news pile

[curgoth]

Two interesting stories on CBC's Metro Morining today, one following the other.

TDSB proposes Boys only school "boys act out more and get into much more trouble in the school system". I'm not a fan of this, mainly because I worry that it'll end up fostering the patriarchal mind-set.
At 17, Ankita Kumar-Ratta started Save The Girls, an NGO that aims to stop female feticide, the termination of a fetus on the grounds that its sex is a female. (sorry, could only find the audio link). The practice of aborting female fetuses is apparently alive and well in Canada in certain communities.

Comments

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

The evidence, as I understand it, is that boys do better in a mixed school, and that girls do better in a girls-only school.

[50-ft-queenie.livejournal.com]

Yep, I've heard the same thing.

[db-ru.livejournal.com]

Could you please toss a link my way?

[tamago23.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd rather see a female fetus get aborted than go on to become a girl who has a life of being mistreated because she's the "wrong" sex her and family/culture doesn't value her. But that's just my opinion. :)

I was actually pretty happy to see the boy's-only school thing. I like the idea of my sons having more options available to them.

[sabotabby]

I'm not sure how I feel about the boys-only school. On the one hand, it's a worthwhile experiment to see if it actually improves learning. On the other, I can see it enforcing a lot of problematic social views. I was loudly in favour of the black-focused school because it was addressing the fact that black kids—part of a marginalized group—were underrepresented in both the curriculum and the staffing, but boys as a group are not oppressed or marginalized.

[mightydoll.livejournal.com]

also: a lot of the things that they are ascribing to "boys' ways of learning" apply to all spirited children, boys and girls (and really, to all children in general) just because girls seem to do better with desk work than boys doesn't mean that desk work is the better way to learn. All children do better with hands on learning, and some girls require more movement (my daughter, for example)

[mightydoll.livejournal.com]

Idunno about Save The Girls.

If we're agreed that a fetus is not a person, then we can agree that it's none of our business why a fetus is aborted. I mean, it sucks that people think girls are less valuable than boys, but do we really want those people raising girls anyway?