education
...s phenomena, Sax discovered sociological studies of the brain that be quite helpful in explaining the mystery. For more than thirty years, sociologists have proclaimed that human sex differences are socially constructed. Researchers in the 1970’s, such as Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna felt that biological sex itself is “socially constructed.” Research shows that the division of the human race into female and male is a social invention, not a straight forward biological fact deriving from chromosomal differences between male and female. But oh, were they so very wrong. In April of 2001, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report entitled “Does Sex Matter?” The Academy announced that sex does matter, that there are immutable biological differences between the sexes which go far beyond the genitals. “There are multiple, ubiquitous differences in the basic cellular biochemistries of males and females,” according to the report, and “these differences do not necessarily arise as a result of differences in the hormonal regime to which males and females are exposed, but are a direct result of the genetic differences between the two sexes. If we turn our attention to the brain, we confront an avalanche of data complied over the past thirty years showing that there are, indeed, major differences between the sexes in brain structure and development. Girls brains develop faster, for starters. Neuroscientists Reuwen and Anat Achiron have shown that just by doing an ultrasound of the baby’s brain, you can distinguish female from male: a female baby’s brain is more mature. A girls brain remains more mature than a boy’s brain from birth through childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood. The men do not catch up with the women until the age of about thirty. Neuroscientists at Harvard University have used sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging to examine how emotion is processed in the brain of children between the ages of seven and seventeen. In all young children, they found that emotional activity was localized in primitive subcortical areas of the brain. Now this is the kicker. In girls only, during adolescence, does the locus of emotional control shift from the primitive area to the more rational, the more evolved cerebral cortex. In boys, the command center for emotion remains firmly rooted in primal sub cortical nuclei. German researchers have found that this persists into adulthood. So, given that the female brain develops more rapidly than the male, it should come to no surprise that girls, on average, acquire language skills more rapidly and proficiently than boys do. As soon as children begin to speak, girls articulate better than boys do. There sentences are longer and more complex. These verbal abilities also seem to be independent of race and culture. Similar case studies were conducted in Miami, Florida and South Africa with identical findings. Additionally, the learning styles of boys and girls differ in ways that are now fairly well understood. Girls thrive in noncompetitive, collaborative learning situations; boys are motivated more effectively by competitive environments with clearly defined winners and losers. Girls are much more likely to keep records, set goals, and consult adults for help in schoolwork; boys are less likely to employ any of these strategies. In learning basic math skills, young girls tend to use overt strategies such as counting on their fingers or using manual counters; boys are more likely to use covert strategies, working out the problem in their heads. One of the most profound findings in educational research is the different reading preferences of boys and girls. Girls prefer short stories sand novels; boys are more likely to choose factual accounts of real events (battles, sports, adventure) or illustrated descriptions of how things work( spaceships, snakes, volcanoes). This is very good reason to believe that these differences in educational styles are biologically programmed, reflecting innate neuroanatomical differences between the sexes. Another strong research statistic to support single-sex education would be the Australian Council for Educational Research, who recently conducted the largest-ever comparison of single-sex and co-educational schools. Their analysis, which was based on six years of study over 270,000 students, in fifty-three academic subjects, demonstrated that boys and girls who were educated in a single-sex setting scored an average 15-22 percentile ranks higher than those who studied under co-educational settings. All of this simply proves that boys and girls are out of sync with each other because of differences in physiology and cognitive development...