A few weeks ago a new report was released by the American Association of University Women Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls that basically disproved the popular so-called feminist contention that boys were inhibiting girl's academic performance in school. It is the sixth in a series of research that document the academic woes and troubles of girls and suggest ways of countering them. The report found that while girls in Single-Sex education report being more confident in their abilities, higher self-esteem and more positive attitudes towards traditionally "male" subjects, i.e. Maths and Sciences, their test scores and performance in exams generally do not improve.

Kathleen Parker, a multiple award winning syndicated columnist for the Orlando Sentinel wrote an essentially hostile article about the study. She wasn't angry about the result, she was mad because nobody cared to question whether boys did better in Single-Sex environments. Is her concern superfluous? After all, what problems could boys possibly have that would require the sacrifice of effort needed to check whether they would benefit from Single-Sex education? Conventional wisdom clearly and unequivocally states that girls are the disadvantaged in classrooms.

Or are they?

• 67 percent of high school girls attend college compared with 58 percent of high school boys.
• 56 percent of bachelors' degrees go to women, 58 percent of masters' degrees go to women, and 62 percent of all bachelors' degrees given to minority students are given to minority women.
• Male high school freshmen are nearly twice as likely to drop out as are female high school freshmen.
• While girls demonstrate marked deficiencies in mathematics when compared to boys, boys demonstrate deficiencies in reading, writing and English competencies (according to standardized tests) that are greater than those of girls' in math. Not much�as of yet...is done about boys' deficiencies�not nearly as much as is done about girls'.
• High school and national honour rolls are characterised as having a female majority.
• Eighth-grade boys are fifty percent more likely to be held back a grade than girls.
• In high school, two-thirds of the special-ed students are boys.

Something is wrong with this picture. It looks as if boys have a lot of problems. They are losing out to the girls in academic performance and seem to have major impediments to learning. And what has been done to deal with this?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Unless you count "Take Your Daughter To Work Day" in the United States. A day when you can teach boys, who get to stay in class while the girls go on a field trip, what they do that make girls miserable and what to do to make girls happy. Or better yet, "Girl Power: Building Brighter Futures For Girls" which has quite a larger scope than "Take Your Daughter To Work Day", mostly because it has made an extra effort to "expand the message to boys And young men". Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has worked hard to see this program come to pass.

What this program intends to do for boys is...

• Promote responsible behavior.
  
• Include boys and young men in teen pregnancy prevention and family planning efforts.
  
• Focus on developing and testing approaches to providing family planning services to males.
  
• Ensure that adult males send the message of abstinence, responsibility and health to young men and boys;
  
• Involve males in building community support for teen pregnancy prevention and respectful relationships.
  
• Provide educational services, counseling, outreach to males and their families, clinical services and public information on family planning/reproductive health issues.
  
• Educate males about health decision-making and family planning.

• promote healthy behavior
• increase confidence
• prevent teen pregnancy and other risky behaviors, such as smoking and drug use, among girls 9 to 14 years old.
• address the critical and unique needs, interests and challenges of the 9-14 age group
• address teen pregnancy prevention as it relates to other risky behaviors and within the overall context of health promotion, self-confidence, motivation and opportunity.
• improve the health, education, and well-being of young girls and their families.
• utilize community volunteers to serve as mentors to the girls
• encourage the girls to get involved in community service
• spread the messages of delaying sexual activity, staying in school and preparing for the future.

Despite the fact that boys are using drugs, committing crimes and suicide at a rate five times that of girls and are displaying learning disabilities at six times that of girls, not to mention coming up with perennially much lower scores in reading and writing, the government is obsessing over girls scoring (very marginally) less in Maths and Science and not answerring questions in class. The reason is that the problems girls experience in schools have become conventional wisdom thanks largely in part to so-called feminist organisations, like the AAUW and the Ms. Foundation; "teachers pay them less attention in school, fashion magazines feed them unrealistic role models, their self-esteem plummets as they enter their teens, etc. The results: everything from eating disorders to lower-paying jobs. The response: everything from all-girl math classes to Outward Bound programs specifically aimed at building girls' confidence." The problem is that these same so-called feminist organisations, while doing something honorable in alerting the public to girls' problems did something horrible in propagating the fallacy that the education system is geared towards helping boys. They are also guilty of propagating the notion that boys' were one of the major impediments to girls' academic success. Below is some of the text in the information packets the Ms. Foundation handed out to girls' taking part in Take Your Daughter To Work Day;

• Girls who maintain their strong and true voices, who continue to trust the authority of their own thoughts and feelings and desires - despite implicit or explicit messages pressuring them to conform to the traditional female role - often find themselves in serious trouble for being too much to handle in classrooms, families and relationships of all kinds.
• In exchange for giving up complex relationships with others (particularly with women and girlfriends) heterosexual girls are offered the starring role in the romance story - an idealized tale of true love and happiness.
• Teacher and other school staff members, regardless of gender, unintentionally reinforce gender stereotypes and pay more attention to boys.
• There is a tendency beginning at the preschool level for teachers to choose classroom activities that will appeal to boy's interests and select presentation formats in which boys excel or are encouraged more than girls.
• When girls and boys work together in groups, girls are often silenced, ignored or relegated to stereotypical roles.
• Many girls give up the struggle for authentic relationships and pursue the feminine ideal - of being kind and nice, of swallowing their anger, of being selfless - at great cost to their psychological health.

Clearly, the co-ed public school system is failing its male students. I think Ms. Parker's contention that "As for single-sex ed, I'd wager boys would do better without girls." is worth some consideration.

At the core of this hypothesis would be that the education system is not conducive and is even hostile to boys' needs in learning. A casual observer would see that the mixed schools of today are already skewed about as far as they can be toward supporting girls and girls' methods of learning, effectively handicapping boys from achieving...though the result is actually to handicap both sexes. So there are no further advantages to be gained today from placing a girl in a girls' school. There is however much to be said for correcting the current endemic anti-male bias in mixed schools, or for placing boys in boys' schools so that they can be handled and taught more appropriately.

Apparently (to this writer, at least), there are three/four major issues that are at the center of this;

• The "feminisation" (I don't like that word) of the school system, which is basically what the above paragraph is saying.
• The increase in fatherlessness and the low number of male teachers, particularly in junior classes (the latter is perhaps related to the above); meaning there is a lack of male role models that encourage boys' to take their academic work seriously.
• Current attitudes towards boys.
• A pronounced lack of concern towards boys (very strongly related to the above).

A part of this "feminisation" of schools is the relative lack of male role models within the school system. In early years, for the past thirty years, almost all the teachers are female. This has resulted in girl's behaviour becoming what is accepted as normal As a commentator on this problem, Michael Gurian of Washington state said "If Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were living today, they would have been sent to a psychiatrist, given Ritalin, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and a conduct disorder. They were just high-testosterone, very male kids who were exploring and taking risks."

A single mother in Australia voiced her concern about this in a letter to influencial education expert Peter West, Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Western Sydney.

"The Principal and the Deputy are the only males in the school, excluding the janitor... The flavour and atmosphere of the school is what I call a hen club. The female teachers are most influential and vociferous. The norm for child behaviour is that of girls...It is difficult raising a male child single handedly. I expected some assistance from the school when he first started attending. I thought he would have access to male role models. Unfortunately I was very wrong".

Next in the line of culprits is the attitude/lack of concern towards boys. The prevalent attitude in education is a so-called feminist one. Like it is said above, the so-called feminist organisations that first reported girls' woes within the school system are guilty of consciously spreading the belief that the system was designed to favor boys and that boys are the root cause of many of girls' problems. The truth, despite the many protests to the contrary, is that girls in industrialized countries have been outperforming boys since the late 1970s. Ignoring the many experts who say that the studies that the so-called feminist organisations conducted were hideously flawed and misleading (i.e. curiously, the students most at risk educationally, African American boys scored the highest while the least at risk, Caucasian girls, scored the lowest in the self-esteem tests), this has nonetheless created an atmosphere where it is considered superfluous to extend a helping hand towards boys or worse; "anti-girl" to do so, resulting in a hostile counter-productive "anti-boy", and perhaps just as bad "Who cares?" attitude.

Perfectly illustrating the former; to quote Kathleen Parker's article:

"Any suggestion that boys might need examining these days is summarily dismissed by (so-called) feminists who believe attention to males diminishes the strides of females. Girls, after all, have had only "a nanosecond in the history of educational reform," writes Gabrielle Lange in the AAUW magazine, Outlook."

A textbook example of the current hostile "anti-boy" attitude is displayed by so-called feminist academic Dr. Victoria Foster who when consulted by the Australian government to devise a better strategy for educating boys in 1996, (following calls from parents who were concerned at the level of male underachievement in schools) went on the record as believing that a boys' education strategy is not required since it is actually girls who are disadvantaged at school (despite having seen records proving otherwise). She even went as far as to claim that the boys' poor performance in exams was actually good news; it gives boys "an opportunity to see girls in a new light" (i.e. superior) and that it will be "good" for boys' intellectual and social development." Another display of misandry comes from so-called feminist Peggy McIntosh, of the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, a prominent member of the AAUW, who calls boys "winner-killers".

In other words, the constant demonization of men so prevalent in industrialized countries has filterred down to the children. The popular so-called feminist trend to vilify men for being men has backfired on this generation of boys. Constantly told that they are violent beasts who would grow up to become even more violent beasts has not helped at all. They are told that they are the bane of girls' existence. They are told that by virtue of being male they are the worst thing to ever happen to the earth. And what's more, they are treated that way. Witness the infamous sexual harassment cases involving a six year old in North Carolina, Jonathan Prevette, and a seven year old in New York, De'Andre Dearinge. To quote an article on this issue; "Feminists (so-called) have thought hard about gender but their assessment of masculinity has not been positive. Too many schools have fallen into the practice of defining males negatively...as people who are dangerously inclined to be aggressive, competitive, result centered, cold, unfeeling, sexually or otherwise violent."

But the ones most guilty of the "Who cares?" attitude is the public. A year or so ago, in Britain, a major newspaper, The Times (I believe), carried an article titled "Boys Are The Weaker Sex In Exams" which went on about how to further improve girls' self-esteem and performance. Boys, not to mention how come they're not doing so well were only worthy of a few tiny paragraphs. The Evening Standard in London, called the fact that female students are consistently outperforming their male counterparts, a "blow for feminism", rather than something to be looked into (if it were the reverse, it would be. i.e. Oxford University is presently working to create new "gender-neutral" tests to deal with the so-called feminists' complaint that there must be a bias since male post graduate students are outperforming their female counterparts). The Toronto Star in Canada published an article where the problem of Montreal's dropout rate was urged to be taken seriously because 45% of the dropouts were female (the remaining 55% were not worth a mention). Many educators simply refuse to see male underachievement as a problem, as this article from the Women's Freedom Network shows. Even more disturbing is the casual attitude towards male suicide. Donna Shalala, while obviously aware of the fact that there are five male suicide victims to every one female, believes that girls need all the attention because they say they attempt suicide more often than do boys.

But there are a few people who have noticed this disturbing phenomenon. Unfortunately, they often come down harshly on the boys rather than acknowledge that the system has spent the past 15 years ignoring boys; as Donna Laframboise reports; "In a recent Globe and Mail article ("Where the Boys Aren't: At the top of the class", Feb. 26, 1998), educators tell the media that "too many boys don't seem to be even trying," and blame "a boy culture that celebrates bravado, lassitude and stupidity."

Others toe the usual Politically Correct party line. The idea that boys are the disadvantaged in school directly contradicts their beliefs so they refuse to acknowledge that. So, they place the blame at the foot of boys' nature or masculinity. So-called feminist Carol Gilligan, who was one of the major promoters of the illusion of girls being victimized by educational system tilted in favor of boys has been speaking about this. While maintaining her belief that girls are the ones who are really disadvantaged in schools, suggests that boys' ways of relating to people and each other needs changing to the more "cooperative and non-competitive"(writer's emphasis) way of girls to better help them achieve.

In other words, when girls fail, it's the system's fault, when boys do, its their fault, either because they are too "boyish" or too lazy.

This needs to change.

So how would single-sex education help boys? First of all, in contrast to public schools, it would provide an environment where boys' behaviours and mores, like competitiveness, are not denigrated or pathologised. Second it would educate boys using methods and standards that would better encourage them to succeed. The methods of teaching boys should be appropriate for the boys and should not be feminising nor effeminate; it should recognise boys' ways of learning and be respectful of them. Note, of course, that there is no single model of learning which applies to everyone; there are many differences even within tiny groups, talk less of a group as diverse as boys. There are a vast number of approaches, traits, theories, individual aptitudes, statistical differences by sex, "schools of thought", etc. An example of simple distinction is individual capability of learning by "seeing" or "hearing". Some people memorise better by one way or another for instance. An area of difference by sex is for example language. Nearly no girls stutter; significantly fewer suffer dyslexia (chronic incapability to write ortographically). They also are better at articulation and expressing themselves. Meanwhile boys are generally better at "symbol thinking", mathematical abstractions. An all-boys' school would seek to educate boys, noting their different style and tempo and catering to rather than trying to counter it as is so popular today.

A writer on the Internet presented the case for boys' schools thusly:

The case for boys' schools:
• Their success and long and industrious history is in itself sufficient reason. Note that the author sees this argument as a necessary but not sufficient reason.
• Boys are distracted by girls. Note that the author accepts single sex lessens the distractions but not to point of view of complete detachment.
• Boys relationships are more marked in an all boys setting (in adolescent development boys are drawn close to buddies (girls are never buddies)). Boys mature through sparring, mateship, nudging and prodding. Note that the author sees this argument as not persuasive enough to justify boys schools.
• Most important reason for single sex boys' schools is analogous to argument for single sex girls' schools.

Just as girls can master leadership skills better in an all girls school so can boys. Boys are more comfortable at revealing their softer side in an all boys setting than a co educational one. Boys are freed to show their 'feminine' sensitive side precisely because their audience is of kindred spirits.

Boys in a coeducational school are more likely to sit back in areas of community service and art and let the girls do them.

Boys entering schools may bring an instinctive reliance on strength to solve problems; they have to be educated that there are alternative means and emphasize virtues which include thoughtfulness, empathy and sensitivity. (Editor's Note:- This writer, while noting the word "may" in the above sentence is personally against the assumption implied that boys must somehow be "taught" to use such virtues any more than girls.)

A boy goes to a boys school for many things, but above all, for self knowledge.

The only other alternative would be boys' schools, which would take special interests in boys' futures and not treat them as the enemy or "winner killers". They deserve that much at least.