Single-gender classrooms are the best way to help a “Lost Generation” of academically underachieving boys

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Many elementary and secondary schools use teaching methods today that work best with girls – a trend that’s developed over the last 30 years with efforts to make curricula and classrooms more gender neutral.  This change has worked exceptionally well for the girls; but many boys are now being left behind.

Recent neurological research has made it possible to pinpoint some of the ways that boys and girls learn differently.  For example, girls develop language and fine motor skills – like those used in handwriting – six years earlier than boys.  Boys develop math and geometry skills about four years earlier than girls.  Yet, in co-ed classrooms, we expect both boys and girls to learn the same things, at the same times, in the same ways.

The social pressures of co-ed classrooms often interfere with learning, particularly in high school.  Many boys react by acting in a goofy or overly aggressive manner.  Others are too embarrassed to try activities such as drama or art that their friends think are “just for girls.”  

As a result, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best thing we can do for boys – and for girls as well – is to give them the chance to be educated separately.  The more time I’ve spent as an educator, the more I’ve become convinced that single-sex classrooms offer remarkable benefits for both genders.

I first encountered the differences between single-sex and co-ed classrooms when I taught both boys and girls at a private school in Connecticut.  I taught an AP Calculus class of all boys in the morning, and an AP Physics class of both boys and girls in the afternoon.  Many of the same boys were in both classes.

How did those boys behave?  If a boy struggled on a math problem in the morning, other boys in the class were very willing to offer help and support.  There was no posturing – just a gratifyingly eager search to find an answer together.

In the afternoon, they behaved differently.  Many of the boys were afraid to take risks in front of the girls.  And they weren’t nearly as eager, in this setting, to help out a struggling friend.  Priorities in this class were given to appearances.  And that had a bad effect on how both the boys and the girls learned.

Social pressure isn’t the only factor at work in schools.  As psychologists, physicians, neuroscience researchers and educators delve deeper into the problems of academic achievement by both boys and girls, they’ve developed very specific ideas on what to do to help both boys and girls learn.  Some of those ideas are summarized by Dr. Leonard Sax, a family practice physician and psychologist, in his book Why Gender Matters.

In studying literature, for example, boys will respond more to action stories and less to discussions about relationships between characters in a story. Girls thrive on discussing feelings and relationships, a more popular pedagogical approach.  But as any parent of an adolescent or preadolescent boy knows, asking a boy “How does that make you feel?” is relatively ineffective; their emotional development simply isn’t in sync with their female classmates.  For boys, the best approach is to focus on the plot first, and circle back to the emotional elements of the story later.  

There are differences in math, too.  Girls manage algebra problems better when they’re expressed in “story” form.  Because of this, “story problems” have become popular in most algebra texts as a way of getting girls more interested in math.  For boys, however, the opposite is true.  They like to start from an abstract perspective.  The reason: recent studies show that girls process both math and language in the same section of the brain; boys do not, so boys have to take the extra step of making connections between the language-based “story problem” and the math.  Both groups can be taught algebra well, but a genuine physiological difference between the sexes suggests they shouldn’t be taught the same way.

A boy’s classroom should be active – the teacher should move around, the boys should be able to move around, and the teacher should speak loudly.  Research on hearing shows that young girls actually hear at least twice as well as boys in the frequency ranges of normal speech.  This trait begins in infancy and is still a factor at least through middle school.

Imagine a classroom in which the boys are clustered in the back, the girls are in the front, and a teacher seated at a desk speaks in a “normal” voice.  There’s not a lot of learning going on in back – in fact some of the boys can barely hear the teacher.  Pretty soon the buzzing of the florescent light fixture is the only interesting thing that’s going on; and two or three of the most restive boys in the back of the room will be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

It’s easy to argue against some of these concepts by saying that I’m simply dragging out old-fashioned gender stereotypes.  But research suggests otherwise.  In my experience, co-ed schools tend to reinforce the gender stereotypes that single-sex schools can purposefully and effectively break down. Absent gender stereotyping and social pressure, boys are definitely more likely to learn foreign languages and study music and art at a boys’ school.  A similar effect makes girls more likely to study math and physics at girls’ schools.  Girls who study math and physics at all-girls secondary schools go on to study those subjects in college six times as often as girls who go to co-ed schools.  

There are no significant differences in capability between the genders.  But the ways they learn are vastly different; and so some careful thought needs to be given to the way we teach each gender. If we want to correct the problems of boys dropping out of school, being left behind academically, and going to college in rapidly dwindling numbers, then our schools will have to respect the different learning styles of boys.  It will save the boys, and benefit the girls, too.

Christopher Brueningsen is headmaster of The Kiski School, Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, a boys’ boarding school for grades 9-12.  He may be reached at 724-639-8024 or at headmaster@kiski.org

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