|
More and more studies are finding that single gender education is indeed working very well, and the reasons why were outlined by Dr. Leonard Sax, a renowned expert on single gender advantages and author of Why Gender Matters, at a presentation hosted by Central Catholic and Providence high schools at the CCHS gymnasium on Feb. 1.
Dr. Sax (a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in psychology) began by referencing the gender-related firestorm that ensued last year when Dr. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, expounded on his personal theory behind the lack of women professors in the fields of science, physics and engineering.
Eliminating sexism and life style choices as causes of the disproportionately lower number of females in these fields, Summers expressed the belief that it was innate differences in intrinsic aptitude. “In other words,” said Sax, “the president of Harvard is telling us that biology is destiny and women, by birth, cannot excel in computer science, physics and engineering.”
The lively debate that followed in the media had conservatives backing Summers and touting that hard-wired differences between boys and girls implied an order of rank, with the sexes being better in different areas. Hence, boys (better at “things”) would excel as engineers and physicists, while girls (better with people) would make better baby-sitters and kindergarten teachers. “Critics pointed out it seemed awfully strange,” said Sax, “that the things that boys were better with seemed to pay a lot better than the things girls were better at.”
Others, on the liberal end of the spectrum, held that boys’ and girls’ differences were based on how they were raised, with boys being given trucks for play while girls receive dolls, and boys encouraged to take risks but girls being discouraged from doing so.
“Both sides of this debate were wrong,” said Sax. While there are hard-wired, innate differences between the sexes, this does not imply an order of rank, he observed.
Girls who attend all-girl schools, he pointed out, do extremely well in computer science and physics, outperforming their male counterparts. In fact, girls who attend girls’ schools are six times more likely to take courses in subjects like computer science and physics than girls in coed schools.
Also telling is the fact that 13 percent of girls’ school graduates go on to major in subjects like computer science, physics and engineering, as opposed to only two percent of girls graduating from coed schools and 10 percent of boys from coed schools. And, on the college level, women who attend women’s colleges are three to five times more likely to subsequently earn Ph.D.’s in these fields.
Obviously, noted Sax, this refutes Dr. Summers’ theory and places the answer to the question he addressed as either being due to all-girl schools doing something right, coed schools doing something wrong, or a combination of the two. It is the latter theory that Sax delved into in his presentation. Noting recent articles in Newsweek and Business Week that detailed how boys today are falling behind in every level of education, Sax went on to state that on all parameters — grades, clubs, honors, academic participation — “there is a growing gender gap favoring girls at the expense of boys.”
He added this is not just a case of girls doing better, but a fact proven by studies that boys today are doing less well in school than boys 20 to 25 years ago. “For more and more boys,” he said, “school is a bore, a chore, something they endure. Everything they care about happens outside the school. They sit in school and wait for school to let out because, as far as they’re concerned, life begins each day when school lets out.”
Nationwide, it has been found the top performers at coed schools are overwhelmingly girls, with the successful boys being disproportionately from East Asian or Southeast Asian cultures. “For white, black and Latino boys,” said Sax, “academic excellence has come to be seen as un-masculine. You can be a jock or a geek and not both.”
A report by the National Endowment for the Arts revealed that whereas teenage boys 25 years ago read for fun, this is no longer the case. While girls had always been more likely to read for enjoyment than boys, “that gender gap has widened into a chasm,” said Sax, not because girls are reading more, but because boys are reading less. “Reading for fun has become a marker of gender identity,” he said. “Girls read; boys don’t.”
He sees part of the blame for this falling on a shift in the reading curriculum over the years, a shift away from more “boy friendly” authors such as Ernest Hemingway to those that appeal more to girls, such as Toni Morrison.
Going back to Dr. Summers’ controversial gender pronouncement, Sax noted that 22 years ago 37 percent of undergraduates earning degrees in computer science were women, with that number steadily declining to only 18 percent this past year.
“Women are not only not making progress,” observed Sax, “they’re going in the wrong direction.” This is despite it having been 30 to 40 years since Title IX became law in an effort to bridge the gender gap.
To get a better grasp of the situation, Sax invited a look into American education 200 years ago, citing Kim Tolley’s historical research, laid out in her book The Science Education of Girls in America. Two hundred years ago, public schooling only existed through sixth grade, with education past that point done by private high schools, all of which were single sex institutions up until the Civil War.
Ferreting out old advertisements for these single sex schools, Tolley discovered that the great majority of girls’ schools taught physics, chemistry and astronomy, while these subjects were seldom taught in boys’ schools. She also learned physics books were either written specifically for girls or for boys. Intrigued, Sax purchased a set of 200-year-old girls’ physics books on ebay and found them to be a rigorous treatment of the subject, involving calculus and not at all “watered down.”
Western civilization has been sexist at every age, he noted, with males always being valued above females. “And in each era,” he said, “men showed the most delightful creativity in coming up with new mythologies to explain why women are inferior.”
In the early 1800s, a very strict distinction was made between the “natural world” and the “world of man,” with women’s place in the order of things held as being somewhere between the two, hence closer to the world of nature and better able, it was thought, to understand things of the natural world such as biology, chemistry and physics.
Only males were considered capable of lofty thought and able to understand the teachings of philosophers such as Socrates, Aristotle and Virgil. Therefore boys were schooled in Greek, Latin and philosophy. A popular saying of the time was, “Science for the ladies; classics for the gentlemen,” with essayists referring to boys as being by nature more “spiritual and ethereal” than girls.
Noting he had visited over 140 schools in the last five years, Sax quipped that “ethereal and spiritual” were not the first two words that came to mind when describing the boys he had observed these days.
As could be expected, girls in those days vastly outperformed their male counterparts in math and science in the then popular academic competitions, which were eagerly followed the way competitive sports are today, with scores published regularly in the newspapers. Conversely, the boys did much better than girls in foreign languages. And it was staunchly believed that these respective competencies were innate, the exact opposite of today’s prejudices.
Sax pointed out that prejudices of this nature still exist, with a book published as recently as 2002 touting women’s “natural” weakness in math and physics as stemming from estrogen and their menstrual cycles.
“I think it’s important,” said Sax, “for parents and educators to be able to distinguish fact from mythology. This notion that boys are better with things and girls are better with people is a mythology of our time.” |