More public schools splitting up boys, girls

[Starry Messenger]

32. Public education in the US has been co-ed since the early 1900's too.

We sent men to the moon and other numerous great feats with co-ed education. I think it would be more useful to look at why that worked rather than experiment with things that would be more appropriate in schools of choice, ie. private school.

Here's an excerpt from a letter from a parent:

http://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/my-daughters-deserve-be-taught-more-stereotypes

As a parent, I like to know about what’s going on in my kids’ lives. We go to every ball game. Every school function. We sit down as a family for dinner every night. It’s important for me to know what’s going on with their education.

So I was shocked to learn that Van Devender Middle School in, where my three daughters attend school in Wood County, West Virginia – with no warning to parents – was using our children in a misguided experiment to separate the boys from the girls, giving them completely different educational experiences. This was not mentioned in the parent orientation when my daughters entered the sixth grade. And there was no other option: unless we wanted to uproot our girls from the friends and classmates they had made in elementary school and send them to a different school, they had to participate in the single-gender program at Van Devender.

<snip>

Meanwhile, the girls are restricted in their movement and are placed in desks facing one another. They don’t do this with the boys because they think that it would make the boys too confrontational.

The idea that all boys and all girls learn the same way is ridiculous—and I know my daughters would benefit from some of the methods used in the boys’ classrooms. For example, one of my daughters has attention-deficit disorder. She gets fidgety and sometimes needs to move around. Because this wasn’t permitted in the girls’ classroom, she is sometimes placed with the boys. And while this gives her the chance to move around, it’s unfair to single her out as being different from her classmates, as if she wasn’t a “normal” girl. My second daughter is legally blind, and would benefit from the brighter lights that are supposedly only better for boys. Another of my daughters learns best by repeating things out loud. Although she does this quietly, it can be disruptive to the student sitting at the desk opposite her. When she asked if she could move to the back of her English class to study, she was told she had to stay in the face-to-face formation.

Professional educators are trained to educate in many ways to accommodate different learning styles already. It doesn't break down along gender lines.