Establishing gender divided classroom s would seriously harm children’s development. Yes, sometimes having the other gender in a classroom can be distracting for everyone, but by separating the genders you create a whole new set of problems. Gender divided classrooms aren’t going to solve this problem, just change it. Students need to develop these social skills for life anyway. They’re going to have to interact with the opposite gender eventually. Why not give them time to develop those skills before throwing them into the world to fall on their face. If anything this would make the problem worse. It will create a gap between the two genders. How are you supposed to understand the other gender when you have no interaction with them? It will just lead to conflict which will make the situation worse. Yes, there are differences between boys and girls and their learning styles, but dividing classes isn’t going to help. By dividing the classrooms, it almost feels like a punishment for learning differently. Have parents interact more and promote different styles of learning, have teachers find new methods that can teach to either side, these things will help, not gender divided classrooms.
One of the big reasons to support gender divided classrooms is that it allows teachers to teach to each gender’s “strengths,” which for boys would be math and science. Well according to “Girls' and Boys' Developing Interests in Math and Science: Do Parents Matter?” they discovered that girls can be just as strong. It doesn’t take altering schools to make that happen either, it just takes some support from parents. In their study they followed a group of children all through grade school and monitored their interest in science and math. The results showed that children of either gender can be more interested in those subjects with a little motivation from their parents. So why split up the classroom when there’s a simpler answer lying at home?
Source: Jacobs, Janis E., and Martha M. Bleeker. "Girls' and boys' developing interests in math and science: Do parents matter?." New Directions for Child & Adolescent Development 2004.106 (2004): 5-21. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 22 Oct. 2010.
Good point Toby. I agree with you that boys and girls are both equally capable of learning. They just need to be encouraged the right way and parents can accomplish this, without needing to change the school system.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you too, Toby. Sure there are problems with our education system, but there are different ways to solve them rather than stereotyping boys and girls into different classrooms. Simple things like having teachers that understand how students learn or having parents encourage their kids to be interested in a variety of subjects can be more effective than single-sex classrooms without causing a great controversy.
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