Pink versus Blue

What saddens me most about this is that when I first read it, the ingrained culture part of my gut wanted to nod along a bit. I know that's wrong, but I wonder how many people would be able to see it the same way.

The bottom line is that some South Carolina schools have set up intricate sex segregated classrooms. These classrooms go along with standard gender role nonsense about boys being rambunctious and girls being quiet and social in defining their teaching styles.

I'm not even going to touch schools teaching the boys "to be heroes."

If we were going to be logical about this, it makes more sense to tailor education to learning styles, not separate genders. For example, make a class of visual learners, a class of aural learners, a class of verbal learners, etc. You'll find members of each of these types of learners in a class of one gender. Paring it down to boys learn differently than girls is ridiculous. Of course, it's even better to have the classes as inclusive as possible (boys, girls, visual learners, aural learners, etc all in the same class) so that children grow up dealing with different people and different learning styles, something they will have to do all their lives.

The figures seem to point to women doing better in education than men, and more women are going to college and other forms of secondary education. This must be bad, as we all know men are better, so now, and only now, is there a problem that we need to fix now that women have the opportunity to compete directly with men in just about any field if they so choose.

It isn't the women are catching up in academics, really, it's that schools teach in a way that's easier for women to do well in than it is for men. So, let's separate them so they never have urges in high school and will have little experience dealing with women in formal situations like school. This will put more boys in college, so that college-educated women will have someone to marry!*

Of course, we all only start to care about academic reform when it's girls outperforming boys. The prescribed norm is that boys do better and get to go to college, go into hard, difficult fields, like chemistry, physics, business, engineering and math, while girls go into easy MRS degrees like English, psychology, and biology.**

I cannot think of a solid explanation of why girls are currently doing better in academics than boys, but I doubt that it is because current schools are tailored towards girls in how teachers teach.

The program in South Carolina is a farce, plain and simple. It oversimplifies learning styles in order to force children very heavily into their societal gender roles by giving them no other options. It's even more saddening that it is being federally funded, and it will likely be implemented elsewhere. The system is currently broken, as proven by the US, richest nation on Earth, being outperformed by its industrialized fellows, but England, Finland, China, and Japan seem to be thriving with their co-ed classrooms. One may even dare to suggest that its because their people and government place a higher value on educational quality, and that culturally education is more highly valued.

*I actually read this in an article on the fact that there are 2% more women in colleges than men. The author seriously asked "Who will these women marry?" Apparently it is permissible for men to marry women with less education, so that their wives can be taken out of the workforce and left with no way to survive economically after a divorce, but a woman cannot marry after college, or marry someone with less education. (Personally, I married a college dropout I met while he was still attending my college). I mean, if she does this, then she'll push the marriage to divorce because she earns more.

Never mind that women who are well-educated with careers tend to have more stable marriages, when they do marry later in life. Women now have more choices available to them in how they live their lives, and, for some strange reason, they seem to be happier for it.

**My husband, who is naturally more mathematically inclined, hates it when people call biology a soft science. Physics is very easy for him, but biology has so much memorization, as well as describing very complex systems, that it gives him trouble. He considers it one of the most difficult sciences. The truth is that biology, like psychology and English, has gained this label from some because it has a heavy female presence. Whenever a field gains a lot of women in its ranks, it apparently loses some measure of credibility and perception of difficulty. This is why English, which involves a lot of reading, writing, and heavy analysis is perceived as easy and a waste of time, while history doesn't seem to get the same sort of treatment exactly.

I mean, if a girl can do it, it can't be that bad, right?

Of course, the higher percentage of women in these fields isn't really good evidence that women are more inclined towards the liberal arts. I cannot currently find the study, but I do remember hearing that in elementary school, an equal number of boys and girls are interested and capable in math, science, and English, but it is in middle school that the genders shift to have girls more interested in English, and the boys in math and science. Natural ability isn't tied to gender, but the path our lives take seems to depend on said gender and its expectations.