It freaks them out. Some of the locals. They make assumptions. About sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. They see them loitering and imagine intent. They see pink hair and shaved heads, torn jeans and tiny shorts. No good, they reckon. They're up to no good. They see them fraternising, boys, girls, holding hands, hugging. Tut, they say. Tut, tut. What are they being taught?
When were you born, I think? 1873? I see the kids going in and out of our high school, my son's school, I see them, the geeks and the gamers and the Goths, and I am glad. Glad they are not separated by gender. Glad they are not forced to dress alike. Glad they can be, can hang out with, whoever the hell they damn well please.
I went to an all-girls school, wore a uniform, and received a wonderful education. A dear friend of mine works at one of the country's top girls' schools and I know her to be one of the most forward-thinking, extraordinary teachers. So it's not that I think single-sex schools are necessarily bad, that the wearing of uniforms is by definition detrimental, it's just that the more I think about it, the weirder it all seems. The other night my daughter's primary school opened up the classrooms and invited parents to come and celebrate their child's learning with them.
I watched as my almost 10-year-old daughter blithely and enthusiastically engaged with the boys she had worked on her project with. And I thought how grotesque, how antiquated, that in a few short years anyone would so suddenly and summarily segregate them. It is as if, for all our modernity, we cannot let go of these Victorian notions around adolescence and sex, of needing to protect them from not only each other, but themselves, from their own vulgar desires. If school is about preparing you to enter the adult world, surely it should reflect that world, not some oddly sequestered universe.
My first mufti day at high school weighs stoutly on my memory. I understood that by what I chose to wear I was effectively declaring myself. And the girls I had hungered after, but to whom, in my uniform, I had been largely invisible, took notice. After a few false starts I eventually found my niche, forging lifelong friendships. However, when it came to boys I remained resolutely stupid. Awkward and obsessed. Terrified and promiscuous. My husband, who went to an all-boys school, describes his dealings with the opposite sex as being similarly fraught. And while there are many men, my husband's friends, my friends' husbands, who I am awfully fond of, I was 28 before I made my first male friend who wasn't gay. My first male friend who I neither wanted to snog or shag.
