I arrived at the school where I was reporting for Senior One on a weekend. Those were the days when weekends were not used for “normal” classes as is the case in many “powerful” schools today.
Children were supposed first of all to clean their community, do personal administration and then have breakfast. That was Saturday morning. You then did whatever tickled your fancy – read, play, bond with peers, Talk to children about relationships with the opposite sex PARENTING BOB KISIKI exercise… whatever.
Lunch was mandatory, but what happened after that was also up to individual children, until the evening when, after (mandatory) dinner, there was entertainment. This is really my school I am describing; not all schools of the day.
Anyhow, arriving at the school that Saturday morning, I was shocked at what I saw. boys and girls wandering about; the boys wearing anything from vests to sleeveless basketball tops, to no shirt at all, with sweatpants, denim pants commonly called Jeans (though Jeans is just one brand of denim); sports shorts and so on.
The girls, on the other hand, wore mostly shorts, some of which seemed to have been grafted into the skin; for you would be hard-pressed to tell how they put them on, let alone how they took them off! As for the tops, even a leotard was acceptable. All day.
So, how did those girls manage to have their monthly red rounds every month, without those boys having impregnated them, seeing as they dressed that “loosely”? How did the school manage to keep those wild hormone totting youth keep off each other, dressed like that and not hounded around the compound like goats? Good questions. That’s the essence of this article.
At our school, it was drummed into our minds from the day we reported, to after we left, that people of the opposite sex were human beings like us; not sex objects. You had to learn and live by that. Human beings worthy of respect, not sex objects. How do your children view people of the opposite sex?
before they can enunciate baa, maa and aaa, their first three “words”, our children began getting gender-related training. For instance, if a boy struck their only sister, we told them in very strong terms, “Men do not beat women!” If anything, we added, they protect them. I won’t lie that those two boys have grown up without ever either beating or fighting with their sister, but the (few) times they did, it came with dire consequences, because it’s our culture in the house, that men do not beat women.
One of the reasons proponents of co-educational schools advance for abhorring single-sex schools is that when they ultimately get out of there, children do not know how to relate with people of the other sex.
But how do we get to this point? It is by assuming that children will figure it out on their own. Letting them experiment. Which they will, sometimes deliberately, many times inadvertently. I know a girl who went to one of the prominent girls-only schools around Kampala, all the way to Senior Six. She was the calm sort; never opened her mouth except to brush her teeth, yawn or eat. Well, and answer questions in class when persistent teachers asked her to.
The moment she hit university “like this”, she conceived. We’ll discuss the whys and wherefores of this individually, if you don’t see the point.
Until we teach our children the value of relationship, and how to do it, especially with people of the opposite sex, we’ll be held responsible, should anything go wrong, as it so often does.
The writer is a parent, teacher and social worker
