KEY POINTS:
The kiwi classroom of the future could look a little like this, if American educationalist Dr Leonard Sax has any influence.
A room is filled with 7-year-old boys, none of whom is sitting - in fact there are no chairs on offer.
Their teacher is pacing the room, moving unpredictably and virtually shouting at the children. Occasionally he will eyeball one of the students, get right up into his face and talk at him in a confrontational manner.
There is noise, cooler light and the temperature has been turned down. This, says Sax, is the environment in which boys learn best.
The Maryland-based executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, is in New Zealand next month to speak at several single sex schools including Auckland's St Cuthbert's College and Dilworth School, and at Iona College, Lindisfarne College and Woodford House, Hawke's Bay.
Citing research from Harvard Medical School, the US National Institute of Health and various European studies, Sax argues that no one-size-fits-all education programme can be successfully applied across the sex divide, that both girls and boys will flourish in environments tailored to their gender-specific requirements.
Traditional arguments for sex-segregated schools are often based broadly on the management of teenage hormones. The theory was there would be less distraction for everyone if the girls and boys were educated separately. But hormones have no part in today's rationale for single-sex classes.
"There's been a pretty fundamental shift in the way people think about single-sex education, at least in North America, over the last 20 years or so," says Sax. "That's what's new: the idea that the single-sex format may be most beneficial for children who are 5, 6, 7 years old. This is the empirical finding."
Of the 367 public schools in the US that have adopted the single-sex format in the past few years, Sax says that all but about 20 are primary schools.
"[I'm] not saying that there are not benefits at the high school level; there certainly are. But the benefits in the early primary years are much greater."
He says advanced imaging techniques have offered neuroscientists fresh insights into brain development.
"When you compare a six-year-old girl with a six-year-old boy, you find quite staggering differences in the brain," says Sax.
Regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in the genders, he says.
The areas of the brain associated with language and fine motor skills mature about six years earlier in girls than boys. The areas of the brain associated with maths and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys than girls. This finding may help explain why some girls find maths "hard", he says, while some boys think poetry is for "sissies".
According to Sax, understanding and exploiting these nuances allow educators to adapt lessons and classrooms to suit the all-girl or all-boy population.
One "very reliable difference" between 6-year-old boys and 6-year-old girls is in their ability to sit still and be quiet. The average girl can sit still for longer than the average boy, with implications for the duration of lessons and the structure of the day, says Sax. Girls can have longer, uninterrupted classes, but boys will do best with 20-minute lessons followed by a run around outside.
Some US schools have taken this finding a step further. At both Cunningham School for Excellence, Iowa, and Foley Intermediate, Alabama, sitting is optional in the all-boys classes. And Chicago's Hardey Prep doesn't even supply chairs to their 6 and 7-year-old boys.
"As one teacher said to me: when that boy sits down his brain shuts off," says Sax. "So the boys stand for many of the classes.
"You'll find many, many boys' primary schools make sitting optional. Many boys at age 6 learn better when they're standing than they do when they're sitting."
Girls, on the other hand, generally work better when they're sitting.
"In the mixed classroom, every choice you make is going to advantage the girls at the expense of boys or advantage the boys at the expense of girls," he says. "The lack of awareness of gender differences often has the unintended consequence of disadvantaging both the girls and the boys."
But Sax's theories relate not only to the type of lesson, but to the environment the students work best in.
He says studies of young people of normal weight have shown that the ideal room temperature for boys to learn is about 20C; for girls it's about 3 degrees higher. With classroom thermostats typically set at somewhere between 21C and 22C, Sax says that both genders will be outside their ideal comfort zone.
Similarly, he says, a European study has shown that girls and boys learn better under different levels of fluorescent lighting. Girls learn much better with 3000-kelvin bulbs (warm light) while boys learn much better with 4000-K bulbs (cool light).
Evidence that tailoring the learning experience rather than simply splitting up boys and girls enhances academic performance is mounting, with research showing improved grades and test results in both sexes.
Sax advocates the introduction of single-sex classes into co-ed schools as some New Zealand schools are already doing. In Auckland's Mt Albert Grammar, most of the junior classes are gender segregated while Long Bay College in Auckland last year introduced single-sex classes.
SAX SAYS he wasn't always a devotee of single-sex education, believing that "we live in a co-ed world... schools should prepare kids for the real world". And there are still many critics of the single-sex education model, notably the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organisation for Women, who see it as a discriminatory anachronism. Under the old model that prevailed in the US until around the 1960s, boys' schools typically received the bulk of the resources while girls' schools made do with their leftovers and hand-me-downs.
But Sax has no intention of returning to what he describes as "the bad old days". He was educated in an era when "they pushed girls and boys into pink and blue cubby holes" - boys had compulsory woodwork, girls had home economics. The new world order he favours aims to "expand educational horizons, to get more girls excited about computer science and physics and engineering - and to get more boys excited about art and poetry and creative writing and foreign languages".
"The irony is that we've had roughly three decades throughout the English-speaking world of ignoring gender, pretending that gender doesn't matter," he says.
"There are substantially fewer young women studying computer science, physics and engineering than there were 20 years ago - and fewer men who regard creative writing, or writing at all, as something that boys do. So we've ignored gender and the result of ignoring gender has been not to eliminate gender stereotypes; it has been a hardening of gender stereotypes."
