The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

82 misinterpreted the data. To follow Sax’s line of reasoning would be to say that one “cannot expect first-grade girls to learn their shapes or boys to begin reading and writing” (366). Not only did the study fail to test the brains while the children were involved in mental tasks, but also the data from the Virginia Tech study actually found “a cyclic pattern of maturation, with spurts of development that appeared to spiral through different brain areas” (366). This means that at the end of sixteen years, which was the oldest age in the study, boys’ brains and girls’ brains were equally mature in all areas. Also, at every point during the study there were significant differences within the two genders, as well as between them. Furthermore, as Eliot points out, the verbal capacity of two-year-old girls is only about a month ahead of that of two-year-old boys. Therefore, any differences in performance could not be based on brain maturation. This gap in capacity rises throughout preschool, but around age seven the differences become almost nonexistent (366). Sax used Virginia Technical School’s study to make generalizations, saying that every boy and every girl will mature in the same way as all of his or her same-gender peers. In reality, children are different, even within their gender, and their minds are just as unique as they are. Some boys may be well ahead in mathematics, but the same could be true for some girls. Another idea propagated by proponents of single-sex education states that boys and girls use different areas of their brains for similar tasks. For example, Michael Gurian, a prominent author in single-sex circles, and Kathleen Stevens authored Boys and Girls Learn Differently; in their book, they say that boys primarily use the right sides of their brains, but girls mainly use the left. Moreover, they state that “[b]oys tend to process emotive information from the limbic system to the brain stem . . . [whereas] girls tend to process it more in the upper brain, where complex thought occurs” (57). One should note that Gurian and Stevens list no citations to back their statements, and therefore the reader has to take their word. Sax agrees with Gurian and Stevens, and cites a study of verbal IQ to prove his point. In the study, which looked at the brains of men and women after they suffered a stroke, the researchers found that men suffered the greatest drop in verbal IQ, about twenty percent, when the stroke affected their left hemisphere. There was not drop, however, when their right hemisphere suffered a stroke.