Ottawa Citizen editorial page weighs in on the boy troubles:

No boy left behind

The Ottawa CitizenOctober 26, 2009Comments (5)

Canada’s largest school board appears poised to jump on the single-sex education bandwagon as a way of addressing the worrisome number of boys failing to thrive in school.

The attention paid to this issue — both the director of the Toronto District School Board and Premier Dalton McGuinty have given the plan a thumbs-up — is positive. It recognizes that schools need to do a better job of accommodating boys, who have become education underdogs in recent years.

But segregated education is not the only way to address the issue. Nor is it necessarily the best way, according to some research.

Although many boys excel in school, they are, as a group, falling behind — more likely to underperform, to need learning support, to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and to be suspended. The resulting disengagement is costly to both individuals and society. Official recognition of this issue is overdue.

The Toronto proposal calls for the creation of a “Male Leadership Academy” for students from kindergarten to Grade 3, starting next fall. The school would then add a grade a year. The academy is the brainchild of academic, author, teacher and former football player Chris Spence, who argues that boys have suffered under the unisex model of learning.

He is not the first to make this argument. The advantage of single-sex schools as a way of addressing male under-achievement has been promoted by groups in Canada and the U.S. in recent years.

Leonard Sax, the author of Why Gender Matters and Boys Adrift, argues that boys and girls are so different that they can’t learn well in mixed classes. Sax, who quit his medical practice to head the National Association of Single Sex Public Education in the U.S. is one of the most vocal proponents of segregating girls and boys in school. Based partly on his arguments, schools — including Maynard Public school near Prescott — have done just that. Roberta Bondar school in Ottawa South currently has one all-boys and one all-girls class in Grade 7.

But there are other approaches to dealing with the gender gap in education.

Neuroscientist Lise Eliot, in her newly released book Pink Brain, Blue Brain, says boys and girls can learn a lot from each other, and benefit from each other, especially in elementary school. Girls tend to have a calming effect on their male classmates, and boys can help push girls to be more active and competitive, according to some studies.

Eliot makes a compelling argument for making classrooms boy-friendly without necessarily segregating boys and girls.

Which doesn’t mean Toronto’s proposed academy is bad idea, or that there isn’t room for segregated classes, especially in maths and sciences. Toronto’s proposal aims to deal with the city’s growing school violence problem, in addition to academic issues. And it may make a difference in the lives of boys who might otherwise lose interest in school and become involved in violence. It is certainly worth a try.

And it will raise awareness that the underachievement of boys in schools can no longer be ignored. Single-sex education is just one way of addressing the worrisome gender gap.

 

Tags: single sex canada

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