There are a ton of things wrong -- philosophically, politically, logically -- with the same-sex education that serves as a starting point for this article, but I didn't even need to get that far:

Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Already, first paragraph on the first page, they lost me. Holy shit, I'm sweaty just thinking about it. Yellow walls? Warmer temperatures? While the boys are down the hall, chilling (literally) in their blue room with their snakes? And then there's this whole thing about how the boys need more movement and physical representations of important concepts, and they get to read The Hatchet, while the girls have sing-alongs about being sisters forever and talk about their mamas making friend chicken. IN A SEVENTY-FIVE DEGREE CLASSROOM. Christ. I would have wanted to be in the boys' room so bad. I would have been the crankiest, itchiest, most inattentive class clown the girls' room had ever seen. I would have sued just to get the hell out of there.