In some circles, this is the new miracle cure for what ails our schools: Teach boys and girls separately and they’ll do better.
The argument that boys and girls can concentrate more on school if they’re not distracted by each other (whether in the form of crushes or teasing) makes some sense. But as the Boston Globe pointed out Sunday, a number of schools are redesigning their curriculum around much more debatable ideas: That females are genetically programmed to talk three times as much as males, that girls can’t grasp abstract math (and so need to learn numbers by doing things like counting flower petals), or that boys are so inherently unruly and wild they have to be handled completely differently from girls, hence the need for separate classes.
This last one particularly struck me, because it’s one right-wing pundits cite a lot to explain why boys are falling behind girls in school (allegedly, that is—one study found that if you eliminate poverty and race as factors, the difference is minimal): School is inherently antiboy. Boys want to run wild, play in the mud, have adventures and don’t want to sit school and obey a bunch of stupid rules (for which reason some theorists think boys should learn reading from adventure stories while girls should learn from something suitably sweet and cute).
Even assuming this is both true and gender specific (I’m not sure girls are any more enthusiastic about sitting still in class), how could it possibly explain a recent change in boys’ performance? From time immemorial, school has been about sitting still and obeying the rules and doing sums instead of playing: Were boys somehow less wild and playful a century ago?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.