I know a number of people who think separating boys and girls in school is a great idea. A couple of their reasons are that boys and girls learn differently and that having opposite sex in the classroom is distracting for kids with raging hormones.
My main objection is that separate and equal never works and that in life you are going to have to work side by side and if you don’t learn social skills when will you learn them? In college? In the workplace?
The ACLU brought a lawsuit against Birmingham Alabama which had separate classes.
My main objection is that separate and equal never works and that in life you are going to have to work side by side and if you don’t learn social skills when will you learn them? In college? In the workplace?
The ACLU brought a lawsuit against Birmingham Alabama which had separate classes.
Alabama: Another Unlawful Single-Sex Program Goes Co-EdI do not believe that any case can justify “separate but equal” all it does is breed discrimination and biases.
By Amy L. Katz, ACLU Women's Rights Project
6/6/13
A Birmingham, AL public middle school has agreed to abandon unlawful single-sex classes as the result of ACLU action that led to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the federal agency charged with enforcing Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs.
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Huffman had been separating boys and girls in every grade for all core curriculum classes, homeroom and lunch, on the theory that there are "hard-wired" differences between boys' and girls' brains requiring them to be taught differently, but, possibly in response to ACLU letters of complaint, had cut the program back this year significantly.
Pop theories of hard-wired brain differences between boys and girls have been debunked by neuroscientists, psychologists and educational researchers. Even Birmingham CSD testing researchers were unimpressed with the results of sex separation at Huffman. Analysis of student test results in the areas of reading and mathematics at Huffman and other Birmingham schools that had experimented with sex separation showed no clear pattern of improvement after the initiation of single-sex programs, and the researchers concluded: "There is no definitive proof that the percentage of students scoring proficient is significantly impacted by students being taught in same gender classroom settings."
I disagree with the idea of separation of boys and girls in classrooms. Although it can be said that a majority of females learn better one way while most males learn better another way, this cannot be said for every individual. If we are going to teach subjects in different ways for different individuals, then we should tailor it to the individuals, themselves.
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