Why I don’t regret my all-girls education

Firstly, there’s the mantra of “only the best will do”. If you want to do well, obviously you have to own a minimum of five revision guides per subject and every sort of pen imaginable (fine-liners, fibre-tipped Berols, Sharpies, Lamys… you get the gist).

What’s more, I hate to think how much money I squeezed out of my parents to pay for those re-sits – and all to make that A* a bit more “solid”.

You can imagine, therefore, that I laughed just a tad when I read the proud claims of my former school, a place “where every girl is valued for her individual talents and interests”.

Puurlease – I find this almost ludicrous. My experiences of all-girls education certainly don’t evoke memories of diversity, rather an awful lot of competition as we all strove towards the same impeccable goals. Sure enough, it wasn’t just the grades we were all trying to better each other on. I specifically remember the time two girls argued over who was the first in the school to wear Jack Wills (it was that cool).

More so than any other kind of education, all-girls school puts you in a bubble and one that you can’t truly recognise until you’ve left. True, my education may have been sheltered and devoid of testosterone (so devoid that it took me 5 attempts to spell it right), yet, if I were 11 again, I would step right back into that bubble – downsides included.

Here’s what an all-girls education taught me.

To laugh things off

Embrace the stereotype.

Wear that kilt with pride

Lesbian. Frigid. Horny. Fair enough, the two main men in my life up until the age of 16 were probably my dad and my brother – yet going to all-girls school didn’t make me any of these three things, not that it should be a problem if it did.

In fact, I’m sure the daily massage and ‘mazooza’ (arm tickling) sessions that define mine and my friends’ school years actually cemented our sense of identity and sexuality. Certainly, they made us anything but “socially awkward” – trust me, a mazooza is a great icebreaker.

To be happy in your own skin

Take the fancy dress seriously, but not yourself

And the school sleepover even more seriously…

I have two sisters who both went to mixed schools. They rarely, if ever, leave the house without makeup on – unlike me. It’s not that I don’t take pride in my appearance, but years of going to school au naturel and with a pineapple on top of my head are hard to shake off.

As Nina Bahadur expressed in The Huff Post last year, “there’s something to be said for spending my most awkward and self-loathing years in an environment where being sexually attractive was simply not the goal.” I couldn’t agree more. Far too many women endeavor to change their appearance based on what they believe men perceive as attractive.

At all-girls school, your biggest critics are your closest girlfriends, and nothing makes you more comfortable to be yourself and bare all. You only had to visit the common room to realize this – girls parading around and fake tanning in their underwear was nothing novel. It’s really no surprise, therefore, that my funniest friends on Snapchat are those who also went to all-girls school – we know that looking “ugly” is perfectly normal, and actually very liberating.

To have fun

No one likes a poser

Work hard, play hard WITHOUT SHAME

Admittedly, all-girls school was often a melodramatic, tearful, stressful, even brutal existence. Girls crying over mock exam results (yes, mock) were a regular occurrence. In fact, so great were the pressures on us to become academic stars, that we would regularly bombard our local university library to revise – naturally, the fact we prepared for AS exams was more important than Third Years completing their dissertations.

Yet, without the distraction of boys, entertainment also took on extremes. The “sponsored” silences that infuriated teachers, the time a jelly liver got stuck to the ceiling, and let’s not forget the ‘name game’ where you had to say certain random words in a set time – try slotting ‘traffic light’ into an explanation on photosynthesis.

In these respects, all-girls school adheres very much to the St Trinian’s cliché: the sisterhood was never stronger than when we were up to no good.

This article was original published by The Tab King’s.