Both parents of autistic children tend to be strongly systematic thinkers (“male brain”) who score low on empathetic thinking (“female brain”), writes Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge autism researcher, in the New York Times.

. . . males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one’s own.

. . . According to what I have called the “extreme male brain” theory of autism, people with autism simply match an extreme of the male profile, with a particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize. When adults with Asperger’s syndrome (a subgroup on the autistic spectrum) took the same questionnaires we gave to non-autistic adults, they exhibited extreme Type S (systemizing) brains. Psychological tests reveal a similar pattern.

And this analysis makes sense. It helps explain the social disability in autism, because empathy difficulties make it harder to make and maintain relationships with others. It also explains the “islets of ability” that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing – all skills that benefit from systemizing.

“Assortative mating” — the tendency of men and women with similarities to marry each other — could lead to more children with autism, Baron-Cohen believes. He is dubious about the role of environmental factors, though unwilling to rule anything out.

It may be that systemizing women are more likely than in the past to be working in technical jobs where they meet systemizing men. I suspect Silicon Valley’s rise in children with various forms of autism has something to do with the high concentration of nerds.

Unfortunately, Baron-Cohen takes an unfair swipe at Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, who did not say women are “innately less suited than men to be top-level scientists.”

It’s true that scientists have documented psychological and physiological differences between male and female brains. But Mr. Summers was wrong to imply that these differences render any individual woman less capable than any individual man of becoming a top-level scientist.

Summers understands the distinctions between averages and individuals just as well as Baron-Cohen, and said nothing of the kind. When I was an op-ed editor, I caught this sort of error.

What are prisoners reading at Guantanamo Bay? Harry Potter books top the request list for Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, says the camp librarian. Agatha Christie mysteries are next in popularity. Presumably that doesn’t count the Koran.

According a report on a tour of the Guantanamo camp, not all prisoners are wild about Harry.

In another (session), a female interrogator took an unusual approach to wear down a detainee, reading a Harry Potter book aloud for hours. He turned his back and put his hands over his ears.

Maybe she planned to stop at an exciting place and refuse to go on unless he cooperated.

The University of Rhode Island class was supposed to deal with political philosophers from Plato to Machiavelli. Instead, students read Machiavelli’s The Prince and heard a lot about the professor’s sexual orientation and contempt for conservatives and Christians, writes Nathaniel Nelson, a conservative Christian student, in Front Page.

On the first day of class, Professor Michael Vocino announced, “I like dick,” and asked Nelson if he was “queer,” the student says. On the second day, Vocino asked Nelson if he was uncomfortable knowing the professor thought he was “hot.”

A few times during the semester instead of giving the usual educational assignments, Professor Vocino asked me, and a few other male members, to try “making out” with other males and tell the class how it felt. While observing an outside student walk by the classroom with baggy-style jeans on, he offered that he wished men would wear tighter pants because he liked “bums.” Often Professor Vocino would ask members of the class for hugs. In fact, he did an “experiment” to see how people reacted to the intrusion on their personal space. This “experiment” consisted of class members standing as close as they could to each other. He ended the “experiment” with students, again mostly male and including myself, standing as close to him as they felt comfortable.

Vocino frequently asked students about their sexual activities, “how much, with who and when,” Nelson writes.

It was a frequent occurrence for Professor Vocino to talk about “dick” and all of the actions that one can do with said body member. It should be noted that one entire class was devoted to the topic of masturbation.

After Nelson and another conservative student complained, Vocino, who is a tenured professor of film studies and library science, was suspended from teaching political science. I wonder if he got the ax for sexual and political harassment or for neglecting to teach Plato and Aristotle.

KelliPundit, who advises a conservative student group at URI, vouches for Nelson’s integrity.

Handcuffing an unruly five-year-old girl was “premature,” St. Petersburg, Florida police have decided.

More than a third of Illinois high school graduates aren’t ready for college, concludes the Illinois Education Research Council; an additional 28 percent are partially prepared. Forty-three percent of the unprepared students go to college, as do 58 percent of minimally ready students. When students find out they face more than a year of remedial classes before they can earn college credit, they tend to quit.

Back-breaking, mind-numbing anthologies crammed with bits and pieces of writing turn students off to reading writes Patrick Welsh, a Virginia English teacher. His high school adopted a seven-pound world literature text:

It starts off with a unit titled “Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hebrew Literature,” followed by sections on the literature of Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China and Japan. Then comes “Persian and Arabic Literature” and “West African Oral Literature” – and that’s only the first third of the book. There are still more than 800 pages to plough through, but it’s the same drill – short excerpts from long works – a little Dante here, a little Goethe there and two whole pages dedicated to Shakespeare’s plays. One even has a picture of a poster from the film Shakespeare in Love with Joseph Fiennes kissing Gwyneth Paltrow. The other includes the following (which is sure to turn teens on to the Bard):

“Notice the insight about human life that the following lines from The Tempest convey:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare’s plays are treasures of the English language.”

Both books are full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the readings.

Controversial literature is banned to placate the right, Welsh observes; writing of dubious quality is included to please the multicultural left.

Number 2 Pencil praises Welsh for writing that schools don’t need 1,500-page textbooks to teach students the minimal skills needed to pass state tests. Students would learn more by reading actual books and short stories.

Reading and math scores are rising faster in the South than elsewhere in the country, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Much of the national progress reported for 9- and 13-year-olds was driven by gains in the South. For example, while 9-year-olds in the Northeast gained 10 points in reading achievement (the equivalent of a grade level) over the past 30 years, the South gained 24, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). While reading scores for 13-year-olds barely budged in most of the United States, the South gained 12 points, more than a grade level.

Southern governors, business leaders and educators “launched the standards movement a decade before it was picked up by the rest of the nation,” the Monitor says. Looking at data by race, ethnicity and income started in the South.

Mr. AB got to discuss Plato and Lysistrata in professional development before spending eight hours with glue, scissors and markers, “pretending to be our kids, all in order to learn a teaching practice that could have been taught in an hour and a half.” He used the time to categorize his fellow teachers, starting with Sincere Sally and Prickly Paul. Commenters add more types, including Grandma Gertrude, Chatty Cathy and Bobbi Burnout.

Via Eduwonk’s guest blogger, who rounds up teacher training posts and says doctors do professional development quite differently.

Boosting New York City’s school spending by 40 percent, as called for by the judge who decided an equity lawsuit, isn’t going to happen writes Charles Upton Sahm in City Journal.

New York State now ranks number three in the nation in education spending, with a statewide per-pupil average of $14,000 a year; only New Jersey and Washington, D.C., shell out more per student. And New York City kids aren’t shortchanged: while per-pupil education spending in the city once slightly lagged the state average, the gap has narrowed to almost nothing.

Including pensions, benefits and capital costs, the New York City education budget “works out to a jaw-dropping $18,000 per pupil.”

The city refuses to raise taxes to pay for more; the state legislature won’t raise taxes statewide to spend more in the city. The courts can’t force Gov. Pataki to propose legislation to fund the court-ordered increase, Sahm writes. Expect more litigation.

The Carnival Of Education features teacher Darren’s battle with an educator-mom who wants to get him fired because her 13-year-old son could get from Darren’s Breasts Not Bombs post to photos of the rally. With real nekkid breasts, though not very seductive ones.