Community Magazine October 2009

W hile almost 99.5 percent of US public schools are entirely coed, for generations, many of the most elite private prep-schools have intractably maintained their single gender character, even going to court to defend against challenges to their separate status. Many parochial institutions, including the vast Catholic school system as well as many yeshivot, have also long upheld a single- gender philosophy to education. Yet collectively, these examples account for scarcely five percent of the 55.4 million students enrolled in US schools. Recently, however, even at public schools, the tide appears to be shifting towards separate education. Gender-focused education, either in the form of separate schools or separate classrooms in coed schools, has gained significant traction in the wider public education spheres over the past seven years. According to the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education (NASSPE), in 2002, only eleven US schools in the public education system offered single-gender classrooms. That number has since exploded to 545 as of September 2009 – and 91 of those schools are entirely separate. Interestingly, many of the institutions adopting a separate education format are charter schools, which are carefully evaluated and judged based on academic success. Within the Sephardic/Syrian community, too, recent trends appear to favor separate education. The vast majority of the dozen or so mainstream elementary and high schools catering to the community which opened over the past decade – including Maor Yeshiva, Or Hatorah, Keter Torah, Magen Abraham, Barkai, Mikdash Melech, Mikdash Shelomo, Meorot, Bnot Yisrael, among several others – all provide separate education beyond preschool. But aside from the religious concerns involved in mixed education, is separate education any better or worse at developing the maximum potential of each student? Psychological research has confirmed scientifically what many had long suspected: men and women are wired to think in fundamentally different ways. Among many other differences, it has been found that women tend to react to stress less aggressively and more emotionally than men, and that men tend to be less cooperative and more competitive than women. Men and women also differ in their responses to emotional cues and fear and in the way they process language. Over the past two plus decades, Dr. Leonard Sax, author of Why Gender Matters , has been highlighting the mountains of scientific research that reveals how gender differences are so deeply ingrained from birth. In one study it was found that male and female infants responded differently to sound, movement and isolation – even on the first day of life. The question that begs answering, then, is: If men are really from Mars and women are from Venus, does that mean that they should be educated using different techniques? A History Lesson When formal education began in this country circa 1650, the coed-separate education debate was entirely moot. Schooling was focused on teaching young males aged 8-14 the basic skills of reading and writing, while girls received an informal education at home which centered around the role of homemaker. In the 1880’s, when women sought formalized education and began attending school, they learned in a single-gender classroom, with the idea that they would be taught to fulfill the roles they were destined to play in society. But the women’s movement of the early 1900’s believed that equality in education was to be found in a coed classroom where girls could be guaranteed to be taught the same subjects as boys, allowing them the same opportunities as their male counterparts. It is among the most controversial issues today in education – and particularly inour owncommunity. But thequestionofwhich isultimately “better,” single-gender or coed schools, is far from a new debate. MOZELLE MIMRAN, LCSW 36 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE PEERPRESSURE SOCIALADAPTION ACADEMICS CUSTOMIZEDTEACHING