I read this comment as normalizing violence and rape - saying that it is expected, as a matter of course.

I disagree with that characterization. Bullying, violence, and rape should never be normalized, nor acceptable, regardless of the age of the perpetrators. This is aberrant, immoral behavior and should never be treated as anything else.

I went to an all girls school, and while I'm sure there was bullying, there was definitely no violence or rape.

I feel like I should come to the defense of mixed-gender schools here a bit, even though I realize your comment doesn't necessarily advocate gender isolation (but it does sort of imply the benefits of it).

I went to a mixed-sex high school, albeit you might choose to take this anecdote with a grain of salt since that was 20 years ago in Germany. There was certainly some bullying, although not on the scale I discovered much later in life was common elsewhere. There was almost no intra-school violence. I feel pretty confident in saying this because these things were taken very seriously by both staff and students alike, and the few cases where there had been confrontations between students quickly became very public and a matter of much water cooler talk afterwards. I can also say with about the same level of confidence as you that there was no rape, or other forms of gender-based violence. And coming back to the article's subject, CS class was mandatory for everyone at first - and even though in later years the course became one of those that could be voluntarily dropped, the gender balance stayed the same after that.

That said, school wasn't ideal for me as I was in it. CS class wasn't exactly great, mostly due to utter disinterest by 90% of the students who took it. At the time I had the feeling the school was a bad choice for individualists like me, though in hindsight I would revise that conclusion a bit (as a humanist-themed middle/high school it was actually much better than any other school I could have gone to).

I think it's important to bring young people up together and not artificially separate them into two groups. Of the many social problems present in my time studying there, gender issues were not one of them. There was no us-versus-them mentality, and informal social groups were almost always mixed. I can't help but wonder if that sort of normalcy is something single-gender schools actively campaign against.

I also went to school outside America, ten years ago. I don't have a decided opinion on mixed schools either way - there are definitely benefits to single sex education, but they need to be weighed against the artificiality of the environment, as you say. Its worth noting that many of the straight up academic benefits of gender separation appear to be stronger for girls - higher participation in STEM subjects, more participation in class, better performance in general - but there is some evidence that boys perform better academically with girls in the class. (this might be a little out of date, I am less interested in the theory of school since I left it myself). I got the impression that the idea was basically to reduce social distraction during school: one could always hang out with the opposite sex after school (and most people did).

Whenever the topic of K12 .edu comes up, two loud and inherently conflicting arguments always percolate to the top:

1) Either we need to make school even less like the real world, by separating the sexes as per the above suggestion, or turning the school into the chronological opposite of a work release prison,

or

2) We need to make school more like the real world by banning unnatural things like homeschooling, because obviously no human beings work are home or own their own businesses and self direct themselves. Or no human beings carry a tiny swiss army knife on their keychain, so we need to ban that too, etc etc.

Although I'm not really sure why your defense of rape as normal high school experience managed to turn into a subtle accusation that I may have been a bully myself, and I probably should have ignored that.

It wasn't a subtle accusation, because in my experience people who say school violence doesn't happen or they never saw it happen are/were actually bullies themselves. This post just confirmed it with the nice twisting of words, 'defense of rape as normal high school experience', oh really?

I was pointing out how much, much worse stuff happens in schools than just being told to 'make a sandwich' and trust me, I would have been a very happy little boy if only that had happened to my friends and me. To be honest, starting from the author of the article, this entire thread displays just how sheltered of a life many of this community must be living to start an Internet crusade (because this is what it is going to end up when the social justice warriors get wind of it) because of a boring class with an unqualified teacher.

I think you may be using violence to mean any kind of bullying, which is a little vague. Teenage girls certainly engage in a lot of bullying, but very little physical violence, perhaps even less so in the rich private school environment I was in. I'm sorry you don't believe me. And I think claiming that not-rape would be extraordinary is pretty solidly in line with saying that rape is normal, yes.

To me the thread illustrates that for a community that gives so much lip service to disruption and progress, a lot of people are really unwilling to put up with the idea that high school shouldn't have to be the pit of misery that is apparently common in American public schools. But über is solving real problems!

But there isn't a problem to solve for this community, because bullying isn't actually seen/acknowledged as a problem. Education officials are also only paying lip service and even that only after some very horrible case hits the newspapers and teachers are very underpaid for the amount of work they do. And the people who were bullied either won't get into any position of power with the capability to enact changes or are truly trying to forget it all.

Bullying is violence, and I wonder how you know there was no rape.

Bullying can be, but it isn't necessarily. Please don't trivialize real violence.

You're right, i completely discounted the possibility of female-female rape. I'm still pretty confident, but I take back the definitely. And I was using violence to mean physical injury, sorry if you were confused. I think it shouldn't be an unrealistic goal to have high schools where no one is raped or physically assaulted, I'm very confident i was at one, and I think that people who consider that so outlandish a suggestion that I must be an unwitting monster must have some sad backgrounds.

Well, since almost everyone else completely discounts the possibility of female-female rape - probably including the teachers at your school - I wouldn't be so confident. After all, how would you know?

And now I should apologize, because I realized I was thinking only of the student body when we did have some male teachers. So although I would be shocked to learn of any incidents, it is not as impossible as I said.