quoting the article:
"There is no scientific basis for teaching boys and girls separately, according to Lise Eliot from The Chicago Medical School. Her review reveals fundamental flaws in the arguments put forward by proponents of single-sex schools to justify the need of teaching teach boys and girls separately. Eliot shows that neuroscience has identified few reliable differences between boys' and girls' brains relevant to learning or education. Her work is published online in Springer's journal Sex Roles.
The first issue Eliot highlights is that single-sex school advocates often claim differences between boys' and girls' brains based on studies carried out in adult men and women. But such effects have rarely been found in children. It is also wrong to assume that children's brains operate like adults'. In reality, they are works-in-progress, and much of what influences adult neural processing is due to individuals' social and educational experience over their lifespan. Therefore the assumption that because gender differences in the brain are biological, they are necessarily fixed or 'hardwired' is incorrect."
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Single-sex education was around long before scientists were debating whether male and female brains differ in important ways. Some parents support single-sex education, especially for adolescents, because they think the presence of the opposite sex can be a distraction in the classroom. Others envision different roles for their boys and girls as adults, which leads them to educate them differently. I'm not saying those parents are right or wrong or that single-sex education is good or bad, just that it is as much a question about values as science.
