Single-sex education, and socializing, needs a vigorous defense
Timothy P. Carney
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At some point, about a decade ago, I realized that many of my millennial colleagues didn’t ever hang out in single-sex settings. Particularly, many of the 20-something-year-old men I knew professionally didn’t have regular hangouts with the guys.
This line of wonder and inquiry was inspired by an NPR feature trying to define who was a “bro.” One factor of being a bro was “Dudeliness,” which is “one’s propensity to do bro things with other bros. … A particularly dudely bro is someone you usually think of as an intrinsic part of a larger pack of bros.”
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Hmm, I wondered. Is doing things with other bros exceptional now, so that guys who behave this way now have their own label as a subclass?
Recently, I conducted a very unscientific poll suggesting that about half of my followers, including a majority of dudes, don’t really do all-guys or all-gals get-togethers, such as a book club, church group, or happy hour.
Eventually, I began to wonder about the attitude toward single-sex institutions, such as schools. Throughout history, the idea of all-boys and all-girls schools has made sense to much of the population. When I looked around in the current year, there were plenty of people who thought this was somehow backward or dated.
Harmel Academy, for instance, is a Great Books-and-Skilled Trades school for men. When some admirer tweeted about it, this was one unsurprising response:
In the summer of 2016, when an all-boys high school opened in Washington, D.C., the American Civil Liberties Union objected.
This school was part of Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s efforts to help young black boys, who were dropping out of school and falling into violence at disproportionate rates. This whole initiative came under attack from the National Organization for Women.
Single-sex education shouldn’t need defending. It is true to everyone in education that boys learn differently from girls and that men learn differently from women. Also, when it comes to women, the modern tastemakers seem to believe that being in all-women environments is salutary. It’s insane to assume this isn’t true for men.
But just this week, I came across the most quotidian, yet still significant, reason for single-sex education. This is going to sound absurd, but it has empirical research.
Check out this paper on cognitive testing for men and women. Specifically, check out the chart below.
Men performed better on math quizzes the colder the room was (at least down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit). Women performed better the warmer the room was (at least 80-90 degrees).
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This finding was presented as evidence that the gap between boys and girls on the SAT is due to environmental factors. Fine. But the real conclusion, if this result holds up, is that boys and girls thrive in different learning environments.
Our society is obsessed with nondiscrimination, so having all-boys schools (and, to some extent, all-girls schools) clashes with that obsession. But given how differently boys and girls learn, common sense and science suggest there’s good reason to keep them separated.