Helping Girls Grow

eyond curricular considerations, research has repeatedly demonstrated that girls’ schools are in a unique position to help girls know themselves and to believe in themselves, as individuals and as young women. It is a setting that supports healthy risk taking. And we have found that, in turn, camaraderie and caring among students contribute significantly to Emma Willard’s climate of academic achievement.

Head of School Trudy Hall writes, “Dr. Sylvia Rimm, who with her daughters coauthored See Jane Win, has interviewed more than 1,400 successful women, asking them about the ways in which they were parented to determine important themes in their lives. Based on her findings, Dr. Rimm encourages thoughtful, healthy risk taking in order to instill resilience, one of the most consistent characteristics possessed by the accomplished women in her study.

“At Emma Willard, we believe it is important to provide ample opportunities for girls to take the right kinds of risks—intelligent, reasonable, growth-producing risks. We surround our students with the stuff of dreams—dreams that only their willingness to dare and their hard work can make real.

“Will you be able to provide your daughter with the encouragement she needs to take the right kinds of risks, or will you be tempted to overprotect her? Can you bear to let her fail? Her failures, after all, may be the keys to her future successes.”

 

 

“With alarming consistency, girls learn as they grow up that their role requires giving over to boys leadership positions, the study of certain subjects such as mathematics and the sciences, and certain important attitudes towards learning, such as questioning, challenging, and risk taking.” From Who Goes Where? Choice of Single-Sex and Coeducational Independent Secondary Schools, Valerie E. Lee and Helen M. Marks, University of Michigan, 1992