After something of a hiatus, largely relating to intellectual fashion, single-sex education seems to be making new in-roads in public and private educational settings in the U.S. and Canada.
Several stories this week have focused on the new moves to separate boys and girls in the classroom, whether it is single schools offering separated class rooms, or entirely new facilities designed to specifically cater to one sex or another. Many pieces have focused on the advantages for boys in a single-sex setting, despite the discomfort it may cause: Paul Cappon, president of the Canadian Council on Learning, was quoted as saying that, “We don’t like to talk about it, because we think it’s denigrating the achievements of females,” but that “[we] have to ask what is happening, and […] why.” Many different theories are discussed, including that of parental and societal expectation, but one thing that many of the articles seem to agree on is that the single-sex approach seems to work, at least ancedotally: This National Post article reports that many teachers agree that boys tend to have longer attention spans and, overall, behave better in a sexually-segregated setting.
But what about girls? Some stories have focused on the social freedom permitted to young woman in single-sex schools: In interviews, young women often say that they feel less pressure to “act stupid” to gain male attention. Other stories, such as this one from the UK press association, seem to imply that girls’ physical safety is an issue in coed schools.
Some schools in the U.S. have come under fire for their attempts to offer single-sex options, such as the Rene Rost Middle School in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which got into hot water with the American Civil Liberites Union. However, as Dr. Leonard Sax said in the National Post, “Single sex education is not the objective, it’s a means. The objective is to help every child achieve their full potential academically and intellectually.”
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