Recently my alma mater announced it’s going coed. Being the oldest of few surviving all-boys boarding schools, with its teachers catechized in “intersectionality” for the arrival of girls, it seems the Kiski we knew is gone.

Perhaps not, if some of the school’s alumni get a vote. Friends of Kiski Prep is working to stop the coed move, and reinvigorate Kiski’s finances, pedagogy, and campus. FOKP has tapped many alumni and supporters, soliciting more than $500,000 in funds so far.

But do single-sex schools matter? A recent Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial asked: “Is a co-ed Kiski school really that awful?”

Maybe not, but a woke Kiski is an abomination.

In an era when “choice” is lauded as the ideal, the choices of 200 boys, their parents, and alumni weren’t considered before the school went coed, FOKP members say. And if it’s between a coed boarding school and an all-boys boarding school as we knew it, then coed is worse.

It would’ve been worse for me, and Smelly Kelly, a fellow Kiski footballer and fellow Pittsburgh delinquent who, like me, benefited from the discipline and spartan style of Kiski, as well as its rural location; it kept us focused, and out of some trouble.

Prior to the start of football season, Smelly and I got into a fistfight in the middle of Coach Jessup’s English class, landing on the headmaster’s youngest son before Coach broke it up.

Smelly and I grew to respect each other for our strengths on and off the field—a competition  repeated innumerably between boys, across the student body. Single-sex education provides better opportunities for students, some say. Indeed, the sexes learn differently.

Decades ago, the school intentionally adopted socioeconomic diversity, with a mix of poor, blue-collar, and wealthy boys. Headmaster Jack Pidgeon called it a “blue-collar boys school.” We accepted the burden of self-improvement encouraged by the headmaster (now called Head of School because, well, slavery), and we benefited from what was often our first time studying hard. It was a foundation for future endeavors. We dealt with it, and our characters were improved through modeling, work, achievement, and shared hardship.

Kiski boys also had cultural support from our teachers—we were of a strong tradition of good people, shared by Olympian Bob Mathias and others. Males were not toxic or flawed. We were developing character. Stoicism was life. Sometimes you had to take your lumps.

School was tough, we knew this, and were humble when booted from class for not shaving, or for having bedhead.

“Jonathan you look like you combed your hair with the leg of a chair,” the Headmaster once barked in his Boston accent, tart-to-my-Westsylvania-ears (they painfully drawl their r’s). “If you ever come to my class looking like that again, I’ll throw your ass out!”

We expected now-gone traditions like monthly haircuts (people judge how you appear, even today), the once-a-term Vespers Service, and meals with faculty in the dining room (every day but Saturday) and being a waiter for those meals. Teachers’ quirks were revealed, like Mr. Nanney announcing, “Gentlemen, when asking for an item, please use the terms ‘Please’ or ‘Dammit’.”

Kiski students are poorer without traditions and opportunities to help discipline themselves and befriend others. Coed won’t help this, but a strict boys school might.

We endured all-nighters studying, losing football seasons, long runs in the country for track, and rope climbs up frozen trees along the river at 6 a.m. for wrestling and more, to toughen ourselves. We prepared and persevered because we wanted to.

Smelly ended up being booted before graduating, but thankful for Kiski; he attended some reunions after.

Boys must be allowed to be boys and to compete with each other, roughhouse, and be able to try new things unimpeded by distractions, and to fail. They grow from it.

“The most important thing I learned at Kiski was, ‘Suck it up, buttercup,’” said a friend, an FOKP member from a wealthy family.

And yet intersectionality and all Wokeism is centered not on self-accountability, but on lies targeting men, whites, heterosexuals, Christians, and Jews. Still, truth doesn’t author confusion.

Teaching Kiski boys that sexuality, race, tribe, or religion are responsible for the world’s miseries is weak. It’s a bogus replacement of a nonsectarian Christian faith-based worldview, with a Marxist-imbued faux religion that’s faithless and lacking redemption.

At the school’s 1888 founding, they originally required Bible and “Drawing” classes (boys learn visually), a campus chapel, and Vespers each Sunday—with optional daily Vespers led by a teacher. Students had no visits home during terms.

Perseverance begets strength and courage.

But you can’t build up what you tear down. With Kiski enshrining intersectionality and Wokeism, such propaganda now will guide the 136-year-old institution in “deconstructing” the heritages and psyches of boys. Still, the pendulum often swings back, even with old traditions.

Image generated by AI.