The ABC’s Cranbrook school investigation shows why Australia needs to turn its back on single-sex cultures built on exclusion

What to say about Louise Milligan’s Four Corners investigation into yet more allegations of a boys’-club-toxic-culture scandal at yet another overcapitalised-toff-wellness-centre-private-school-and-holding-pen last night?

Four Corners’ report investigating allegations of harassment and discrimination at Sydney’s billionaire baby-educating, boys’ own Cranbrook school by former female staff members raised concerns about gender, power, hierarchy and the perpetuation of not merely unearned advantage but allegations of a dangerous enthusiasm to protect internal culture. It exposed not merely the role of school leadership accused of subordinating employee and student safety to a brand management strategy, but a number of old, ugly social habits around education and exclusivity it is more than time for Australia to give up.

According to Four Corners, Cranbrook said there had been no victimisation of women at the school and that it has an “inclusive and diverse culture”.

“In the context of the size of the school, [Four Corners’] apparently relatively small sample of alleged issues, while of course extremely disappointing, is not a representative, accurate or complete picture of our culture,” it said.

The report raised many important questions. The most obvious: why was the Cranbrook school receiving more than $6m from government coffers with less accountability than a public school would have to go through for a purchase order of paperclips? The show opens with complaints about alleged toxic, sexist behaviour at the school shown by its schoolboys towards a female senior marketing executive – provoking two more questions. The first: what would be the consequences of such serious claims of employee harassment at any other institution in receipt of government funding? And, dear God, the second: why is A SCHOOL employing a “senior marketing executive”?

I guess with $6m taken from Australians who may never have the means to even see Sydney harbour – let alone be educated in a stone palace next to it – the answer is: they can afford a senior marketing executive. Actually, they can afford 50 at the current market rate – and, given such allegations, this may be commercially prudent.

But an angle to Milligan’s story that shouldn’t be lost amid its other alleged outrages is how the weird hangup of gendered segregation hangs over not only Cranbrook and the glorified rowing academies of the St Posho’s private sector, but persists around the Australian school system in general. The story gives the impression that some within Cranbrook sought the transition of the school into a coeducational one as a remedy to the “we gave our female teacher fluffy handcuffs for Christmas” culture – as if the introduction of girl germs to the boys’ environment would build up an organic resistance to their own behaviour. The idea was, apparently, struck down; the school in 2022 was “not ready” for a proliferation of vagina-bearers within their cloistered confines.

It’s an interesting counterpoint to the tearful conclusions drawn by some very strange old boys of Sydney’s similarly cashed-up and cloistered Newington College, who recently hit the streets with neatly printed signs and desperate whining before the media to protest against the incipient coeducationalisation of their own alma mater. In either case, it’s amazing to consider that replicating merely the gendered reality of a society that men, women and non-binary people actually share represents such a radical, transformative change for either school. Lord, what will these people do when they discover the existence of the working class? Of course, one sends one’s child to such schools to ensure they never will … oh, and then makes the working class pay for some of it. Neat.

Alas, the Four Corners story uses the example of Marlborough College, UK, to disabuse both the hopeful and the terrified of the idea that the arrival of girls will make misogyny disappear. The alleged experience of coeducation from the young female alumna interviewed from that school was of boys slapping their dicks on girls’ shoulders.

It’s almost as if the problem stems from the expanded permission structures afforded the privileged in environments that exist to powerfully affirm the values of that privilege, rather than whether they have let girls in or not.

This is hardly an argument against coeducationalisation. I am passionately in favour. I went to a co-ed public school and no boy’s dick landed anywhere near my body that I hadn’t enthusiastically consented to be there. But before that, I attended a single-sex public school … and what is inarguable in those places is the conscious unreality of the segregated environment, a tangible awareness that you exist, day-to-day, in a community that is aggressively unrepresentative of your generational cohort, let alone your external community. In spaces built on exclusion, internal culture folds in on itself because the folding out of generalised society is the foundational value. When you add exclusion of entire social classes, entry policed on capacity to pay, social permissions that apply nowhere else and a few stone castles, it’s inevitable you get internal cultures of allegedly antisocial behaviour a public broadcaster’s obliged to investigate.

Gender-segregated schools date from a time when people didn’t merely believe that boys and girls were manifestly different in aptitude and ability but prepared them for different destinies. As Australian society has shed commitment to the wasteful, harmful social engineering this premise poses, it’s time also to shed the remnants of the segregation that persist in the remaining single-sex schools. No, neither girls or boys are meaningfully better off for the separation, whatever trembling Newington old boys claim.

If we can accept that, it’s time to reassess an educational system that funds and bolsters institutions that brand and market their class and power exclusivities, too. Vested interests may claim we’re “not ready” for that. But if you’re disgusted by the allegations these former staff levelled at Cranbrook, baby, you already are.