There are a lot of findings in psychology that suggest boys and girls develop differently and at different rates in their schooling years. There's a reason why boys are more likely to give up interest in school early and fail... and why girls give up on math and science in the high school years... some nature, some nurture.

For starting the discussion I'll bring up this from Scientific American.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=...-with-language

Apparently girls learn language in a more efficient manner that is more abstract (not socking since girls have a more efficient connection between the left and right hemispheres).
This causes girls to learn language easily through either hearing speech or reading... while boys are likely to need both.

Is this something that can be applied in education?
Perhaps it's best to teach this in a manner that suits the boys... as repitition certainly isn't going to hurt the girls' understanding.

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You make a good case for gender specific schools.

I'm just starting to read this article in the NYT Sunday Magazine from March 2:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/ma.../02sex3-t.html

Just started it, so I can't comment intelligently on its contents yet.

In general, I think there's something to be said for the fact that boys and girls learn differently and have different attention spans, and that single-gender learning environments can eliminate some of the gender-difference distractions in a classroom.

The question for me, though, is whether those advantages are large enough or important enough to outweigh the presumed social benefits of learning to navigate in a two-gender world. Will segregation make either boys or girls less able to deal with that world when they grow up?

Plus there's the "does one size fit all?" question. As a matter of statistics, some boys and girls will do better in a mixed environment than in a segregated one, even if in general segregated classes produce better results.

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That's the same thing I'm thinking.
Maybe the key is to isolate the particularr subjects at particular times where disparity is greatest and seperate by gender for those things only.
Also I think we can bypass a lot of the gender issues by moving toward "academy" model schools with smaller classes and more individualized attention.
That would actually allow for each student to get the education he/she needs.

But it would be helpful for educators in any case to understand these differences and apply them.

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"It's never over... BOY!"
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I don't know how accurate this is, I'm a guy, but back in high school I hated math and science (especially Chemistry), and love language classes.

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this t o teach différent are wrong. why dont in school give goo d teachers to students so we can lehrn subjkets.
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I think it's time to change the nature of the school dynamic. I don't think that it's prudent to entirely segregate populations, but I do think that we would be better served by putting students of the same learning styles in a classroom together with a teacher that shows success in teaching in that particular style.

basic learning styles being:
There are certainly differences among these general styles, but I think that an exposure to a variety of difference under these general classes might expose students to new methodologies.

I hesitate to embrace a full separation because the young men and women need the experience of interacting with one another in a social environment and a workplace type environment to adjust to the outside world when they're done with school. Perhaps if it were done where boys and girls were in different wings of the same facility with some shared activities between them might do.