Boys & Girls are Different

The 60’s and 70’s of the 1900’s will always be remembered for the inroads made into our culture and society by the Feminist Movement and its associated allies. As part of its so -called “championing” the rights and interests of women and girls, the Movement began an all-out assault on what was then perceived as a patriarchal society.

All male institutions, clubs, colleges and especially the military, were targeted as places where gender divisions and separations were not only unconstitutional but were (claimed to be) inherently wrong and damaging to the general psyche of the female population .

As is usually the case, our society went from the ridiculous to the sublime when political correctness went awry as it tried to appease the women’s rights lobbyists by succumbing to demands that in many instances had neither scientific evidence nor common sense to support them.

Now at last, as we march further on into the new century, a policy shift is occurring in both political and educational spheres. In May 2002 (and again in March 2004), the U.S. Department of Education announced that it intended to revise the regulations on gender ( substitute: single-sex) education, so that school districts could have more flexibility in the establishment of all-boys or all-girls Public Schools (1). Although co-education has been a part of our history for over a hundred years, there is now new mounting evidence that such educational philosophy and teaching methodology can cultivate situations and strategies that may hinder academic progress in both girls and boys. In fact, some research is showing that co-ed settings may actually reinforce many of the gender stereotypical ideas, and prevent boys and girls from achieving their best in school and college.(2)

The main thrust of this new evidence is that medical, neurological and psychological research clearly shows that boys and girls DO learn in different ways.

Boys and girls are different!
They look different.
They act differently.
They think differently.

They process information differently and do so in environments that should be greatly different.

The “cookie-cutter” approach to education is therefore long overdue a decent burial.

Yet, it would seem that the established leadership in the field of education has failed to grasp these simple truths.

Forty or fifty years ago, the conventional wisdom was that co-education would break down gender stereotyping; that boys and girls are exactly the same and learn alike and that we were in some way ( as yet still unexplained) “damaging” students by isolating them in any way. That type of “innovative thinking” has turned out to be as flawed as many of the other idiotic ideas that came with the times.