silveradept | Special Comment: On making school "better for boys"

Christina Hoff Sommers thinks schooling would be better for boys if we gave them a plethora of vocational-technical classes and advocated for them as an underserved population, as we do for women in traditionally male fields.

...no. Well, maybe, I suppose, but the conclusions drawn from the plight provided appear remarkably myopic, and more than a little bit stereotyping. Starting with the set-up:

Women are obtaining the majority of university degrees... Which apparently causes women to start fleeing college after there are less than 40 percent of men on campus. So I'm supposed to believe that enough women go to college to meet men that they'll flee when there aren't enough? I thought the M.R.S. degree was a thing of the past. Why so many women on campus? It's...
...because girls have more collegiate aspirations...
...because girls get better grades. Both of those assertions backed by a study, of course, that says women are more likely to aspire to postgraduate education (a Masters or Doctorate) than boys (29 percent to 16 percent), and that five percent more girls get mostly As than boys.

*recordscratch*

Wait. For kicks and giggles, how many professions require postgraduate education as a minimum for the entry level? Lawyers, doctors, (nurses?), teachers, librarians...I have to wonder if this disparity isn't something that has to do with the female-coded nature of many postgraduate professions. Maybe not the doctors and the lawyers, but the others... anyway, resuming...

So, the consequences are very dire for our boys - without that college education, the wages for the men have been going down. The Brookings Institute study could, of course, point to the decline of union jobs, factory closures, globalization, outsourcing, and all of those things that dried up the pool of good-paying jobs that didn't require collegiate degrees, leaving service industry work like Wal-Mart or McDonalds. But that wouldn't serve the current purpose. The College Board study that declares the awful plight of minority men sounds an alarm about the society and situations those men find themselves in outside of school. There are a lot of studies already out that point out how difficult it is to do well in school when all your survival instincts won't let you concentrate. And more than a few more studies that talk about the ease in which minority children can fall behind due to a lack of books, a lack of conversation, and a bad neighborhood long before they get to school.

So, what now? According to the article...

Acknowledge that boys and girls are different.
Change education to give boys more opportunities to hit things and take them apart.
Steer more boys into vocational education.
Advocate for boys at national levels, like we do for women

Which sounds like the very crudest of stereotypes about boys and girls. Namely, "boys don't sit still and don't like having to read or converse or talk about feelings, they want to take things apart and use their hands and do things." Which is interesting, considering how we both fetishize and deride manual labour ("hand-crafted" items versus "blue-collar" work and the attendant snobbery) in the country. And how we gender-code the activity of engineering, building, taking apart, and making. The Maker movement, STEAM education, and other elements of this nature did not arise from a vacuum, nor did things like WISE or other programs intended to try and get women into traditionally male pursuits like the sciences. It appears to hit boys harder because boys are encouraged to do these things and girls are not.

But really? This whole thing currently boils down to "Hey! Kinesthetic learners exist, and our school system does not do well with them right now." Vocational training, classes with more hands-on elements, ways to do instead of just reading and listening to lectures, and all of these things could be reintegrated into a classroom, given proper support, funding, and a curriculum that encourages all their students to find the ways that they learn best. And then provides those ways for every student.

But then, there's the whole other component. Making school better for boys isn't just about improving classroom environments and advocating for more vocational and technical training for those that have the aptitudes (but without sorting them up too soon), but also about improving their environments outside of the school. Early literacy projects and Head Start programs have had effects in improving the ability of everyone to avoid starting behind, and improvements to a surrounding environment that improve safety, economic security for families, reduce crime, violence, drug usage, gang activity, and otherwise make it so that those students don't have to concentrate on survival long enough to learn things pay dividends in the school environment.

It's entirely short-sighted to say that boys aren't doing well because they are just hard-wired to take stuff apart. Advocating for students means advocating for improving all aspects of their lives at all stages of their lives. Our article-writer needs to zoom out some.

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I wasn't expecting much when I saw who wrote the article, but hey, she's toned down the evo-psych! That was much less painful than it could have been.

I think a lot of problems in 'guys with university degrees' doesn't necessarily come from support or high school stuff per se, but rather the fact that in the first couple of years in large lecture halls, everyone's just a number on a scantron/essay in a blue book. Girls have a lot more socialization in being ignored by their teachers and left to form study groups amongst themselves.

And the high school/can't sit still/vocational stuff should be available to everyone. The home environment needs to be safe and then, teachers need to act like the boys are there to learn, without focusing entirely on them all of the time and giving them more kudos than the girls for the exact same work.

Yes. There were just so many this about that article that were Very No, and I forgot about the tendency of teachers to focus on praising boys and ignoring girls.

Basically, all of this!

You hit on the things that should/could change and what probably won't because America likes start from some misaligned gender stereotyping and gender-divide and work out from there. And then proceed to fuck up from there because hey, it's all a great big illusion that we still haven't been able to shake.

It's entirely short-sighted to say that boys aren't doing well because they are just hard-wired to take stuff apart. Advocating for students means advocating for improving all aspects of their lives at all stages of their lives. Our article-writer needs to zoom out some.

EXACTLY.

Thanks. Good to know it made sense to others.

I'll have to send this article to my mom, who's a professor of education specializing in gender, to see what she thinks. But imo it boils down to boys no longer being given so much more than girls are in education, and society scrambling to keep up. Girls are also taught to sit still and concentrate even in their playtime. Boys are given a more "boys will be boys" approach and not taught these things from as early an age. Though that's a horribly vast overgeneralization, and I think video games help shrink that gap.

Also, a lot of the people I know who are getting postgrad degrees are doing so because their bachelor degrees mean nothing in this economy. Most of those people are women. Women tend to choose liberal arts degrees more than men, and men tend to choose engineering-type degrees more than women. Somehow I think the postgrad stats aren't saying what the article writer thinks they are saying.

Edited 2013-09-19 17:13 (UTC)

I agree - all the studies and data cited, I suspect, do not say the things the writer wants to say.

I don't understand what you mean by "boys being given more than girls" and why that causes a need to catch up.

I phrased it badly. Having problems with words today. Basically, that boys had/have an easier time with teachers because of things like getting more attention and praise. But that's not happening as much now, but they're still often socialized to expect it. Basically, they're being given fewer breaks simply for being boys than they used to.

Ah. That makes great sense and is totally true. What used to be enough to coast on isn't cutting it any more. That this is causing panic is disturbing, as it should be causing cheers.

Part of it is that society has a bunch of conflicting messages to boys that schools aren't buying into any more. There's a lot of "Boys will be dickheads" in the media, music, and family cultures, but schools aren't willing to put up with it as much anymore, so they come to school and spew out some sexist, homophobic garbage or disrespect their teacher and get into trouble for something they don't necessarily get into trouble for at home or their parents don't "believe" they did and end up spending time at school in trouble, being yelled at, or being punished outside the classroom and they become less invested. Sports also interfere. While girls have a few of those issues, most of the social pressures move them in a different direction.

That being said, there is a significant difference (in statistical terms) in graduations rates and test scores in highschools with a full program of vocational education classes as well as college prep classes and those that don't have a full program, with the schools with both the vocational and college prep programs having more positive outcomes (generally speaking. there is a single demographic where that was not the case, but it was very very specific).

Very true able boys and conflicting messages from potters, parents and society.

Interesting that a school that chooses to complement the college prep track with vo-tech ends up graduating more and having better test scores. It's almost like they're managing to catch and maintain the interest of more of their students and play to their aptitudes. What a novel concept for educators that must be, based on what high school is like now. [/Sarcasm]

Too much political capital invested in "everyone must go to a 4 year university", so a higher percentage of graduating seniors going to (or, you know, starting) a university must = better school. Nobody does data on percentage from which highschools FINISH a 4 yr university and there isn't much data that corrects for family finances. The politics wants simple answers and that often leads to simplistic summaries of the analysis of the wrong things. *grumps*

I REALLY hate treatments of gender that ignore the fact that there is more difference between individuals in the same gender than between the genders as a whole. Can we quit doing this? Please?

(And that's not even getting into the fact that not everyone fits in the gender binary. There are a LOT of gender variant people out there.)

Wait -- you mean that different people learn differently? But that would mean that a one size fits all model is invalid!

Surely you're joking.

;-)

Yes, it would be a problem to have to admit that the factory processes that produce mass goods are rubbish for producing workers.

Special Comment: On making school "better for boys"

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