Toronto is planning four segregated schools: one for boys, one for girls and, for potential dropouts, one choir school and one sports academy.

So if boys are from Mars and girls are from Venus, which is arguable, then singers are from Saturn and athletes are from Neptune?

Finally, can someone sensible not just declare that boys, girls, singers and athletes are all from the planet Earth (they did, but it didn’t catch on) and they have to get along as adults, so let’s not chop them into spurious categories early.

Toronto District School Board trustees have told Education Director Chris Spence, a man well-versed in the crisis in American schools that doesn’t match our own difficulties, that they first want to know if such schools will work before they start quizzing parents about whether they’ll send their children there. Good for them.

Single-sex schools are based on junk science — actually it’s not science, it was a 2005 Newsweek cover story titled “Boy Brains, Girl Brains”— and a lazy notion, fuelled by the U.S. Christian right, that became a theory.

Now many parents think boys and girls have different learning styles and that classrooms are becoming excessively “feminized.” The theory is now a conspiracy. In fact, it was all nonsense to begin with.

Boys do learn differently from girls at some stages — they have to be told to sit down and be quiet more, for one thing — but these differences hardly overshadow the similarities between male and female children who all have to learn to read, write, add, and talk intelligently. Turning schools topsy-turvy to accommodate an entirely unscientific schema about which gender has more oxytocin flowing in their brains in reading class is absurd.

In 2005, Larry Summers, Obama’s now-disgraced economics czar, mocked the scientific abilities of women. But females were being attacked on another front. The Bush administration was pushing for single-sex schools, in a weird re-enactment of “separate but equal.”

The journalist Susan Jacoby explained how the debacle unfolded in her magnificent 2008 book The Age of American Unreason. There was a flurry of theory — none of it based on scientific study — about inborn brain differences in boys and girls, with co-ed schools being described as “a biologically disrespectful model.” The hard right said boys were forced into reading too early, and the hardline feminists said girls were being verbally bullied by aggressive boys.

But here’s the problem, Jacoby says. “The [American] boy crisis is largely confined to poor and minority communities. Rich white boys are not falling behind rich white girls.”

Boys who are Hispanic, African-American and poor white suffer because of violent street culture (in Ontario that includes Dalton McGuinty’s lucrative ultimate fighting now popping up in school fight clubs) and absent fathers, as well as what Jacoby describes as “a greater susceptibility to malign influences,” including drugs and gangs. So why are we discussing how girl and boy brains have different amygdalas that rule their “verbal processing”?

It’s junk science. It’s junk thought. And it’s eerily similar to the centuries-old canard that women’s bodies were too frail for university and Negroes’ brains too weak for any education at all.

Here’s the kicker. The boy-girl brain fight was created by psychologists and social scientists, Jacoby says. “Junk thought is much more pervasive, and easier to promote, in sociology and psychology than it is in the physical sciences, because the endorsement of dubious social science does not require a wholesale rejection of expert opinion.” You can put any damn thing on a magazine cover these days. Boys have a dilatory brain chunk, girls can’t play poker because they can’t strategize, “post-abortion syndrome” exists. There’s no peer-reviewed scientific study with control groups over decades to prove the above as facts. It’s journalistic filler.

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Sadly, Spence fell for it. Show us the science, the trustees are telling him, and I am grateful for their reluctance to blow a wad of education dollars on a fad, a mere suspicion.

hmallick@thestar.ca