One Man’s Journey to Change the World, One Child At A Time By Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
I just finished reading this book and find myself still in awe of it. If you've not read the book, it is a must read. Check out some information here. Greg Mortenson established the Central Asia Institute whose mission is described as follows:
Central Asia Institute’s mission is to promote and support community-based education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The philosophy is to empower the local people through their own initiative. As of 2008, Central Asia Institute has successfully established 130 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which provide (or have provided) education to over 51,000 students, with a emphasis on girls’ education. Over the first decade of CAI’s evolution, our programs and projects expanded to several regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan with an emphasis on education, health issues, environment and cultural preservation.
I came away from reading this book with three things:
(1) A deep, intense need to see this part of the world. It isn't a realistic dream, really, but I want to see this region. No part of my imagination can come up with a vision of what these mountains must look like. I can't picture the severity. It has to be an extreme combination of rugged, raw, unadulterated beauty and a harshness beyond my ken. I even looked at Google images for the region and I still can't see it.
(2) A realization that I do not truly comprehend the power of education. It seems so simple. Education opens the doors of the world. I know that is true, but this country (for the most part) takes education for granted. I recently had a family member lament on how horrible homework is. It doesn't often occur to us how a lack of education is a root cause of so many struggles. This book did an amazing job at hammering this home for me. It also made me more sure than ever that the long term solution to terrorism is to give the future a better option.
(3) I do not do enough. True...it is unrealistic to think I could have imagined and brought to fruition what Greg did, but still...I do not do enough.
Knox County Schools and Metro Nashville Public School use web filtering software that blocks student access to the websites of many well-known national LGBT organizations, including PFLAG, GLSEN, and HRC.
The Knoxville News Sentinel is covering the story here and the public comments are frustrating, as per usual.
Yeah, let's unblock beastiality, that's discrimination against the animals or PETA/Humane Society will get you. And let's unblock the child porn as that's age discrimination. And let's unblock every other sick and perverted thing out there because we certainly don't want to shelter our children from the deviants in society.
Thankfully there are a few sane people out there that balance things out.
I guess I read the wrong article. Nowhere does the article talk about porn or pushing ones opinions on another. If minorities can have scholarships, any minority group should have the same EQUAL RIGHT. Come on people...get out of the dark ages!
Seriously people, we are talking about access to legitimate resources. No porn. No attempts at a mass conversion...we don't have enough toasters for that. Simple, plain access to legitimate resources that may gosh I don't know help a kid get to college or even save a kid's life.
In Chicago, plans are under way for a new school where gay students and others wouldn't face the bullying and harassment they endure in other schools...
William Greaves, the city's liaison to the gay and lesbian community is on the design team. He said the proposed Social Justice High School-Pride Campus would be a college prep school for about 600 students.
"We as a team saw many … lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning [students] and their allies who were well integrated into the system and doing well academically," Greaves said, "but we saw just as many, if not more, who were isolated struggling, who were dropping out."
He said the school would support those students as well as others that don't feel safe regardless of their sexual orientation.
As you might expect, there are some in the community who oppose the school, but their reasons are quite diverse:
"It's not to take away my compassion for anybody here. I try to raise my children righteously via the word of God via the Bible because this is my belief," Greer said. "I cannot support with my own tax dollars paying for something that I don't agree with."
Others had different reasons for opposing the school. Hantas Farmer, a transgender, cited the ground-breaking Brown v. Board of Education school decision.
"Have any of you considered that this is nothing but de facto segregation? I support you in principle. School should be safe for everyone. But I'm not sure segregation is the way forward," Farmer said.
If approved by the school board, this new LGBT magnet school will open its doors in 2010.
What do you all think - good idea or a step in the wrong direction?
As was mentioned in a previous article, the muppets are great. In fact in 1974, Sesame Street addressed the issue of the women's liberation movement with the following video, "Women Can Be". It is voiced, not by the muppet typical men in falsetto, but rather by real women! Marilyn Sokol (of Alice Otter in Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas fame), Carol Hall (a song writer for Sesame Street), Jane Henson, and Rita Moreno provide the voices. It captures female empowerment and the excitement of realizing that you can do anything. I wish more children's programing was this ambitious.
The onslaught of media consumed by children today cannot be avoided. Even if your kids don’t consume it directly, their friends will. Negative messages about body image, overt and thinly veiled racism, sexism and homophobia are everywhere, and our children absorb all that in a variety of ways. In addition to trying to change the media—which must be a critical part of movements for social justice—as parents we have to act as mediator between the messages our children get in the world, and how those messages affect who they are and what they believe.
Schools are places where media messages—the effects of them and children’s interpretations of them—are mixed with real life experiences with institutionalized bigotry and oppression. From the far corners of the playground where child anarchy can foster unchecked messages and experiences, to the history books that formalize those sentiments, too often our kids are being schooled in a context that, as feminists, we know is dangerous.
That’s why, as a feminist mother, I chose to not send my kids to school.
In addition to being a feminist parent, I am a feminist homeschooler...
You can - and should! - read the rest at California NOW. I'm curious to know our readers' opinions - is homeschooling a solution? How about single-gender schools? For those of us for whom home-schooling is not a viable choice, what are some other ways that parents can help their kids cope with the sexism, racism, and homophobia that they will most likely encounter in classrooms and on playgrounds?
When Adriel Arocha, 5, was born, his father, Kenney, vowed to teach him his heritage.
"We feel that it's important to raise him as Native American until he's able to make a choice," said Kenny.
And part of that heritage meant he would not to cut his son's hair, believing hair holds spiritual meaning...
All that was fine until Adriel's parents planned to enroll the five-year-old at Needville Elementary School. Despite promising to keep his hair neatly braided, the district refused to accept him.
1. Hair shall be clean, well groomed, and out of the eyes. No hair shall cover any part of the ear or touch the top of the standard collar in the back. Hair shall not be excessively full (not to exceed two inches in fullness). 2. Designs are not permitted in the hair. 3. One straight line for parting purposes in permitted. 4. Sideburns shall be neatly trimmed and be no longer than the middle of the ear lobe. 5. Extreme hairdos of any nature that would be disruptive shall be in violation of the dress code. 6. Not tufts or tails are permitted. 7. Hair when combed forward cannot be in the boys’ eyes.
It is obvious from looking at the schools' photos that the 'no long hair' rule only applies to boys - so we can safely translate rule 1 to mean 'no girly-boys allowed.' Then there is the 'no non-white hairstyles allowed' series of rules: no full hair styles, no designs, no 'extreme hairdos'...
This all seems to add up to the no 'political' hairstyles rule - aka no hairstyles that suggest that you're OK with being different from us.
Here is a fun disturbing Friday game: try to spot all the denialist tactics used by these creationist cranks as they guide a group of children around a science museum:
Think this has nothing to do with feminism? Well, you're partially right - the tour guides don't openly promote the oppression of women. Yet, it is this sort of brain-washing that has convinced generations upon generations of supposedly 'good' people that women are not as intelligent as men, despite constant evidence to the contrary, and that they therefore do not deserve any rights - not even over their own bodies. This type of 'its in the Bible' non-logic also promotes the idea that gays are 'unnatural' - so, no rights for them either! So, being opposed to confusing children about the difference between fact and faith seems pretty feminist to me. The rearranging of reality to fit a preexisting world view certainly hasn't been good for women in the past and continues to hurt women today.
Besides, this sort of stupidity is just so... embarrassing.
Shakira has won and lost my heart a couple of times over the past few years (Platinum blond? Really? Why?), but she definitely won it again with this:
Colombian pop star Shakira was in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday... to lobby Congress to endorse bipartisan legislation that would help pay for education for the 72 million children worldwide who are too poor to go to school...
Shakira is the chairwoman of Education Action Week, which is organized by the Global Campaign for Education. But her work on behalf of the poor is not a new passion. Thirteen years ago, she started the Barefoot Foundation, which aims to help impoverished Colombian children and those who have been displaced by violence.
When reporter Robert Siegel asked her why this issue has been so important to her for so long, she replied:
I grew up in a country where unfortunately education is sometimes seen as a luxury, as a privilege, and not as a human right... This always bothered me. So this is personal to me. In the developing world, people who are born poor will die poor, and that is because of the lack of opportunities, opportunities that come from education. Education can actually save lives.
If you still can't forgive her for her current English-language radio plays, listen to her whole interview with Siegel, in which she also brags on herself for being a big nerd.
For two years, I taught Spanish language and literature in a poor public school in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Aside from a 'virginity pledge' that all ninth graders were encouraged to sign (pledges in which 14 and 15-year-olds promise to abstain from all sexual activity until marriage), there was not much in the way of sexual education for the students. Considering this, it should come as no surprise that teen pregnancy was a big issue in our little school. During my second year of teaching, four of my students became pregnant and stopped attending classes. As a foreign language teacher, I only taught students who were working towards the advanced diploma, so these young women were among the brightest and most motivated students. It was tragic to see them disappear, but the school encouraged pregnant girls to stop attending once their situation became obvious. There were tutors, the administration argued, that could help them continue their studies at home (although not for the advanced degree). When I challenged the effectiveness of twice weekly home tutoring that lasted mere hours each week, my principal explained that the girls would be more comfortable at home. She then added that we did not want to send a message to the other students that our school condoned teenage pregnancy. The administration's position seemed to rest on the assumption that other girls would see their pregnant peers and long for morning sickness and stretchy-waisted pants. Few girls returned to classes after giving birth. Pregnancy effectively meant the end of their high school education.
I was not the only person on the staff to see the injustice of the situation. Two weeks after she was hired, a young counselor offered to run a group for pregnant teens. She planned to talk to the girls about options for continuing their educations after giving birth, and about practical matters like managing finances and baby nutrition. This counselor offered to lead the group in the evenings, after the other students had left for the day. Her idea was rejected and she was told that she was not allowed to use school facilities for a teen pregnancy support group, even if she did it on her own time.
This is why I completely understood what Sen. Barack Obama meant when he said that, while he planned to teach his daughters about morality and responsibility, he did not want them 'punished with a baby' for any mistake they might make. Yet, this discussion of how conservatives and liberals frame family-planning and sex-education issues made me consider my own use of this "lefty jargon." Apparently, Obama's comments have led to accusations that he doesn't value babies - that he sees them as a punishment. Anyone who has thought deeply about why we have such high rates of teen pregnancy in this country, or about how we treat young pregnant women, immediately understood what he was trying to express. Yet, perhaps he was using a short-hand that distracted from his real point.
So, let's be clear. Having a child is not a punishment. Being forced to have a child is. Having your educational opportunities destroyed is a punishment. Having valuable information withheld, information that could help a young mother care for herself and her child, is a punishment. Being told that you are no longer worthy of the community's support is perhaps the most serious punishment that could be imposed on a young person. These are the punishments that Obama hopes that his daughters, and all our daughters, will be able to avoid.
How the Christian Right Goes Wrong is a must-read for anyone who has ever struggled to explain to a conservative why abstinence-only education and limiting family planning options are bad ideas. This article by pro-choice author Cristina Page is dense with information about how such policies, which the anti-choice movement has aggressively pursued in the name of decreasing the number of abortions, are counterproductive. Here's a taste:
New research reveals that female students in programs that promote abstinence exclusively are more likely to get pregnant than those in programs that teach about the full range of contraceptives as well as abstinence. The news, published in the April issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, is just the latest proof that the $1.5 billion dollar “just say no to sex” experiment on our teens has failed...Earlier findings by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities revealed that teens taking part in virginity pledge programs (they pledge to stay virgins until marriage) are more likely than their non-pledging peers to engage in risky unprotected sex.
There is only one statement in Page's article with which I do not fully agree:
These statistics infuriate the abstinence-until-marriage proponents. Their hope is that, by keeping teens in the dark about protection, ignorance will somehow lead to temperance.
From what I saw while working in a public school system which refused to provide students with any discussion of sexuality except for mandatory "virginity pledges," the hope is not that the lack of information will lead to temperance, but rather that it will ensure punishment for those young people women who do have sex.
I've been listening to episodes of This American Life as part of my morning routine recently: turn on the coffee pot, start an episode, and listen to little excerpts of other people's lives while drinking my coffee and brushing my teeth. It was today's choice of episodes, entitled Nice Work if You Can Get It (first aired on March 21st), that I learned of the DREAM Act through the sad story of Martha. Martha (not her real name) is a young woman who seems to be what every parent hopes their children might become - smart, hard-working, dedicated to helping others, and motivated. She wants to become a doctor - an OBGYN. She has earned excellent grades at UCLA, even though it meant sleeping at the library and showering in the locker room for weeks at a time (she could not afford housing near the campus). She also has an unpaid internship in medical research and all the community service activities that would make her an ideal med school candidate. Yet, since Martha was not born in the States, but was brought here from Mexico by her parents when she was a child, there is no path to legal status for her. She cannot apply for grants, student loans, work study, or scholarships. Even were she to find a way to pay for medical school, she could never be employed as a doctor in this country. She lives in a perpetual state of limbo - the United States being the only country she has known since early childhood, but without any way to truly participate in or contribute to the society that has raised her.
Martha's story sounded familiar to me since I have known several young people in her position - kids that work hard despite being fairly sure that they will never be able to attain the types of jobs that their intellects would earn them, had they the proper paperwork. Yet, there might be a possible solution, if we had the political will to make things better for these kids. We could pass the DREAM Act.
Currently, children who immigrate to the United States from another country can only obtain legal status through their parents; there is no independent method to accomplish this. Through many quirks in immigration law many individuals brought here as children remain without permanent status, despite having parents or spouses who are naturalized citizens or legal permanent residents. If a child is brought into the country illegally there is no method of becoming a legal resident. Returning to their country would not guarantee a path to legal status. Attempts to come back legally are often difficult, with roadblocks such as ten year bans on re-entering the U.S.
The complete lack of any path to citizenship for these children poses a problem for both them and for the United States, since they are blocked from becoming full contributors to the community in which they live. The DREAM Act would provide a path to long-term legal status for those young people. Although the legislation's detractors assert that the DREAM Act's passage would provide a sweeping "amnesty," the bill would not provide a path to legal status for all undocumented children, for:
In the meantime, kids like Martha will continue to study hard and work towards goals that they have been told they can never attain, hoping for the chance to give back to the country that they consider their home.
Using public data, researchers tracked the reading and math skills of more than 5,000 students between kindergarten and fifth grade as shown on a series of standardized tests. They discovered that girls who received the highest levels of physical education, or 70 to 300 minutes a week, scored consistently higher on the tests than those who spent less than 35 minutes a week.
For boys, he said: “You need to get them up and moving. That’s based on the nervous system, that’s based on eyes, that’s based upon volume and the use of volume with the boys.”...For the girls, Chadwell prescribes a focus on “the connections girls have (a) with the content, (b) with each other and (c) with the teacher.
Perhaps, just perhaps, both genders would do best to have movement and connections with the content, each other, and the teacher. Clearly, though, the "girls can (and should) just keep still, but boys should be allowed to squirm and move" theory is bunk.
UPDATE: To be fair, it is possible that the data from the CDC study is correlative, but not causative. Since "specials" like music, art, and gym are cut from students' schedules in under-preforming elementary schools, girls attending schools with the most time for gym and recess are most likely attending high-preforming schools. Still, though, I think that girls should be encouraged to get exercise during the day.
Interesting. The practice of killing and maiming is a valid educational tool for boys between the ages of three and five who otherwise cannot keep up with the girls. This from the UK Department for Children, Schools, and Families which "leads work across Government to ensure that all children and young people: stay healthy and safe, secure an excellent education and the highest possible standards of achievement, enjoy their childhood,make a positive contribution to society and the economy, have lives full of opportunity, free from the effects of poverty." So, allowing boys to be rambunctious outside during recess in the fresh air is ineffective unless they have a plastic AK-47 at the ready. Perhaps they have missed the true point. If the boys were playing with pink sparkle microscopes and sewing machines like the little girls are forced to do, *then* they would be learning more.
Thank goodness that The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) is not agreeing with this poppycock. Chris Keates, the general secretary of NASUWT points out the obvious, "Many parents take the decision that their children won't have toy weapons. In addition to that, I think this is a clear example of gender stereotyping."
MarkH of Denialism is defending his thesis about now, and will soon be MarkH, PhD. His description of the academic experience is both funny and insightful, and young scientists and scholars everywhere should really go read it. Actually, everyone should go read it. Now.
Clever, wasn't it? Yet, as happy as I am for all my buddies earning spiffy grown-up degrees, it has made me realize that we're, like, adults now or something. I've graduated from the young feminist club and must now go with the adjective-free feminist. And, as Sarah Vowell explains in The Partly Cloudy Patriot, that means that sooner or later we'll all be dead because:
...being a grown-up for real means you're getting old and getting old means you are definitely, finally, totally going to die. My mother is a grandmother and my sister is a mother and I have decided the dressing will be yellow this year, therefore, we'll all be dead someday. (p. 13)
Actually, I've never made dressing before, nor made any decision about the preparation of any meal, so perhaps I can avoid acknowledging death for another year or so.
But here's my question, can one still be a grrrl when the term girl no longer applies?
A book for adolescent girls that frankly discusses the human body? Well, it sounds like both a great idea and a recipe for some disastrously embarrassing birthday parties (I still blush when I remember opening a gift of ... underpants(!) in front of all my friends at my 6th birthday party). Yet, despite Body Drama's potential for some initial awkwardness, it has already gotten the Broadstreet nod of approval:
Because, as Redd herself puts it in the book's introduction, "our educational system spends millions of dollars creating detailed health programs, but those programs skip over the basic ABCs of basic body smarts. We've been so focused (and understandably so) on sexual education that we've completely ignored body education ... How can we respect and protect our bodies if we don't know what real bodies look like? If we can hardly utter the word vagina, much less peek at it without feeling dirty, how can we own and love it and ourselves?
How indeed!? This looks like the sort of book that perhaps I should have stumbled upon as a lass. Heck, my body still has the power to surprise me occasionally. With so many of my family and friends experiencing pregnancy for the first time, it seems like I can't go a week without my managing to work "It does what? No way!" into some conversation about completely normal biological functions. So. Giving this book to the kids seems like a good idea. Just slip it to them discreetly, though, instead of assembling a large group of people to watch them unwrap it. The same goes for boxes full of undies.
In the past, I have had some concerns about the effects of single-sex education, especially after reading an article in the AJC in which parents talk about how great it is that their sons are allowed to shout-out answers in the boys' school while the girls' school students are becoming "young ladies." However, if anything could convince me that single-sex education is actually good for building girls' confidence, it would be this video promoting Girls Prep (via Feministing):
After watching this clip, I had to acknowledge that many elementary schools do not have an abundance of images of successful women or minorities. In a school that consciously focuses on confidence-building for girls, students will be presented with positive role models on a daily basis. This could be a great advantage for girls who would otherwise be in male-centric environments and saddled with the 'boys will be boys' but 'girls will be good' stereotypes.
Yet, while opinions abound about whether single-sex or coed classrooms are most effective, solid research on the matter is practically non-existent. According to Diane S. Pollard of the University of Wisconsin:
At this point few definitive conclusions can be drawn about the overall impact of current efforts to implement single-sex classes, especially with respect to their impact on girls. Three problems associated with much of the research and practice in this area make it difficult to offer a general assessment of single-sex classes: (1) the disparity in the goals of single-sex classes, (2) the differences in how these classes have been implemented, and (3) the lack of systematic, long-term research.
Research in the United States on the question of whether public single-sex education might be beneficial to males, females or a subset of either group (particularly disadvantaged youths) has been limited.
They did, however, attempt to do a systematic review of all the studies on the benefits of single-sex research done to date. As you can see, they ran into a few problems:
Of the 88 quantitative studies, 48 were eliminated after further review using the coding guide, and 40 studies met the inclusion criteria and were retained. The reasons for the exclusion of these articles were 1) failure to operationalize the intervention properly; 2) failure to apply statistical controls during the analyses; 3) work that was actually qualitative in nature rather than quantitative; 4) work performed in a non-Westernized country and therefore not comparable; 5) work written in a foreign language and therefore not codable by the researchers; 6) failure to draw comparisons between SS and CE schools; and 7) participants not of high school, middle, or elementary school age.
Forty studies did meet these criteria and were evaluated by the Department of Education. A summary of the results of these forty can be found on this table, which categorizes each as pro single-sex ed, pro co-ed, null, or mixed. While “roughly a third of all studies reported findings favoring SS schools, with the remainder of the studies split between null and mixed results,” the Department of Education does note that:
There is a dearth of quality studies (i.e., randomized experiments or correlational studies with adequate statistical controls) across all outcomes. Even using the more relaxed criterion of allowing correlational studies, each outcome has only limited candidate studies. Too few researchers report descriptive statistics or effect sizes. Mathematics achievement test scores, English achievement test scores, and school subject preference were the only outcomes to have 10 or more qualifying studies. Even within these three categories, the studies differ in the criteria they use and the statistical controls they use to compare SS and CE schooling. This somewhat limits the arguments that can be built and extended from this quantitative review and renders it nearly impossible to conduct a meta-analysis on any outcome area. Many of the remaining studies have other conceptual or interpretive flaws. Many of the studies lacked well-developed hypotheses, and the hypotheses were often not linked directly to the outcomes being studied.
Of course, there is the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, whose sole mission is to promote research that supports single-sex education. Their website, however, relies mainly on anecdotal evidence to support its thesis that same sex classrooms are preferable and merely summarizes data instead of providing links to any original studies. Worse, I felt that this site was intellectually dishonest in the presentation of the little data that they did summarize. For example, the first study mentioned by the NASSPE involved only the fourth grade students at one Florida school, Woodward Avenue Elementary. Woodward Avenue has six classes of fourth graders, and the average class size is about 14 students per class. That means that only about 84 students participated in the study. Half the fourth graders in the study were enrolled in single-sex classrooms while the others spent the year in co-ed classrooms. According to the NASSPE, the percentages of students “scoring proficient” on the end-of-year Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test were as follows:
boys in coed classes: 37% scored proficient
girls in coed classes: 59% scored proficient
girls in single-sex classes: 75% scored proficient
boys in single-sex classes: 86% scored proficient
While these results are dramatic, they are also problematic since the results for the boys and girls in co-ed classes are dramatically less that the state-wide proficiency levels. In classrooms across the state, 86% of fourth graders scored at or above the proficiency level of 3.5. Since the results for the students in co-ed classrooms at Woodward Avenue are so much lower than the scores of students state-wide (who were also enrolled in co-ed classrooms), they are not a credible standard against which we could measure the scores of the single sex classrooms. The question begged by the numbers published by the NASSPE is not why the single sex class scores were so high (they were actually in keeping with the state averages of students in coed classrooms), but what could have gone so very wrong in the coed classrooms that only 37% of boys passed.
So it seems that, for now, no overall conclusions can be made. Since single-sex schools are most often private, perhaps the most important task for parents deciding whether a single sex school is right for their daughter is evaluating the ideology of any individual school. In the case of Girls Prep, the decision to have single sex classrooms is motivated by the desire to give girls access to the affirmative environment that boys generally have in any classroom. This is not the motivation for all single sex classrooms, and parents will have to continue to evaluate the appropriateness of each school environment for their students.
Perhaps the abstinence-only education campaign, with its sleek billboards and TV ads featuring fashionable young virgins, has become stylish enough to sway some university officials. Yet, since abstinence-only programs do not seem to be effective and contain a startling number of errors and mis-information, the abstinence only fad is a dangerous one. Universities would be wise to remember their duty to both young people and truth and bring back open discussions about safe sexual behavior.
Quite frankly, I don't hate the ad. Parents should talk to their kids about sex and pregnancy and STDs and waiting to have sex is probably the healthier decision for teens. Yet, I DO hate the push to scare teens into abstinence with misinformation. The agenda to deny young people access to information that will keep them safer when they do decide to become sexually active is immoral.
UPDATE: RH Reality Check is holding a Sex-Ed Digital Video competition! Hopefully this will help promote the use of truthful and informative sex education materials and perhaps even create some useful teaching videos.
Someone wants to helpthe the well-educated and underpaid people who dedicate their lives to providing free education to all children? What a surprisingly brilliant idea.
Then again, though, it would probably just be cheaper and less time consuming to constantly threaten to pay them less. That will keep qualified teachers in the public schools.
Or perhaps just separate and more well-mannered? This article in the AJC about the resurgence of gender-specific classes left me feeling uneasy. I don't know anything about the "recent research into brain differences betweengenders" that allegedly reports that girls and boys learn more when they are grouped in single-sex classes (and the AJC doesn't link to this research, making its value immediately suspect), but the arguments in favor of single-sex education listed left me feeling like segregating students is a bad idea. According to the article, dividing the children makes it possible to let male students"... shout answers to questions, get up from their desks during class and, yes, stand on chairs when needed," - to act confident and uninhibited. A parent in with a child in an all-girls class, on the other hand, is pleased to report that his daughter is "...becoming a young lady," - presumably keeping quiet unless called on and not standing on chairs if she needs a boost.
To me, this sounds bad - shouldn't we be teaching our girls and boys alike to be confident, and also that there are certain times when it is best to curb their first impulses? To me, these segregated classes sound like a practice in institutionalizing gender stereotypes - negative ones on both sides.
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