom? What were the pitfalls? After four years, I never noticed, or bothered to make a guess.