anythings.org

The NYT has an extremely long (and boring to read) piece on single-sex education in public schools that is based on the “research” (opinion) of a family doctor based on the east coast. The doctor has become an advocate of single-sex education (not same-sex education, because that would be GAY) because during his years as a family practitioner (not a child therapist, not a psychologist, not anything remotely related to early childhood educational and mental development) he realized that boys and girls “learn differently”. Now, in psychology, gender is one of those big categories that they use to look for differences because it is (usually) easy to identify. However, many studies have come to the same conclusion: the differences within each gender are greater than those between genders. Which, of course, when you are leaving your private practice as a doctor and emerging as an advocate for single-sex education - while promoting your new book of the same vein - you are more likely to ignore the research that has proven time and time again that gender isn’t always a predictor of differences.

The killer part is, of course, the fact that this doctor has based all of his opinions on brain research. He claims that the “neglect of gender in education has done real harm” to children. When, in fact, if he looked at more than just brain research, he would see that gender has not been ignored in education or in research surrounding educational development of children. There are more factors than gender at play in terms of educational development and achievement. Breaking up children - voluntary or not - based on their sex simply assumes that all boys and girls are identical to their peers in terms of learning and educational abilities.

Gender is an arbitrary trait that has been selected because it is easy to pick on: “boys are better at math than girls” and “girls are better at reading than boys” are cultural stereotypes that are still strongly believed in our school system, and by our children’s teachers. I am not the only one who thinks gender based single-sex education is barking up the wrong tree:

In fact, many caution against trying to draw practical implications for schooling from their work. Much of what Gurian and Sax call “brain research” is still in its infancy, a long way from being able to support practical applications in education. Jay Geidd, one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying brain development in children (including gender differences) cautions that gender is much too crude a tool to differentiate educational approaches: the variation within each gender is often larger than the average difference between genders, and there’s substantial overlap in the distributions.

Geidd’s caution is well worth heeding even in areas where science–not just neuroscience but also other less flashy but often more relevant fields of child development research–does show real differences in boys’ and girls’ development. There is pretty strong evidence that preschool-aged boys develop gross motor skills faster than girls do, while preschool-aged girls tend to have an advantage in language development. As a result, boys and girls are, on average, at different levels of language and motor development when they enter school. Sax and Gurian see this as one argument for separate sex, gender-based schooling. That might be reasonable if gender were the only source of variance in young children’s learning. But it’s not: Young children’s development is highly variable. Some 5-year-old girls might lag many boys in language skills, and some boys’ motor skills might lag those of their female peers. If one is really concerned about adjusting education to variations in children’s development, increased customization and multi-age groupings in early elementary school, which allow teachers to group children who are developmentally similar, regardless of age, and children to progress at their own paces, are a far better solution than simply separating children by sex.

As someone who has worked with children in different age groups and with children who have developmental disabilities, I couldn’t agree more. Gender isn’t the problem here - abilities are. We are so stuck on placing children into classrooms based on their age rather than their abilities. Getting held back or being pushed forward is an option that parents and schools are very wary of, despite the child’s needs. I was put into kindergarten a year early because of my educational abilities, and my brother was put in a year later because he has Asperger’s on top of his learning disabilities. We both benefited from our parent’s decisions to place us in school at a time that wasn’t traditional.

We also benefited because we attended a year-around school rather than a traditional school for the first 6 years of our education. The switch to traditional school was a nightmare. Traditional schooling is such an antiquated system based on the needs of an agricultural community with working children. Our society no longer functions that way, so we no longer need that school system, but the teacher’s unions and the government are so wrapped up in it that it’ll never change. But that’s an entirely different soap box.

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