Read this ginormous Times magazine piece about single-sex education and how it’s gaining popularity in American public education.  There are a lot of enemies to single sex education, the principle of which is the ACLU, and just about anyone else who sees gender seperation as some kind of discrimination, some kind of admission that the public schools don’t work, some kind of something.  The beastly article, which has a lot of good anecdotal information, ends with this common, tired argument against single-sex education.

Given the myriad ways in which our schools are failing, it may be hard to remember that public schools were intended not only to instruct children in reading and math but also to teach them commonality, tolerance and what it means to be American. “When you segregate, by any means, you lose some of that,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there’s also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy.”

Well, at least public school champions are finally admitting in public that schools teach philosophy and worldview, not only in their curricula, but also in their design and mission.  Nevertheless, let’s make sure to keep the kids mixed and keep ignoring solutions to the failing system.  Our kids might be stupid, but at least they’ll be tolerant of their own ignorance.