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On the surface, it might be easy to say students learn better in single sex schools because instruction can be gender specific and there are fewer distractions. Clearly, boys and girls think, act and learn differently. Recent brain research has shown that different areas of the brain are dominant between males and females. While not universal, spatial skills, linear thinking and math skills come easier to boys, while reading and writing come more easily to girls. There is also the difference in students' abilities to sit still for extended periods of time. Girls have a distinct advantage in public schools with their ability to sit quietly for longer periods of time than most boys. Having single sex schools would allow for those differences and increase academic learning on both sides. Single sex schools would also eliminate the distractions created by rising hormones and interactions between the sexes.

On the other hand, schools are not simply academic institutions. Schools provide an arena where critical social skills are learned. We cannot expect our children to learn to be competent members of society if they have been denied access to half the population, especially one so fundamentally different. The social skills acquired in school carry a student through their lives more surely than any math or history lesson. We cannot expect students to learn how to handle differing views or perspectives if they are never exposed to them.

With men and women sharing the world's work force, we must ensure that our students are learning how to interact with the people they will be working with. Those social interactions are far more valuable than the concrete facts and figures learned from a textbook. Exposure to people of the opposite gender provides opportunities for learning, just as exposure to different cultures. By learning about those who are different from ourselves, we learn new ways of thinking and problem-solving and we learn that there are many similarities in human thought and feeling. We cannot understand what we haven't experienced. Single sex schools are simply too limiting.

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