Are Same Sex Education a Solution or Just Modern Segregation?
This week we wrote about same-sex classes, which have grown by a whopping 4,000 percent since 2001, and are now a surprisingly hot-button issue whose opponents and advocates are, well, also surprising:
“Our concern is that once you separate boys and girls you are telling them that there is some inherent difference such that they need to be educated separately,” says Lenora Lapidus, head of the ACLU’s women’s-rights arm, which is spearheading the investigation. “When public schools do this, it’s the government reinforcing gender stereotypes.” Lapidus’s division also has open cases against districts they believe are violating the admittedly loose terms of the ammended legislation—in those cases, their beef is that single-sex classes are being forced on children, and parents aren’t being given a legitimate coed option. But Lapidus says that she believes public schools shouldn’t offer single-sex classes under any circumstances—whether it’s a choice or not.
The ACLU’s opposition perplexes advocates of separate classrooms. “The ACLU has become increasingly deranged over the years,” says Leonard Sax, the head of the National Association for Same Sex Education. “And by deranged I mean out of touch with reality.” Sax also can’t understand why the National Organization of Women (NOW), which advocates choice in reproductive rights, would be against giving parents more options when it comes to education. “We are the pro-choice movement in this debate—we don’t believe that every child should be in same-sex classrooms, but every parent should have a choice.”
During our interview with Lapidus, she told us that the idea that girls and boys are at all different is fundamentally wrong. We, perhaps too frankly, told her that she sounded insane.
It speaks to a giant divide between our generation and hers—we’re of the age and cohort that accepts gender differences as fact (while allowing for huge variations within that—one of the best examples of a “good girl” is one of our male editors). In our minds, little girls and little boys—especially in groups—are different. Not better, not worse, just different.
