By Majikthise (be sure to read the comments)
When a gender gap that favors boys, the proposed solutions generally involve changing girls to meet the prevailing ideal. This is usually the most sensible way to approach the problem. Girls are underperforming in math and science? Well, then we should keep up the emphasis on math and science for everyone and push girls harder.
By contrast, when a gender gap favors females, people are more likely to address the discrepancy by challenging the evaluation criteria. American public school curricula have come to place more emphasis on reading comprehension and other verbal abilities. Some educators argue that this shift has placed male students at a systematic disadvantage because girls tend to be better readers and writers than boys. Note that schools deliberately increased the amount of reading and writing in the curriculum because they thought that it these skills were intrinsically valuable for all students.
and Lance Mannion.
So from my experience I could characterize the talk of men as being laconic and mainly process-oriented and the talk of women as being more verbose, descriptive, and insight-driven, and I could conclude that I’m seeing the ancient dynamic at work still and agree that it appears that women are just naturally more comfortable, fluent, and creative in their use of words and that this translates into higher verbal skills and higher verbal scores on tests.
But I’m not a fan of evolutionary arguments to explain current cultural conditions, like the fact that American men don’t tend to open up in their conversation the way American women tend to do, because we don’t know. There’s not enough evidence of what people were doing before they started writing down the history of what they’d been doing. From the point where we do have written evidence, lo and behold, most of the writing is by men!
Where did they learn that trick?
I’ve been reading a lot about this lately. It has been a big issue on several blogs I read. I seems to me that there are three possibilities for why boys are now falling behind.
1) The school system in the past disadvantaged girls by teaching in a way more favorable to boys. By changing the system, to better help girls, we stripped the system of the things that helped boys excel. Boys are now at a disadvantage.
2) Boys only did better than girls prior to changes in the recent decade because girls were suppressed by a system that systematically lowered their results. Boys are no worse now than they have ever been, girls are just better than they were and they’ve pulled ahead.
3) Girls were never really behind boys and the changes haven’t really made a difference (or maybe made it a bit harder for boys to like school by not appealing to their interests). I don’t have any hard stats but this one seems the most likely to me. From my experience and those who are older it seems that the top students were mostly girls. They have not always been THE top performer but were over-represented in the top 10%. It was after high school that girls were denied opportunities by sexist expectations of what careers they SHOULD aim for.
Any way you slice it, if boys are falling behind we should be looking into it, not ignoring an undeniable reality. I’m sure someone will say big deal since “men still control the world”. Or make some reference to the patriarchy. However these are children we are talking about and ignoring their problems because they were born with a penis is not acceptable.
Most blogs I’ve seen comment on this have had discussions that were closest to Eric’s third possibility. Heh, now that I think about it, several of us were talking about the school issue in the strawfeminist entry not too long ago.
I gotta stick with my philosophical guns. Perform or fail, it’s up to you. Beyond ensuring that the curriculum is appropriate and that the teaching is competent, it’s not the school system’s job to make any particular group reach any particular bar. You want to fail out of high school and work construction? Be our guest – you’re a free person in a free society. You want to work your ass off and overachieve? Go nuts. It’s not our freakin’ problem – it’s yours, no matter what.
And I’m guessing that number is two is the correct one on Eric’s list. Outside of math class, school puts a premium on verbal skills, as it should; this may well favor girls. In the Bad Old Days, girls got held back (and held themselves back); now, less so, and we’re seeing the results. Too bad for the boys. Work harder or fail.
I don’t think this will translate into an excessive imbalance outside or after school, either. Men tend to be more ruthless and ambitious than women – even if we do worse in school, we’ll do better in life (according to a certain view of success) because we want it more. Too bad for the girls. Get meaner or fail.
I’m a lot more concerned with individual opportunity than I am with group outcome. From what I can see, in 99% of the schools out there, a boy or a girl or a white or a black or an Indian or a Jew or a queer or a straight or a special needs kid or a bloomin’ genius who works their ass off and is motivated to succeed has no insurmountable barriers to their success. Fine with me.
I don’t really care what happens to people who don’t work their ass off.
I remember reading a statement, I can’t remember by whom but I think it may have been a woman, that there aren’t as many female geniuses for the same reason that there aren’t as many female socio-psychopaths. I have to wonder if the future will reveal more on both extremes.
Robert, I tend to agree that the individual makes his or her own destiny but I think that a system, that everyone is subject to, that disadvantages one group over another from before they are old enough to notice and react to is an issue.
Lauren,
You haven’t stated your position on this issue so the following comment isn’t directed at you, but at Lindsey and other feminists I’ve debated on this issue. ISTM that there is a huge chip on their shoulders that unites them because they’ve all, without exception, played the “if females were doing poorly then the response was to suck it up, but as soon as males are doing poorly then we’ve got to change everything to give them a hand-up.” If any of these pundits would look to the history of educational reform they’d see that the reforms that began in 1989 were instituted precisely to address the gender and race gap that existed. What took place then is precisely what is being discussed now.
After the reforms, between 1992 and 2004 girls scores decreased by 2 points while boys decreased by 6 points. It is entirely plausible to investigate what effect the reformed pedagogy produced. Why scores for both boys and girls decreased. Why the boy’s scores decreased at a greater rate. Now, after a reform designed to boost female and minority performance is instituted we could see a few outcomes. If the scores of boys remained stagnant but the scores of girls were boosted, we could have some grounds to believe that the previous approach actively hindered girl’s performance. That didn’t happen. The scores of both sexes decreased, which gives us reason to believe that the approach wasn’t as effective as the one it replaced, because the target group’s, girls, scores also decreased. The fact that the scores of boys went down faster than girls makes it look like the performance of girls has improved.
What we’re seeing with the defensive positions being staked out by Lindsay and others, is exactly the same as what they decried that “the patriarchy” was doing before the reforms – actively hindering girl performance, except they’re now proposing to actively hinder boys performance. What they neglect to address is that the performance of girls has also decreased, which could mean that the curricula is the active depressive factor here.
The reading reforms were taking place at the same time as the math reforms. Look at the ideological slant that was taken back then:
The above quote is a direct refutation of Lindsay’s launching off point for her essay. To be fair to Lindsay I’m not sure she’s aware of any of this, but other bloggers are and simply ignore the history so that they can continue to grind their ideological axes against “the patriarchy.” This problem with boy’s school performance, and any proposed solutions, aren’t some grand scheme that devalues women.
It would seem to me that many of the pundits pontificating on education reform would be well served by reading a bit more on the Hegelian dialetic and how we arrive at a state of synthesis. In the past, we recogized need for reform and that reform now needs to be reformed once again so that we can move to a better state.
I could go on for much longer, but I won’t :) I provide supporting evidence for many of the above points in my comment at Kevin Drum’s. I’d also point to this post by a blogger who is observing the different ways in which boys and girls approach problem-solving, and how he as a teacher questions his instincts to modify the boy’s behaviors to be more like those of the girls.
Well, my god Robert, why even bother with schools? The ones who’re worth a damn will just climb out of their cribs, crawl down to the library, and work their asses off.
Your comments on the reading matter assigned to boys and girls don’t match the experiences I had at the Canadian elementary and high schools I attended, TangoMan. It seemed to me that there was a great deal of effort expended in choosing texts that were boy-friendly. When I was in grade six, the teacher divided the class into two sections; one section read The Wind in the Willows, the other read The Call of the Wild. I’ll leave you to guess what the gender breakdown of the two groups was.:-) In grade twelve the novel we read was A Separate Peace. This book is a boring, turgid piece of crap with no recognizably human characters, but it’s also set in a boys’ school on the eve of WWII, with not a female character in sight. In spite of the efforts to make the English curriculum congenial to boys, girls still got higher grades than boys.
Amba,
Upon reading Lindsay’s comment threads, you may notice similar criticisms being voiced, yet no one is offering up their age so that we can ascertain whether the were in school before the reforms, only caught the tail end or started 1st grade in 1992.
My point is, contra Lindsay, that reforms were undertaken to address poor performance of others, broken down by gender and race, so mooting the idea of reform now because of the poor performance we’re seeing from many boys is not an attempt to put women in their place.
Also, please don’t confuse my comment above as being an attempt to define a solitary variable that explains all of the phenomena.
In spite of the efforts to make the English curriculum congenial to boys, girls still got higher grades than boys.
I think it will always be thus, not matter what type of reform is undertaken. However, in those cases where a few boys break into the top scoring cohort they are more likely to be near, or at, the top. We see this large variability quite a bit.
The larger point that I think should be addressed, and at what better place than a feminist blog, is the introduction into schools of efforts to refocus gender roles by selection of socially topical literature which models the characters along lines that feminists find agreeable. All else being equal I don’t necessarily have a problem with the effort to push that agenda. However, if we find boys resistent to letting go of their gender identity and completely disinterested in reading this material, how can the effort at gender redefinition become more important than the task of providing boys with reading material that they find engaging, even if that material reinforces boys gender identity which feminists find objectionable. As Richard Whitmire noted in the New Republic article that initiated all of our chatter, the feminist scholars tracking the boy’s reading problem are fine with the social relevent literature and think that the problem will be solved when boys become more like girls. I have a lot of problems with these types of ideologues, who place greater emphasis on their propoganda than on the mission of teaching children. Unfortunately, these types of theorists and researchers are too often seen in the education field.
Could you provide a link for Lindsay’s thread, TangoMan?
I was in grade six in 1990, TangoMan, so my entire high school career happened after these purported reforms took place. Maybe Canucks are immune to such things, or maybe it’s down to the schools I attended, but I simply never witnessed any feminisation of the English curriculum: if anything, there was much more emphasis on providing texts that boys would find interesting. If you assign Julius Caesar and Macbeth and The Call of the Wild and boys still aren’t interested, what are you supposed to do?
that there aren’t as many female geniuses for the same reason that there aren’t as many female socio-psychopaths
“Socio-psychopaths” are almost always the result of horrific child abuse and neglect. You didn’t really mean that geniuses are made rather than born, do you?
Amba,
It’s most certainly left to the schools, or districts, depending on the local power structure (do administrators define curricula or do teachers/schools have leeway.) That said, I don’t think that US derived standards, like those from the National Council on Teachers of Mathematics, would have any spillover effect into Canada.
Did you read the story a while back where Toyota decided to base their new plant somewhere in Ontario, rather in the US, primarily because there was no need to provide remedial instruction to the Canadian workers. I’d say that speaks well of Canadian instruction practices, though I think the trend of boys falling off is taking place in Canada too.
If you assign Julius Caesar and Macbeth and The Call of the Wild and boys still aren’t interested, what are you supposed to do?
We need to keep in mind that, for whatever reason, cultural or genetic, girls have always excelled at reading compared to boys. What we need to seperate out is whether the gap is growing, which it is, and why. What I’m saying is that the obvious place to look is at instructional reform. It could entirely be a coincidence, but we don’t know if we don’t look. Also, let me reiterate my point that I’m not saying that there is only one cause and we can pinpoint it to instruction, for there are certainly cultural issues in flux as well, but that doesn’t mean we can’t correct something that is within our power to correct.
Lindsay’s post is the first one that Lauren links to. Read the comments and see if anyone is referencing the reforms, and the issue driven literature (not Shakepeare or Call of the Wild) with titles like these that are recommended by the University of Virginia as books for Adolescents:
Please read the entire book reviews if you think I’m unfairly slanting the coverage:
Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence
The Awakening
The Bluest Eye
If Beale Street Could Talk
Ironman
No Kidding
Here is Carol Ann Petuch from Yale’s New Haven Teachers Institute analyzing why ideologically infused books pushing an agenda are not engaging the interests of young readers.
Here’s a Canadian reference, from the University of Saskatchewan
In other words, a snoozefest for barely engaged readers who give don’t care about the agendas of the various reformers.
If you were lucky enough to escape this ideological infusion then count yourself lucky. I shudder when I think about what would have happened to me if I was subjected to crap like this in my formative years. Why would I develop a love for reading if this kind of material was forced down my throat?
Look at the controversy that ensues when LGBS activists try to push for inclusion of books like Heather Has Two Mommies in order to advance their viewpoint. Leave aside the question of human rights and instead focus on whether anyone is gauging how the book works at developing reading skills. All I ever hear about is that the message of gay acceptance is more important. I think that is getting the priorities for book selection exactly backward. First make sure that the story engages the kids, then worry about pushing your adult social revolution agenda into the schools.
I can’t find any evidence of that. What are your sources?
TangoMan, while a lot of those titles do look like simplistic YA type novels, The Awakening, If Beale Street Could Talk and The Bluest Eye are well-regarded literary novels. Although they wouldn’t be appropriate for students who aren’t proficient readers, they’re fine choices for students in their last year of high school who are planning to go to university. I don’t think that canonical novels can be dismissed as ideological just because they happen to deal with black or women’s issues. What makes Toni Morrison more agenda-driven than John Updike?
I can’t find any evidence of that. What are your sources?
The FBI’s ViCAP report, for one. Have you got anything better than EricP’s unattributed source for the notion that genius and evil spring from the same font? It’s very Silence of the Lambs, I know, but not much for being reality-based.
ideologically infused books pushing an agenda are not engaging the interests of young readers
See, for example, the Narnia books. Or The Lorax.
And anyone who thinks that LGBT activists are blazing a trail of promoting ideological children’s books hasn’t picked up a children’s book since they lost their wisdom teeth.
Isn’t the whole point of “literature” to deal with the human condition aka FEELINGS? It’s not technical manual reading class (although that is a useful skill they should cover more–just not in lit class). What sort of boy-friendly, essentialist, unapologetically “masculine” literature do you suggest? “Today John McWhiteguy was discharged from the Army. He killed many enemies. Then he earned ten million dollars as a CEO. Yay John!” All literature deals with human thoughts and emotions to some extent. The list of simple sentences filled with monosyllabic action verbs, e.g. “Dick and Jane” is stupid and not valuable as a tool for enhancing reading comprehension. Comprehension comes from being able to understand not just what the characters are doing, but what their motivations are and how their backgrounds and experiences influence their actions.
Besides, we all know that anything written by or about women, non-Christians, GLBTQ people, or people of color is different and ideologically driven because WASPY-y heterosexual masculinity is the default status of humanity and everything else falls into the “other” category of specialty reading. And what’s wrong with making kids think about “issues” and their application to the real world as a whole? That’s how you integrate school and life–by making what you learn applicable. It seems like there’s a big disconnect between school and life for lots of kids, which is very sad; I bet that if you can see the point of the material–whether or not the point relates specifically to the almighty YOU–you do a lot better in comprehending it. I find it rather pitiful that people are suggesting that children shouldn’t have to learn about the experiences of diverse characters. OMG A GAY CHARACTER! Children shouldn’t have to read material with gay characters! It offends their sense of traditional roles (even though those roles seem to be causing them trouble already what with boys flunking English because they’re not socially permitted to bother with characters who have relationships)! Wah! Fucking deal. Please don’t tell me that the subjects of reading material should be limited to rugged straight white firemen who have no feelings. Grow up. Expand your humanity, kids; it’s called the real world, where there are–OMG–gay people and black people and disabled people. Learn about them through the magical world of reeeeeading.
And for reference, I started first grade in 1994, so all this reform stuff was in place. Certain “masculine” standout reading materials in my educational career included whole units on classic horror stories, naturalist literature (specifically basically everything Jack London ever wrote), and shit like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain (which I found intolerable not because they weren’t Judy Blume books but because they were so shabbily written it disgusted me). It was all based around the premise of literary conflicts being man vs. man, man vs. nature/supernature, man vs. himself, and man vs. society. Some people like certain conflicts more than others, but I think we should be moving away from the idea that your gonads are the reason for your preferences. All this binary separation of “girls like books about secret crushes and bunnies and domesticity” and “boys like books about characters with zero emotional depth who kill things and make explosions” is bullshit. I feel bad for the kids with dicks in Amba’s class who were really more Grahame than London at heart, and for the vagina-owners who would love to race the Iditarod one day rather than hear about Mole and Mr. Toad.
Bridgetjean,
In many schools systems over the last decade and a half we’ve run a pretty large social science experiment. We put primary emphasis on introducing social change mechanisms and lessened the emphasis on the efficacy of material used to skill development. I can give you quotes from a college eduation class were the students, future teachers all, were professing that their primary goal in teaching was to affect social change, and not to help students master material.
What we’ve seen is that many young boys are turned off by reading because it doesn’t speak to them. The feminist scholars quoted in the New Republic article are basically of the opinion that that’s a necessary cost to achieve their goal of tweaking gender roles. They state that the problem would be solved if only boys became more like girls.
So, what I’m saying isn’t necessarily directed at stopping the introduction of literature that addresses the many varieties of the human condition, but that the agenda of achieving social reformation by targeting the thinking of children must come second to the effectiveness of teaching the children. This is exactly the opposite of the priorities that the feminist scholars, quoted by Whitmire, espoused. If you want kids to read about the life experiences of lesbians, then test out a number of books on that theme to see how they capture the interest of boys and girls in the target age group and select the books, not by which theme and plot is most resonant with advancing the political aims of the lesbian lobby, but which book most captures the interest of its audience, and then look to using the book to speak to the lesbian perspective and the political/sociological agenda. You can substitute any demographic for lesbian, be it black, hispanic, asian, amputee, christian, muslim, WASP, criminal, etc.
However, if the interest of students is better captured by books which don’t speak to the social concerns of favored groups, but by books which reinforce the status quo, then teach the books that reinforce the status quo. The job of teacherss is to educate students. The job of social reformers is to change people’s thinking on issues. The two should not mix if they work at cross purposes.
Bridgetjean,
In many schools systems over the last decade and a half we’ve run a pretty large social science experiment. We put primary emphasis on introducing social change mechanisms and lessened the emphasis on the efficacy of material used to skill development. I can give you quotes from a college eduation class were the students, future teachers all, were professing that their primary goal in teaching was to affect social change, and not to help students master material.
What we’ve seen is that many young boys are turned off by reading because it doesn’t speak to them. The feminist scholars quoted in the New Republic article are basically of the opinion that that’s a necessary cost to achieve their goal of tweaking gender roles. They state that the problem would be solved if only boys became more like girls.
So, what I’m saying isn’t necessarily directed at stopping the introduction of literature that addresses the many varieties of the human condition, but that the agenda of achieving social reformation by targeting the thinking of children must come second to the effectiveness of teaching the children. This is exactly the opposite of the priorities that the feminist scholars, quoted by Whitmire, espoused. If you want kids to read about the life experiences of lesbians, then test out a number of books on that theme to see how they capture the interest of boys and girls in the target age group and select the books, not by which theme and plot is most resonant with advancing the political aims of the lesbian lobby, but which book most captures the interest of its audience, and then look to using the book to speak to the lesbian perspective and the political/sociological agenda. You can substitute any demographic for lesbian, be it black, hispanic, asian, amputee, christian, muslim, WASP, criminal, etc.
However, if the interest of students is better captured by books which don’t speak to the social concerns of favored groups, but by books which reinforce the status quo, then teach the books that reinforce the status quo. The job of teacherss is to educate students. The job of social reformers is to change people’s thinking on issues. The two should not mix if they work at cross purposes.
The system does favor girls. For one thing most teachers are women, and have feminine teaching styles that emphasize cooperation and sitting still for long periods of time.
About ten years ago certain gender advocates did some bogus studies and sold the media the line that girls were being neglected in schools. The media bought it hook line and sinker. Ever since then girls have been getting special attention for no good reason.
Most teachers were women before the advent of the second wave of feminism, tragula, and the idea that would-be Huck Finns were indulged in classrooms fifty years ago is laughable: ask any man in his fifties or older about his experience in school, and you’re likely to find that strict discipline was meted out for infractions that would seem minor today.
So, how about the teachers who thought they were giving girls and boys equal attention and time, and who, when filmed, found out that taking more than a third of the time on girls made them feel like they were giving girls _all_ the time?