The American Civil Liberties Union is on a vigorous campaign to integrate Mississippi’s public schools, making requests across the state to find out which have segregated classrooms and weighing whether or not to sue.
But the investigation isn’t about racial segregation — it’s about sex-segregation. Single-sex classrooms are a growing phenomenon across the country. In 2002, just about a dozen schools had them, but now as many as 500 do, according to the Associated Press. The movement shows no sign of slowing down and has set off a pair of debates: a pedagogical dispute over whether sex-segregation makes for better education, and a legal one — which the ACLU is at the center of — about whether this sort of separation violates civil rights laws.
Today’s argument for sex-segregation increasingly turns on scientific — critics would say pseudo-scientific — arguments about how the two sexes acquire knowledge. The separation of boys and girls into different classrooms lets administrators and teachers tailor the instruction to what they see as the different learning styles of boys and girls.
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Post submitted by: Miqi Cos
