I teach a seventh-grade class, and I have been reading Leonard Sax’s “Why Gender Matters.” I also read with interest the Feb. 6 editorial on the large and growing discrepancy between girls and boys in school performance and college enrollment.

The Sun Journal reasonably distrusts single-answer solutions and says you cannot choose from among several possible causes for the gender gap in performance and enrollment. But then you say as a matter of belief that the “solution won’t be gender-based.” Logically, the solution to this gender-specific problem should, indeed, have a gender base.

In further support of the argument, you see only “subtle” differences between the genders. Yet, the more research I read, the more substantive do these differences appear. In fact, the size of the problem has reached such proportions that reflexive deference to feminist dogma no longer suffices to cover the problem’s true core: Men and women possess and manifest myriad differences. Few schools recognize these differences – to the increasing detriment of the boys.

You give a final, passing slap at a gender-based solution. You lump such an idea in with other “one-size-fits-all paradigms.” You contrast gender-based solutions with the “best” way to solve the problem: one student at a time. What incompatibility exists between any reasonable genderwide strategy and the tactical, one-student-at-a-time application of that strategy’s components?

The problem embraces a very distinct pattern. Don’t turn a blind eye to it.

Leonard Hoy, Greenwood