Girls’ Club

Amanda Maister reflects on what school taught her, and what life has taught her about school.

I am standing on a stage in the hall of my infant school singing a show tunes medley and watching my Mum well up with the emotion of how grown up I seem.  Except I am grown up.  I am forty years old, living back with my Mum and feeling like Gulliver in Lilliput faced with all the tiny furniture more suited to four year olds.  Moving home at forty was never part of my plan but such unexpected events are what life is made of.  I don’t need a Proustian madeleine to bring back my childhood, I am currently sleeping in the room in which I was born.

When you lose your health it is frightening how quickly the life you have built for yourself falls away.  Never has a house of cards metaphor felt so apt.  What I do have now is plenty of time and space to reflect. My old schools are not too far from my house and so I am walking the same routes I walked as a child from five to sixteen years old.  As I scuff my feet in the memory palace of my home town echoes of my childhood are everywhere.

“What would any of us tell our younger selves that they could even understand?  ”

I want to scoop up my five year old self and hold her so tightly knowing as she does so little of everything that is to come, years at school, exams, university and work that all lead to this point.  Would I tell her to do something different? Or to not even bother but to go off around the world on some mad adventure instead?  Sadly none of us can factor the role played by fate in our decision making process.  What would any of us tell our younger selves that they could even understand?  

Having managed to get good results throughout my education parents would sometimes ask me for advice on schools but I never knew how to respond.  You can spend a lot of money sending your children to posh private schools and boost their ability to access an elite or attend your local church to get into the church school.  Where I grew up you still have the option to pass the 11-plus exam and leave your less-well-tutored friends behind in their slumbering state schools.  What struck me most throughout my time at school, though, was that a lot of your enjoyment and success was down to pure chance.  

I am still in touch with people I have known since I was 11.  They have played a fundamental role in my life and the pleasure and love I have managed to extract from my forty years on this earth.  This is because I was lucky.  Schools juggle children’s names and place them into groups of thirty with no idea if they will get on or not.  I know of people who spent ages agonising over which school to send their child to only for them not to make a single friend in their class or to have a miserable time at the hands of bullies.  I managed to get through school without ever really being bullied; I think some of the harder girls thought I was a bit boring but they never took it out on me.

One important element that was not pure luck was the fact that my senior school was single sex.  My sister had gone to the local mixed school and we squabbled so much that my parents thought it was best to send me somewhere different.  At the time I was heart-broken as I would be leaving all my friends behind, and being with just girls felt distinctly uncool.  Yet I now wonder if this decision was pivotal to my future self. In later life, faced with devastating and life-changing news it was my strong female friendships that supported me, providing much needed light during some very dark times.  I hate to say it, but a lot of my male friends fell away, seemingly unable to cope.

Not that single-sex schools should be seen as some kind of woke nirvana for women. It can be an intense environment as bonds are made and broken in the heat of adolescent hormones.  But I felt that it gave me the space to thrash out those friendships and to test bonds away from society’s patriarchal gaze.  Femininity is a performance and this can be draining for women, which is why there is such fierce debate surrounding female-only spaces when it feels that they are being threatened. There is safety in numbers in a single-sex environment and also an element of gender neutrality. Thanks to Hollywood, the different roles for children in schools have become modern archetypes.  The Breakfast Club, the quintessential high school movie, divides these into a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse. In the film these are clearly gendered roles, but in a single-sex environment it can only be a girl who is a jock or a brain.  Women construct an idea of what they should be around what society deems normal for their gender, inside a single-sex environment they are free from that to a certain extent, and so can devote more time to really building up a picture of themselves, outside of the constraints of femininity.

“I felt that it gave me the space to thrash out those friendships and to test bonds away from society’s patriarchal gaze.”

It seems like no coincidence to me that one of my strongest memories from my time at a mixed infant school is playing kiss-chase.  Somehow one boy would be decided as the most popular and so he would get to chase the girls around the playground.  Inevitably this led to a hierarchy of popularity amongst the girls: if you were seen as the least popular then no one would chase you.  It was a pretty brutal lesson to learn early on.  In our school it was the girl long blond hair and blue eyes that was always the favourite.

The classic argument against this type of education is the impact of single sex schooling on relationships with the opposite sex. I find it hard to assess ad I’m sure studies must have been done on this, but looking at my friends, anecdotally I can see a wide range of relationships, good and bad.  I find it very pleasing that my friends seem to have picked excellent husbands.  Myself, I am useless in relationships and certainly suffer from a lack of confidence but I have many good male friends and I have an inkling that this issue would have been the same no matter where I had gone to school.

After a brutal few years, I am still allowing the dust to settle on my life.  I have had many of the foundations upon which I had built my life swiftly taken away from me and often it feels hard to be optimistic.  My friend’s 16-year-old niece was asking for exam and career advice and I shied away from answering as life still feels a little too raw to me. But one thing I can tell her for certain is to make sure you have some good, caring and kind friends.  I know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for mine.

Amanda Maister is a photographer and feminist administrator going incognito in the suburbs