“If all-boys’ schools like La Salle and Ateneo are co-ed, all-girls’ schools should be too!” No, Tito Jun. They shouldn’t.
On May 12, 2020, La Salle Greenhills announced that starting Academic Year 2020–2021, their Senior High School program would be co-educational, meaning for the first time in years, the school would be opening its doors to female high school students. This announcement sparked quite a number of angry and sad reactions on Facebook with comments such as “LSGH will never be the same” and “A great loss”.
In 2016, Ateneo de Manila University’s senior high school arm also moved towards co-educational learning. This shift also brought about much discussion on the appropriateness of welcoming young girls into a predominantly young, masculine environment. Many alumni, especially of older generations, called for the administration to rethink its decision and reminded them of the long-standing tradition of “brotherhood”.
While their university counterparts — De La Salle University and Ateneo de Manila University — are co-educational (Ateneo’s since 1973, even after some historical protests against this), the basic education units remain steadfast as all-boys schools. Until recently.
As someone who attended an all-girls school for my whole life leading up to my college stay in Ateneo, I was never bothered by the lack of male students in my school. I have a brother who graduated from Xavier, a school that remains strong in their males-only fifteen-gated campus, and he was all the proof I needed that boys were, well, nothing special. I had no male friends until I was around 15, and even then, I treated my LSGH friends the same way I treat my brother. Nothing new here. Moving to university though, I picked up on the massive differences in the ways I moved versus they moved, how my thoughts worked versus them, how I was raised versus them, how I couldn’t do things but they could.
All-boys schools, I would soon come to learn, are a breeding ground for gender-based discrimination and bullying in a way all-girls schools are not. They are a mirror image of a world that runs a race in which they already have a head start. I noticed how easily my guy classmates could pass around borderline derogatory gay jokes without batting an eyelash. I heard someone use the f-slur in person for the first time at a party. Once, a friend of mine was going through a rough patch with his girlfriend and came to me for advice. I gave him my two cents, trying to be as gentle as possible. He thanked me graciously, then called her a “bitch” in the same breath.
I knew these things were happening, even at home, when my brother was being teased in school for being bigger, but I passed them off because I thought that’s just what boys do. Boys don’t complain or cry or feel emotions. They fight back — with their fists. And when my brother came home one day with a disciplinary case due to a fight after the teasing got too much, I just thought, “boys will be boys”.
But girls cannot be. We aren’t allowed to fight back because it’s not attractive to boys. We are taught to sit still, never cross your legs at the knee but at the ankle because it can be distracting for men. We’re encouraged to wear make-up to look presentable and attractive but not too attractive that we garner malicious looks. We are told by male teachers that our business attire skirts are too distracting. We are told that we must be mothers but also providers and somehow balance both at the same time. We are informed that employers will see us as a loss of profit because of things like maternity leave, and many would rather pick a man instead, regardless of qualification. We are taught that this world is harshest to women because it is men who wrote the rules upon which the world works. From an early age, we are made aware of the stacked odds, that we will be seen as less capable, a bigger liability, and we have to fight to the death to disprove that.
I learned to take matters into my own hands and fight this system. We were encouraged to play sports where we could dirty our white uniforms for the sake of the game (shoutout to all my PE teachers who let us play UBE, the most SPCP game ever). We could learn to cook and sew, but also learn to sharpen our minds through debates and reports. While we were discouraged from engaging in the act of sex, as a Catholic school does — albeit in some upsetting ways like showing a propaganda-esque abortion video in a hall, my teachers would remind us to practice proper reproductive health when we would have sex. Women are taught to say no and to stand by our nos. Take no shit from anyone, most especially from men.
It was in university that I saw that this internal rebellion was not the case for many of my male classmates, especially those from all-boys schools. It was in university that I learned that as a majority, boys are rarely ever made aware of how this world is systemically theirs for the taking. They can get what they want, and get away with what they want too. Hence when a woman says no, it’s a shattering blow to the fragile masculine ego and feels like the rug has just been pulled from under their feet.
One of the first times I was staying in Katipunan late for a dinner with my orgmates, my editor at the time, Luisa, said she would walk me out to my car. It went unspoken but we both seemed to know how dangerous the streets were for us, even at 8 PM. The guys at our table would rarely feel that instinctual need to accompany a fellow man to his car. But of course, us girls are different. Many of my guy friends have offered to walk me to my car after class or wait with me until I got picked up from late nights out with friends — and I am grateful to them. But I know that they know they will never have to worry the same way I do. The same way all girls do.
I remember when the AHS co-ed issue happened, alumnus were saying that welcoming girls into the senior high could lead to distractions for their boys. A year later, reports of sexual harassment in the Senior High were coming to light. People claimed that cases like these are the reason all-boys school should stay exclusive, but I absolutely beg to differ. These issues happen in co-educational schools, they also happen in exclusive schools, and they happen most especially in the workplace. To dismiss the problem as one of timing and setting invalidates the reality that we must face: The fact that all-boys schools have historically served as a breeding ground for discrimination and misconduct to go unchecked and allow for an imbalanced system of misogyny to prevail and carry over in larger society.
To all the parents, titos and titas, and everyone who claims that LSGH moving to co-educational learning taints the brotherhood upon which the institution was built, it’s time to realize that the brotherhood and tradition you long to uphold fundamentally teaches your sons to see the world as theirs — with no regard for the walls it builds to set us apart.
