Jay Currie

Most schools are girl-friendly, says Michael Gurian, coauthor with Kathy Stevens of a new book,”The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life,” “because teachers, who are mostly women, teach the way they learn.” Seventy percent of children diagnosed with learning disabilities are male, and the sheer number of boys who struggle in school is staggering. Eighty percent of high-school drop-outs are boys and less than 45 percent of students enrolled in college are young men. To close the educational gender gap, Gurian says, teachers need to change their techniques. They should light classrooms more brightly for boys and speak to them loudly, since research shows males don’t see or hear as well as females.
newsweek

Watching my sons there is very little doubt in my mind that they are able to learn and learn well; but they may be rather more able to learn in an enviornment which mixes learning and play at a different setting than public schools to.

When I was going to school I could not believe that there was no recess in the afternoon. Nor could I believe that there were not two in the morning. Little boys have tremendous energy. They can sit still quite happily for half an hour and can be trained up to an hour at a time. But I am inclined to think the Finns are onto something with their regime of 3/4 of an hour class time, fifteen minutes outdoor/activity/play time. Apparently they do this by having a half hour rather than hour lunch break.

The other thing which I seem to remember about learning as a child is long periods of remarkable inattention followed by intense periods of total concentration. I didn’t learn a little bit every day – I learned nothing at all for days at a time and then, with a bit of application, figured out what I needed to know and moved to the next period of inattention. I am certainly not saying all little boys learn this way; but I did.

The Newsweek article discusses a strategy of seperating boys and girls and then teaching each gender in the wy that they are most likely to learn. Not a bad idea but it does assume that little boys or little girls all learn the same way. I find that hard to believe having watched people learning and seen the wide variety of styles employed. One size fits all, even split by gender, is not going to ensure that any particular kid will learn anything at all.