The Shanghai Star recently published a piece about Shanghai's No. 3 High School, one of the city's few all-girl educational institution. As I read the article, I was astonished by what a misfit of a school it seemed to be.

Same-sex schools are, more or less, common in the West and are often praised for their academic excellence - as with Wellesley College in Massachusetts, for example. For cultures in the other hemisphere, they have proven to be an effective and reliable method of education. However, in the East I would rule quite differently.

Asian girls are generally introverted; social traditions and values bind them to parents, which results in a strong dependence upon family members. Polite, reserved behaviour is often encouraged; boy-girl relationships are always "hush-hush", and "puppy-love" is frowned upon by protective parents. Maturity, in general, takes much longer.

The stigma surrounding Western girls, on the contrary, is the opposite - strong-willed, independent, and flirtatious personalities colour the female population. Girls are more often than not outspoken individuals, rivalling men with an uncanny ability to live and function on their own.

In terms of individual growth and the important transition from youth to womanhood, an all-girl environment is not one that encourages such maturity for Chinese girls. In fact, it fosters the very opposite: shyness, unfamiliarity, and hesitancy towards the greater society.

They are already over-protected and shielded enough from the realities of "the world out there"; an exclusive community such as an all-girls school would only detach them to an even greater degree. The isolationist theory has never worked and never will work.

Brothers are now non-existent due to the one-child rule, and with the exception of fathers, girls lack a male presence in their lives. Even at the workplace, relations with peers are extremely important in rendering productivity and fundamental social skills. Their futures in dealing with personal relationships - romantic and otherwise - will suffer from unfamiliarity and naiveness.

We must realize that the already-established independence that American girls possess is what makes the same-sex system effective for the Western world - but it is a trait that is absent from China's female youth population.

Sure, an all-girls environment may indeed cultivate more active conversation and debate among students, as there are no boys to intimidate them, but once they graduate from that community - what then? It'll be middle school all over again with the unfortunate opposite sex, once again, in their lives. They will ultimately be faced with the harsh reality that there are boys. We must work with boys. We must live, eat, and converse with boys - none of which they have done in the past few years of their lives. Why are we delaying reality?

And what's all this talk of classes "not being fair" to girls because the boys always answer the questions and win in debates? Are we admitting that girls are inherently inferior? If not, there's no excuse. Shed the insecurities, and "man up".

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