In the early 2000s, the British television channel Channel 4 conducted an astonishing experiment in documentaries “Boys and girls alone” (boys and girls only). The latter consisted of leaving two groups of young people aged 11 to 12 alone in a house for five days. The boys on one side, the girls on the other. Before participating, each group took cooking lessons in order to learn how to feed themselves, without adults.
The objective of the experiment was to see how, in a non-mixed situation, each group would manage to manage without the intervention or the authority of grown-ups. And the edifying results resurface today to shed light on the importance of education in forging the responsible and sensitive adults of tomorrow.
On Instagram, the online media Impact discusses the lessons to be learned from this experience. And the conclusion is clear: ALL children must be raised to become good people. Why, asks the media, are girls educated to become more responsible than boys? And why, despite this state of affairs, are we still reluctant today to elect women to positions of responsibility?
For Impact, three main lessons should therefore be drawn from this study:
- Children of all genders need to be taught the importance of kindness, hygiene, health, responsibility and living together.
- The ability to become a good leader does not depend on gender.
- The best companies are run with kindness, compassion and empathy.
Two rooms, two atmospheres
Back to the results of the study. In the boys’ house, a few days were enough for two opposing clans to form. The walls were vandalized, the furniture ransacked. On the food side, the preparatory courses were of no help since the participants preferred to feed exclusively on cereals, sodas and other sweets.
For the girls, on the contrary, a list of task distribution was made, and they cooked for each other. They organized make-up workshops and if they painted on the walls, it was to decorate them with flowery frescoes. However, not everything was rosy either and the teasing prompted two participants to leave the experiment before the end.
The takeaway from this experiment is not that boys are born to cause chaos and girls are born to bake cupcakes and do the dishes. The lesson is more subtle than that. The gendered education that we give to children is real and it is possible to take advantage of it by offering everyone the same learning of benevolence and living together. In sum concluded miss in an article “We should educate our sons like we educate our daughters, not the other way around.”
