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I went to a state school in Oz and for me a C was definitely shit. It was the lowest mark I got in VCE, it was in Chemistry, and was so shocking, a mate and I arranged some extra lessons with the teacher to help us fix it for the second semester. Definitely other kids wouldn't have bothered but I was trying damn hard to keep my options open for uni so I could escape the town. Other kids who were not interested in uni didn't care about a C and only stepped up if they were going to have to repeat something. My parents (one of which was a teacher) probably had more of an impact on my understanding of the need for a good education than school itself ever did.
I never thought about girls schools like that though. That sounds pretty cool even if I thought we were all pretty even at my secondary school. Even if what classes we did was even, you'd have louder lads (guilty) getting more attention and when it came time for electives I wonder if girls' choices went wildly different directions because of expectations on them or the general feeling of "this is for blokes what are you doing picking this subject". I did Home Eco for 4 years though so I could eat something at the end of a class haha S.M.R.T.
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hippy
hats
Long time ago now I went to a minor public day school up north. Seems to have given me something that helps. Not an old-school network, I'm crap at keeping in touch and the losing-your-surname thing makes it harder for girls to make connections of the "Jones-Lee? Goodness me you don't mean old Oggie Jones-Lee do you?" type, but a bit of confidence maybe. I think I have as much right to step up as anyone else.
Things that seemed to be different between my experience of school and my non-private friends':
Single sex. BIG one for female achievement, at least back then. Science teachers? All women. Maths teachers? (Almost) all women. Highest grades? All girls. Group of nerds in computer club? All girls. The idea of something being "not for girls" just didn't exist for us, other than football because we only did the girls' school sports. And of course we weren't running an inescapable gauntlet of teenage boys all day. I read shit like this and it's a million miles away from my school life.
Expectations. My friends in the top local state schools were told they were doing well if they got Bs and Cs at GCSE (this was back in the 90s when the top grade was A). In my school a C was treated like a failure, it would be all "oh what went wrong". My friends were just as smart as me, but the bar they were being given to meet was lower. (To be fair, one retired in his 30s after selling his business and one ended up working for Google in the early 00s so I'm not sure I won the long game here!)