Newsweek reports that educators are finding that boys and girls learn differently – leading to a reconsideration of educating boys and girls together in the same classroom. In “Boy Brains, Girl Brains,” reporter Peg Tyre lays out the story — and the controversy:
Three years ago, Jeff Gray, the principal at Foust Elementary School in Owensboro, Ky., realized that his school needed help–and fast. Test scores at Foust were the worst in the county and the students, particularly the boys, were falling far behind. So Gray took a controversial course for educators on brain development, then revamped the first- and second-grade curriculum. The biggest change: he divided the classes by gender. Because males have less serotonin in their brains, which Gray was taught may cause them to fidget more, desks were removed from the boys’ classrooms and they got short exercise periods throughout the day. Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings. Because boys have higher levels of testosterone and are theoretically more competitive, they were given timed, multiple-choice tests. The girls were given multiple-choice tests, too, but got more time to complete them. Gray says the gender-based curriculum gave the school “the edge we needed.” Tests scores are up. Discipline problems are down. This year the fifth and sixth grades at Foust are adopting the new curriculum, too.
Then again, some within the educational establishment claim that calls for single-sex classrooms are “part of a long history of pseudoscience aimed at denying equal opportunities in education.”
The differences between boys and girls are profound. Most classrooms are girl-friendly and largely feminized in culture. Boys think differently, communicate differently, and are incentivized differently. Young boys cannot sit quiet and still for long periods of time. Their concentration patterns are very different from those of girls — and they know it. Resisting an acknowledgement of these differences requires a tremendous capacity for denying the obvious.

Cosmetic surgery is becoming a rite of passage for many women — a way to reinvent the self by the skill of a surgeon’s knife. This is a major cultural shift, as cosmetic surgery is transformed from an eccentricity of the rich into a new normal for mass culture.

Danielle Crittenden, author of What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us, has written a must-read article, “The Cost of Delaying Marriage.” The article has recently been republished by Boundless.org. This is an issue I address often, and I appreciate Crittenden’s thoughtful analysis — as well as her perspective as a woman.
Crittenden [married to David Frum, by the way], observes that, as recently as the 1950s, most young women married early. Her analysis:
In this sense, we lead lives that are exactly the inverse of our grandmothers’. If previous generations of women were raised to believe that they could only realize themselves within the roles of wife and mother, now the opposite is thought true: It’s only outside these roles that we are able to realize our full potential and worth as human beings. A 20-year-old bride is considered as pitiable as a 30-year-old spinster used to be. Once a husband and children were thought to be essential to a woman’s identity, the source of purpose in her life; today, they are seen as peripherals, accessories that we attach only after our full identities are up and running.
The article is really important. Her intelligent celebration of marriage is refreshing: What we rarely hear – or perhaps are too fearful to admit – is how liberating marriage can actually be. As nerve-wracking as making the decision can be, it is also an enormous relief once it is made. The moment we say, “I do,” we have answered one of the great crucial questions of our lives: We now know with whom we’ll be spending the rest of our years, who will be the father of our children, who will be our family.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the new Hollywood trend is women involved in physical conflict — sometimes against each other. Christine Rosen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center argues in “Female Fight Club” that this trend can be traced to the influence of the academic elite and ideological feminism. This notion–that women’s essential differences from men translate into distinct (but not inferior) capabilities–has become known as “difference” feminism. Though it gained popularity among second-wave feminists in the 1980s, the underlying idea was always a feature of the cultural landscape. Whatever the merits of difference feminism in contemporary political discourse, in another arena it has all but disappeared: the movies. Here the classic trope of female vulnerability and male strength has been upended and replaced with the childish and somewhat delusional notion that women can surpass men in every area of competition.
After listing a series of Hollywood films featuring female aggression, Rosen explains: Today “do-me feminism” has morphed into “pummel-me feminism,” and it is not a surprise given our collective cultural insistence, despite the evidence, that women have equal physical potential–whether on the basketball court or in the bedroom. In her book “The Frailty Myth” (2000), for example, Colette Dowling described the “final stage of women’s liberation.” She argued that “by making themselves physically equal, women can at last make themselves free. The cover of her book featured the vein-bulging bicep of Ms. Dowling’s mythical creature: the woman who had finally “closed the strength gap” with men and embraced “physical self-esteem.” Anyone who argues with her analysis is itching for a fight.

As “partial-birth abortion” emerged into America’s consciousness, an Oregon woman named Jenny Westberg made a series of simple pen-and-ink drawings of the procedure. Those pictures–striking in their simplicity and devastating in their clarity–would change the trajectory of America’s abortion debate. Evil flourishes in the darkness, and Westberg’s drawings brought the murderous abortion procedure to light.

Americans who care deeply about the protection of human life must face one monumental question: How can the American conscience be so apparently untroubled by the reality of abortion? That is the central question raised in an important article published in the November 2004 edition of Harper’s Magazine. In “Gambling With Abortion,” author Cynthia Gorney looks closely at the controversy over the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and its aftermath, and her article is a wrenching and insightful look at the current status of the abortion issue.

Elina Furman writes about the emergence of the “boomerang nation” — a nation of adult children who don’t assume adult responsibilities, but come home to live again with parents. Don’t get her wrong — she’s not opposed to the trend. She just wants the boomerang ‘kids’ to understand why their parents may not be so excited to see them living at home once again. From her book, Boomerang Nation:

In a world increasingly given to unrestrained sexual activity and a cornucopia of sensuality, voluntary sexual abstinence appears radical, suspicious, and downright odd. This certainly seems to be the case as Rolling Stone magazine reported on what it called “The New Virgin Army” in its June 30-July 14, 2005 issue. The article, written by reporter Jeff Sharlet, identifies this new “army” of sexually abstinent Christian young people as, “the young and the sexless.”

Carolyn Mahaney and her daughter Nicole Mahaney Whitacre have written an important new book, Girl Talk: Mother-Daughter Conversations on Biblical Womanhood [Crossway Books]. The book belongs in the hands of every young woman. Here’s a sample of what you will find:
Our culture puts forth a false standard of beauty and a false message about beauty. But ultimately, it’s the sin of our hearts that motivates us to believe them. These lies appeal to the things our hearts desire. We desperately want success, recognition, significance, importance, and approval.
For mothers and daughters, Scripture reveals the falsehood and the futility of the quest for physical beauty. ‘Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain’ (Prov. 31:30). This word charm actually means ‘bodily form.’ It is perfect form and beauty that our culture esteems and pursues with fervor, yet God exposes this pursuit as sinful. Nowhere in the Bible are women instructed to wish for, ask for, or strive for physical beauty. Neither does the Bible portray physical beauty as a blessing for those who have it.
Now, Carolyn [wife of C. J. Mahaney] and Nicole, along with the other two Mahaney daughters, Kristen Mahaney Chesemore and Janelle Mahaney Bradshaw, have started a weblog, Girl Talk — Conversations on Biblical Womanhood and other Fun Stuff.  Girls only, of course.  Pass the word along.