Teaching Boys and Girls Separately

I cant help it. Whenever I read anything about segregating by sex, I want to hit something. There is only one area I would be indifferent to such segregation and that's sports, only because I know there was no way I could have played water polo against high school boys, then again, that's just me.

Are their differences between girls and boys, men and women? Of course, but that doesn't mean that those differences are more important than our similarities. This article uses such example as girls ability to hear and smell better. So what? Basically all I got from this article is plain old gender sterotyping

On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen’s young-adult novel “Hatchet.” Bender’s voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, “don’t want to be parents. They want to be their kids’ friends.” Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, “Are you going to make it, brother?” Then he kept reading. “ ‘The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .’ What’s abating, gentlemen?” The protagonist of “Hatchet” survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you’re out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.

Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay’s fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of “Always Sisters” and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you’re doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.

I don't have enough room to put up all the stupid generalizations in this article, this is just the first one that really pissed me off.

The following is my rant on singe sex education;

We do not live in a single sex world. How are we preparing our children to deal with the world we live in when they have only dealt with the SAME KIND OF PEOPLE. You can say that girls will have the more self esteem when they go to an all girls school, but does that mean she is prepared for the bullshit she will deal with when she hits the real world. By separating by sex you 1) put way too much emphasis on the differences, which I think is dangerous 2) you make having to deal with real world sex integration come later in life 3) Gender stereotypes become rampant and not everyone identifies with gender roles ( i sure as hell don't).

Education is not only about content standards. We are educating our children to not only to be competent intellectually, but socially as well. Learning how to talk with each other, form alliances, agree to disagree and make compromises is very important when the majority of your life is in the presence of the opposite sex. I never regret an education that involved boys, to me it only made me work harder to disprove myths about my intelligence. How are we ever to achieve equality if we, from the beginning, teach our children that the differences between us are so great they have to be separated to learn? What does that do about differences between us in other aspects? Already our schools are segregated by class, which in turn segregates us based on race and ethnicity. In addition, reducing the way someone thinks to their having a penis or a vagina is clearly ridiculous, stereotypical and dangerous.

The evidence that single sex education was working, to me, could be implemented in any coed education and bring the same results 1) 26 kids in one class? Yes, please! Also there was one piece where a teacher was working with only 9 boys! 2) a sense of self worth and knowing someone cares about you 3) Parents who give a shit 4) a curriculum that seems to based on a well rounded child than a test.