Single-sex schools: The new rage in US

WASHINGTON DC: Two years ago, when Raj Natarajan relocated to Seatlle in Washington state on the northwestern coast of the United States, along with his family, the first thing he did was to go in search of a girls’ school for his two daughters.

He could not find one, and the locals did not even know what a girls’ school meant. In India, he told them, his daughters have always attended a single-sex school. He was also puzzled as to how the US, with more than 90,000 public schools did not have any single-sex school.

He called up Dr Leonard Sax, the founder of National Association for Single Sex Public Education, to find out why. And, as way of criticism, told Sax that his website sucks. Natarajan was right about single-sex schools. When he called, the whole of the United States had just six public schools offering single-sex classrooms.

They struck a friendly deal — Natarajan would redesign the website, while Sax would ensure that US public education would have hundreds of schools with single-sex classrooms. Both lived up to their promise.

Two years down the line, the US has 223 single-sex schools, and “their numbers are growing at a rate where we will have around 9,000 single-sex schools in three years,” says Sax.

Sax, a medical doctor as well as a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and author of the bestseller, Why Gender Matters, says that he is championing the cause of single-sex classrooms not because he wants to keep boys and girls separate, but because each gender has a different way of learning. For instance, he says, girls have better developed inner ears. This allows them to concentrate in classrooms where the teachers are softspoken. Boys just cannot concentrate in such an environment, and this is the reason that boys are thought to less attentive than girls.

“In India,” he says, “classrooms are huge, and if teachers were trained to teach boys and girls separately, the results would be dramatic.” He adds that boys should be allowed to stand, walk around, or even play when a class is going on. “This is because boys concentrate more while they are on the move, but with girls it is just the opposite. This is why girls do better at high school in several countries, including India.”

Single-sex classrooms do not mean that a girls’ school would be a convent or a boys’ school a monastery, he clarifies. “In fact, girls from co-ed schools prefer to date boys from a single-sex school because they are gentlemanly, courteous, and less prone to misbehaviour. If they want a long-term relationship, the girls would chose single-sex classroom boys.”

One of the myths he has to face when he advocates single-sex classrooms is that the children will become homosexuals. “A majority of population in this country is homophobic,” he says. “I get asked almost everywhere by parents asking whether their son will become gay or their daughter lesbian. It is only after I convince them otherwise that they relent.”

Most importantly, he adds, you have to understand gender differences, whether in the US or in India.

“If you don’t, you end up furthering stereotypes, and that could be sociological disaster.”