Like Ezra, I recommend yesterday's New York Times magazine piece on the growing trend of public, single-sex education across the country. Sadly, a good chunk of the 50 or so schools nationwide who've adopted the practice are motivated by dogmatic, unproven theories of sex difference as promoted by the psychologist Leonard Sax, who believes boys are action-oriented and aggressive, and girls are communicative and domestic. So in one Alabama elementary school in which single-sex classrooms are the norm, girls sit in circles to share their thoughts on how washing dishes demonstrates the properties of oil, soap, and water, while boys jump up to answer questions in class (instead of raising their hands) and are encouraged to draw pictures of fast cars and planes with metallic crayons.
The stereotyping, heteronomativity, and misogyny of such an education (Girls! Someday you can wash dishes too, just like mom!) would be laughable, if it weren't the backbone of actual lessons being taught to actual American children. But there's also a more positive form of single-sex education, a trend represented by schools like Harlem's Young Women's Leadership School, which is based on building the self-esteem of girls of color in a culture that doesn't present them with very many models for success. Indeed, it would be naive to deny that girls and boys face different kinds of challenges. In our December print issue, I profiled a program in suburban New York that provides after-school sociocultural extras to African American boys, including a high school support group to talk about masculinity issues, including the lack of present fathers. And girls face a whole host of gendered challenges, from pregnancy, to eating disorders, to self-cutting.
Of course, there are ways to combine co-ed schooling with extra counseling that gives kids safe spaces to talk about more gender-specific problems. But any school district that defines children first and foremost in terms of their gender is playing with fire. Let's say it together: Gender is a spectrum. And defining masculinity and femininity rigidly for children risks leaving many of them feeling left out and unsure of themselves -- or even deviant. Remember the 15-year old California boy who was murdered by a classmate this month after he came out of the closet as gay and began to wear make-up and women's shoes?
School should not be about promoting traditional gender identities -- it should be about helping every child learn in the way that suits them best.
--Dana Goldstein
