Single Sex Education

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting and quite thorough article on single-sex education, which is on a dramatic rise in public schools (apparently). It addresses both the biological and social arguments for single-sex ed, the former of which goes something like “boys and girls have inherent physiological and learning differences that make them benefit from different types of instruction” and the latter of which goes something along the lines of “boys and girls are raised with such different social expectations that single-sex ed is necessary to counter negative influences and encourage positive ones.”

I’m not sure where I stand on the matter, having both learned and taught at an all-girls school, but having found that I thrive quite well in a coed or even predominantly masculine classroom. Certainly I relish being able to do Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice in the same year without sending the class into rebellion, and I vividly remember seeing a friend (whom I knew to be intelligent, perceptive, and hard-working) dissolve into giggly helplessness for the benefit of the boys in a coed chemistry class. But when I think about the differences in learning styles within my own classrooms, I wonder whether championing single-sex education might not cause problems as well as solve them. The Language Log has a nice discussion of the perils of statistics; the line that stuck out the most to me in the article was, “gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds.” I have girls who simply salivate for competition; I have girls whom competition terrifies and shuts down. There are girls who work well within the interpersonal/conversational learning that educational psych touts as a peculiarly female strength; there are also girls who would much prefer to be working a problem out on their own. And I worry that categorizing girls as less comfortable with what we’re now calling STEM–Science, Technology, Economics, Math–is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I guess what I’m saying is that I become deeply suspicious when people implicitly take the male/female divide as prescriptive rather than descriptive, as I have seen them do. Maybe most boys will function better in a specific type of environment; it doesn’t mean that the teacher is then exempted from trying to find what environment will work best for the specific group of boys that she has. It’s one thing to try to predict what a student will be comfortable with, but it’s quite another to demand that our students match their natures to our predictions.