Can we talk about sex?

Though probably not in the way you might think.

I want to talk about sex, as in "single sex education", which is now becoming more and more prevalent around the country.

Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children’s public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience.

When my father went to parochial school, boys and girls were taught separately. Of course, that was in the 1920s. It would have been true for my mother as well, except that, with 13 people in her graduating class in rural North Dakota, it just wasn't practical.

So, this is not a new idea. And let's be clear: most of the instructional reasons for doing this apply mainly to the youngest students, those in elementary school. By the time you get to high school, as my father did in 1930s and found himself in mixed classrooms, I see less and less of a need, and more and more of an instructional reason not to continue the practice.

But, to start, what is the rationale?

You will need to read extensively to understand the thinking behind these issues. The two seminal figures are Leonard Sax, “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences”. and Michael Gurian, Boys and Girls Learn Differently!

In both cases, they are using data, insights and research, a lot of it developed fairly recently from neurophysiology, where increasingly, researchers are able to pinpoint what happens in the brains of young learners.

Essentially, though, the theory holds that environmental factors (room temperature, color, furniture arrangement), combined with physical needs (amount of movement allowed, proximity of bodies, frequency of playtime, etc.) and instructional practice (fine motor skills versus book work, discussion versus hands-on, etc) shake out differently enough in boys and girls to justify breaking them up into different groups by gender.

As this article suggests, instruction cannot only be tailored to fit for boys and girls and the way each learns, but also, teachers can specialize in the kinds of support, feedback and criticism that is most effective for each as well.

Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls’ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly. Under Sax’s leadership, teachers learn to say things like, “Damien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it’s going faster.” “Now Damien feels encouraged,” Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. “To say: ‘Why don’t you use more colors? Why don’t you put someone in the vehicle?’ is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, ‘Well, this is nice, but why don’t you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.’ ”

This makes incredible sense, and as mentioned earlier, especially at the elementary and middle school level. But, in high school, I do believe that these differences begin to dissipate, and also that, boys and girls need to begin interacting with each other in academic settings in order to gain insight from the diversity of intelligences that only a full set of a school's population would present.

But, I do have concerns.

As documented at this website, the statistics do not favor this practice for one important reason: there are only 16.2% of male teachers at the elementary level.

I know, sure, women can teach a group of boys as well as a man. That's true. In most cases, female teachers are extremely effective. But, I think, at some point, a group of all boys is going to benefit more from having a male teacher. I don't have immediate data to back that up, but that is my intuition.

How beneficial, how well-rounded will the education be for a group of 25 boys in 1st grade if, for the next six years, all their teachers will be more like mom than dad? (If there is a dad at home...)

Second, if it is true that boys are more active learners, more individualistic and more hands-on, at some point are we not going to be creating an advantage for girls in that most of academic education is about reading, writing and communicating with others? In other words, girls already make up about 58% of all students in post-secondary education, are we really going to be promoting more balance by putting girls on one track, presumably more academic, and boys on another?

Don't get me wrong. I think this idea has tremendous potential. As an educator who has coached young men, it was easy to understand how much focus, teamwork and common understanding we could generate as a group. And that is the key here: this works because you can customize instruction to fit the learners' needs and make them into a coherent and unified group. I totally believe in that as the key to effective instruction and learning.

But, I submit, it is already possible to achieve that in the classroom anyway. (See the Discussion Topic: Cooperative Learning.) And most teachers, especially at the elementary level, understand how to customize learning tasks around the specialized abilities and needs of their students anyway. That's been going on forever.

So, let the experimentation begin with single-sex groupings. Let the practice, experience and data begin to flow. I just hope that, in the end, the measure of success in single-sex education is not considered to be the test scores of these young people. At long last let's admit that this is not the most important measure, which is exactly why we seek to split students up into gender to begin with: so that they can reach their full potential.