Lori Day looks to find solutions in education that take into account the differences between boys and girls.
Originally written for The Huffington Post about six months ago, this article was received in very interesting ways. Lots of men (and women) were grateful that I was addressing the educational struggles of boys. But also, many women took issue with the article because they did not want distinctions to be drawn between boys and girls in the ways that I did. In the past—and perhaps still today—drawing attention to these differences often had a negative impact on girls. “Differences” somehow led to girls being seen as inferior. That was never the case, and still isn’t. As controversial as it can be to discuss differences, that is all that they are. It is not a zero sum game. I admit to having felt as if I were being viewed as a traitor. What I am is an advocate for children.
The statistics on how boys are faring in schools today are sobering. They are failing precisely because there are differences between the learning styles and needs of boys and girls that favor girls in the current public school system in this country. I simply believe that we all need to acknowledge this, and that in doing so, there should be no perceived threat by girls or women. As caring and responsible adults, we all need to focus on advocacy for both boys and girls in the unique ways needed by each. I spend a lot of time advocating for girls and women. I believe they are sexualized and objectified at a horrifying level, and are shortchanged relative to boys and men in many, many aspects of life. When it comes to other issues, such as education, it is boys and men who I believe are being shortchanged and who deserve greater attention and focus at this time.
I did receive some specific criticisms of this article when it was first published. Many readers took issue with my use of personal anecdotes and gender generalizations, despite what I considered to be strategic use of weasel words explaining the illustrative purpose of generalizations and disclaiming that all boys and all girls fit into these descriptions. Obviously they don’t! But the generalizations are necessary to simply be able to write about the problem in any coherent fashion. In terms of anecdotes, they are meant to provide narrative and texture, nothing more. One can produce studies to “prove” anything one believes. The spectrum of studies on male and female cognition and development is extremely varied. Regardless, as someone who worked in schools for 25 years, I did observe and experience what I observed and experienced, and I share that with you as readers, to be accepted or rejected as you see fit.
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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sang that we should teach our children well and feed them of our dreams, but for millions of parents of sons, dreams are only that, and boys are falling behind educationally at an alarming rate in this country. Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, Michael Gurian, author of The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and in Life, and many other authors and educational experts proclaim that we have a crisis in the education of boys in this country. The media attention to this topic has been extensive in recent years, yet I do not see the systemic changes that are needed.
Gurian presents statistics that boys get the majority of D’s and F’s in most schools, create 90% of the discipline problems, are four times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD and be medicated, account for three out of four children diagnosed learning disabilities, become 80% of the high school dropouts, and now make up less than 45% of the college population. If you look in your newspaper in June, you will see the photos and bios of valedictorians from many of your local high schools, and will notice that the majority of them these days are girls.
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What Do the Experts on Male Development Say?
According to Whitmire, children are forced to use literacy skills much earlier than in the past, and boys develop these skills later than girls. In the world of “Kindergarten is the new first grade,” boys are struggling mightily to keep up. When it comes to writing, the gender divide is even greater. NCLB and our hyper-focus on standardized test scores is worsening, not ameliorating, the academic struggles of boys, and subsequently increasing the numbers of boys who turn off to school and eventually drop out.
According to Gurian, boys learn by doing and by moving their bodies through space. The more emphasis is placed on the development of early reading skills, and the less emphasis is placed on a healthy amount of movement and experiential learning, the more disadvantageous our schools will be for males.
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According to Gurian, boys learn by doing and by moving their bodies through space. The more emphasis is placed on the development of early reading skills, and the less emphasis is placed on a healthy amount of movement and experiential learning, the more disadvantageous our schools will be for males.
Our boys need our attention, and although some of what I’m about to write pertains to girls as well as boys, and although gender differences naturally fall across a continuum and no single description fits all boys or all girls, there are nonetheless a number of characteristics that differentiate the two genders generally speaking.
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On Growing Up With Boys, Then Raising a Girl
As the mother of a female only child, my parenting experience, while not always idyllic, has been relatively peaceful. As a toddler, my daughter was sedentary and cautious, and seemed to have nowhere she needed to go. She would sit in one spot on the floor for hours with a pile of books, “reading” to herself. I could shoot from room to room, accomplishing tasks, and she would smile up at me from her place on the living room rug as if wondering, what’s the hurry?
She was much like I was as a child, and nothing like the brothers I had grown up with who requisitioned large expanses of the floor plan of our house for their games, commandeering space like an army of two. The entire finished basement was needed for indoor hockey (and windows were expendable). Outdoors, acres of woods were barely enough for their imaginary villages and the conquering of foreign lands. Unwitting trees were the patient recipients of nails and ropes and bungee cords, bending uncomplainingly to the weight of whatever animate or inanimate objects were tied, strapped or hung from them.
One day my brother devised a pulley system to ferry a dangling ceramic soap dish full of birdseed back and forth between his bedroom window on the third floor and a distant pine tree in the back yard, only to have it immediately collapse under its own weight, sending the heavy chunk of porcelain careening downward in a 90-degree arc until it came into abrupt contact with a doomed sliding glass door. This was a terrific lesson in physics. It was also funny.
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The Nature of Boys
As Gurian explains in his book, the primitive hunters men used to be were the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Spatially developed male brains resulted from physical interaction with the environment that allowed sensory input to stimulate the right hemisphere and build white matter and synapses in ways that would be useful for survival.
Even though the concept of the square school with the square classroom with one teacher to 20 or more kids has been around for a few hundred years, our boys are still young hunters whose brains need the same types of stimulation to grow and be healthy as did their male ancestors millennia ago. Our schools are vastly different from the setting of family, tribe and natural environment that used to be the educational milieu for growing boys.
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Why Our Educational System Does Not Support Male Learning Styles
Our modern educational system works for many children, particularly girls, but for some boys (and girls) it places constraints on a very normal and necessary experiential type of learning, not to mention the need of many children to move around rather than sit still. While it may be a cynical statement, I have often felt that co-ed schools are girls’ schools that boys go to.
I am not advocating for a return to life in caves and an educational system for boys involving the activities and rituals described in my college anthropology book. What I do advocate for is a greater understanding and appreciation for who boys are and how they learn best, and the subtle pedagogical modifications that would benefit millions of children.
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How Schools Could Honor Who Boys Are
How much Ritalin could remain on the shelves if we created schools that are ready for boys rather than boys who are ready for schools?
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Simple changes to the pace and tempo of the school day, such as incorporating several brief recesses throughout the day, devoting more time to physical education, and including more hands-on activities go a long way towards alleviating some of the natural restlessness of boys and harnessing male energy in positive ways. How much Ritalin could remain on the shelves if we created schools that are ready for boys rather than boys who are ready for schools?
Just as we collectively addressed the needs of girls over the past couple of decades and made great strides in closing their achievement gaps in math and science, let us now turn our attention to our nation’s boys and take equally deliberate steps to assure their success in school and in life. The revolution in brain science over the past fifteen years gives us the knowledge and the tools we need to do this, and we must, for as a society we are setting our boys up to fail in a system that is stacked against them, stacked against the very way they are neurologically wired.
This is not to say that social and cultural influences are not contributing factors to who boys are today, but we now have medical evidence, once elusive, that illuminates the very significant role biology plays in male/female brain development and learning. Parents and teachers need to become better educated about how boys and girls really are different, and how to best meet the needs of each.
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What Does the Future Hold?
At many colleges today, boys are being given a boost in the admissions process because they have become a minority. If we do not address boys’ educational needs earlier in life than this, the skewing of college enrollment, and thus opportunity in life, will only get worse.
Meeting the learning needs of all of our children is a lofty yet imperative goal. We must join together to nurture and celebrate what it is to be female and what it is to be male and the very essence and value of the difference. And after all, boys will be boys.
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photo: wwwworks / flickr
I have add as an adult, had adhd as a child. I had done well on medication but forgetting to take them as a child and not being reminded basically meant I was unmedicated until 8 years out of school whilst they are very hard to get as an adult even though they were literally like a miracle for productivity. Sitting down and having to focus was a nightmare, every-time a car drove past (school was on a highway) I would be watching it, would talk and disrupt the class from sheer stupid levels of boredom yet some subjects that… Read more »
The whole “man the hunter” thing has been overblown, as most anthropologists and archaeologists today will tell you. When you look at hunter-gatherer groups who have been studied by anthropologists in the field, you find groups in which women also participate in many forms of hunting. Among hunter-gatherers (“foragers” as their called today) you find a LOT of overlap between the jobs that men have and the jobs that women have. The idea of total gender segregation of labor is a much more recent product.
And…if you’re unable to concentrate or stand still or be quiet, wouldn’t that make you a really BAD hunter?
Boys and girls create to (significantly overlapping) bell curves in which boys need (generally) more experiential learning as young children?
Definitely.
Boys are now falling behind in early education to devastating effect later in life?
Absolutely. Nail on the head.
Our overmedication of young boys is due to a system that doesn’t support them?
Couldn’t agree more.
“Boys are young hunters”?
Give my an effing break. Don’t cheapen your very valid point by casually tossing around pseudoscience. Don’t create fodder for misandrists and others unwilling to see the problem. I really, really, really expect more from GMP writers.
well, you disagree with the author on one of her key points. What do you think the problem that others refuse to see truly is?
Great article Lori. 1. I think the reintroduction of more, and more intense physical activities that allows boys and girls a physical outlet would greatly help. 2. Continual coursework assessment favours girls, however boys must learn how to get to grips with it. As the continual coursework model is closer to how most adult work environments are, than the end-of-year-exam model that boys prefer. So coursework and how it impacts on boys is a tricky problem. 3. Do schools prepare children for the work environment and running a household? Id say not. Schools should be more than daycare centers. Id… Read more »
I think the article makes very good points about how learning styles and learning development tend to be different for boys and girls. However, I’m curious about the historical timing of all of this, partly because I think Amber raises a very good question about how much has changed. Mostly curiosity as a teacher myself at the college level. As you mentioned, currently boys make up 90% of one problem category, 80% of another, the vast majority of all sorts of educational problems, etc. However, males are still almost half of the undergraduate population, still a sizeable majority of the… Read more »
Good question wellokaythen. “…or do you think that it’s just a matter of time before the current policies have a huge effect on graduate students, PhD’s, and faculty themselves?” I’m having a brain freeze, but I know I read a great article on this just last week…can’t remember where I saw it. It did predict declining male enrollment in college over the next 10+ years. It makes no sense that it would eventually lead to all-female enrollment. That would never happen anyway due to admissions preferences is men are a minority. My gut feeling is that the problem will grow.… Read more »
And I just realized I left out a bunch of other points I wanted to make about the effect of time (or lack of effect) on academic underachievement, learning styles, etc., etc.
Signing off for the night–too tired to think straight!
Back tomorrow…:-)
wellokaythen,
Your facts are wrong, and therefore so are your conclusions. Males are declining in all educational areas, and are the minority in both undergrade and graduate schools. Boys don’t get “special treatment” either earlier or later.
http://www.postsecondary.org/archives/previous/GuysFacts.pdf
Thanks for the information. I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that the statistics in that pdf are correct. In that case, the stats do suggest that a trend that will carry over into graduate schools, which does answer one of my questions. However, the pdf document does not actually give any stats for graduate students, just a prediction about graduate schools, so I’m not sure how it shows that my facts are wrong. My statement about differential treatment was not a conclusion but a hypothesis. The author of the pdf makes a case that my hypothesis is… Read more »
My daughter learns more like the boys you are describing here, so I empathize. It can certainly be a challenge to advocate for her as her parent. Especially since girls who act like “boys” are not OK in our society. However, that said, I think that girls, in general thrive *despite* an educational system that is against them from the get-go. The reason being is simple. Look at our textbooks. Where do you see female accomplishments in any field? Very seldom. Our entire educational system needs massive reform. We need to re-look at how we are teaching kids, which seems… Read more »
Trista, I sympathize with your feelings. I agree that female accomplishments are rarely taught–either because women had historically fewer opportunities than men to excel and be recognized, or because their accomplishments are not highlighted as they should be. However, as bad as this is, it does not lead to the following situation for girls: “…get the majority of D’s and F’s in most schools, create 90% of the discipline problems, are four times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD and be medicated, account for three out of four children diagnosed learning disabilities, become 80% of the high… Read more »
Well said Lori,
Thanks again for staying on point, and being an advocate for boys. Educating people should be the number one priority of our government and everybody should have a right to an education.
The material may be sexist against girls but its looking like the very teaching methods themselves are sexist against boys. Because despite whatever accomplishments are in the textbooks if you look at school performance girls are outperforming boys at nearly every measurement.
Thanks for this Lori. Another amazing piece. Here is a related one that I wrote recently since I have a first grade boy and am deeply involved in these issues:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-matlack/redshirting-kindergarten_1_b_859824.html
Tom, no way! I wrote on redshirting too, just a few months before you: http://www.funderstanding.com/content/redshirting-in-the-age-of-academic-kindergarten
Great minds think alike. 🙂
Hats off to Ms. Day for writing (and re-posting) this piece and to TGMP for re-publishing it. I especially appreciate the non-polemical approach, including referencing the work of Whitmire and Gurian. If you have not read Whitmire or Gurian, I urge you to do so. The statistics, the decade-plus over which the statistics have held up, and the lack of response are appalling. I’ve been volunteering in inner city education and just have to say that the gendered literacy gap is stark. I’ve also been asking around among friends who are involved with public education in the well-off suburbs of… Read more »
Thank you for sharing your perspective and suggestions. I addressed some of your comments in my reply to Amber. I agree with you completely that this issue is very serious.
Okay, so the argument here is that boys are different from girls. YET…at the same time, school has ALWAYS required children to sit still, be quiet, and listen. Boys, as it were, have been receiving a formal education far longer than girls, and the mode of the classroom was still the same for them: sit still, shut up, and listen. So why is it suddenly now boys are having problems doing this when in the past this model worked just fine for them? I mean, you can even look at this in the past fifty years, or go back to… Read more »
More girls are playing with trucks, football, and other traditionally boy activities than ever before – and more boys are not only playing with dolls and other formerly “girl” activties, including cross dressing. Thus, this argument holds no water.
The bottom line is that boys are being disenfranchised and many are, in essence, blaming the boys themselves while being totally content or even pleased do nothing and have nothing done – while the boys suffer and fall further behind.
I have two school age kids- 1 son and 1 daughter. They attend a special school for highly and profoundly gifted children. Every kid in the place has an IQ around or above 145. People move to our city so their children can attend this school The families who send their kids here are incredibly diverse; a large segment of these kids are recent immigrants to the US. The only common message all of these children receive is to achieve academically. Education is of paramount importance. These boys are still less engaged and have far more discipline problems than the… Read more »
Amber, I agree with some portions of what the other commenters have replied to you, but I’ll compose my own response. Children have NOT always been required to sit still as much as they are today. As schools have become aggressively competitive with each other and with other countries, and as teacher evaluation has become tied to student evaluation via state-mandated testing (thank you NCLB), the pressure to push kids into academics starts earlier and earlier. “Kindergarten is the new first grade” means that sand tables have been replaced by writing tables. Girls, who develop earlier than boys, are better… Read more »
“Ask any teacher whether they think boys are more active, or girls are more active, or whether it’s equal, and I guarantee you that you will hear from almost all of them that boys are more active than girls, from VERY early in life, well before they are socialized.”
You must mean before birth then.
Studies show it beginning in early infancy. Whatever socialization along the lines you speak of is going on at that point, I still say is a less powerful factor. I never said it did not exist. It does. Again, read my GMP article The Gender Pendulum. But let’s keep things in perspective.
Thanks to a couple of things, despite socialization, I’ve always been docile. And funny enough but recess and school socialization in general was the low point of school for me. Learning was fun (and I was truly wondering why other kids ‘hated’ school), learning was easy and effortless. Socializing was an opportunity in getting beaten up. Being beaten up didn’t have me more docile, it just gave me other issues over time. Like self-esteem issues, dissociation issues, social anxiety. Another person might have decided to hate school, though it seems most people who did didn’t hate it for bullying reasons.… Read more »
Amber, From what I read in Christina Hoff-sommers “The war against boys” what you are asking is explained. Basically thanks to the advocacy of NOW & AAUW teaching methods and text books (and a host of other things) were changed in the 1990’s to facilitate a better learning experience for girls (i.e. girl-friendly methods were adopted). In other words feminists who see things in a women up/man down or man up /woman down scorecard (instead of helping both genders) were allowed by politicians to implement anti-boy teaching methods. The litigiousness of parents also didn’t help. A lot of recess activities… Read more »
Amber: Boys, as it were, have been receiving a formal education far longer than girls, and the mode of the classroom was still the same for them: sit still, shut up, and listen. So why is it suddenly now boys are having problems doing this when in the past this model worked just fine for them? I mean, you can even look at this in the past fifty years, or go back to the 1900s to find this was still the model, and perhaps more strict because teachers could physically punish students for speaking out of turn! I bolded the… Read more »
Because, as I say above, “boys get the majority of D’s and F’s in most schools, create 90% of the discipline problems, are four times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD and be medicated, account for three out of four children diagnosed learning disabilities, become 80% of the high school dropouts, and now make up less than 45% of the college population.” Our approaches are not mutually exclusive. I agree with your focus on non-gendered different learning styles. However, what still needs to be addressed is that we do not have an equal number of boys and… Read more »
Lori:
Because, as I say above, “boys get the majority of D’s and F’s in most schools, create 90% of the discipline problems, are four times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD and be medicated, account for three out of four children diagnosed learning disabilities, become 80% of the high school dropouts, and now make up less than 45% of the college population.”
Well said Lori. Exactly right.
Thanks for bringing this issue up.
My problem with this sort of thing is the reductionism of concepts like “the mind of boys” and the resort to half-baked evolutionary theory to “prove” what are probably the author’s prejudices. It doesn’t do you any good to use “weasel words” if the thrust of your argument belies them. I, for example, would have been one of those boys who would have been completely happy to sit in a corner with a pile of books and though boys like me aren`t in the majority (probably), we`re common enough that we don`t deserve to be qualified as “not really having… Read more »
Lori – have you read the updated “Failing at Fairness”? I would love to talk sometime about these issues. I am also very curious about how these factors are affected by the presence of more (or less) male teachers in elementary schools. Do you know any good resources that address that?
Hi Soraya. No, haven’t read it. But here is a comment out of an online review that I want to address: “This book is a meticulous documentation of how our educational system discriminates against girls. An illuminating example is how boys get called on more, even by conscientious teachers who both want to overcome this problem and know they are being observed .” I choose this example to further illustrate my point that there are studies that document absolutely any point of view. Here’s what I learned years ago from a study debunking this exact observation…and who knows which study… Read more »
” I personally get accused all the time on this site of doing the “whataboutthewomenz” thing and since I’m the author of this piece, I’m going to try to keep the focus on the boys. I focus a lot on girls too!” It can still be about the girls too because there are girsl who learn like a lot of boys and they are getting the short end of the stick too. In fact that “girl’s are easier” meme can really harm girls – most often if a boy is ADD, he shows some hyperactivity. A lot of ADD girls… Read more »
“It can still be about the girls too because there are girsl who learn like a lot of boys and they are getting the short end of the stick too.”
Yes, good point!
“Most people, male female or whatever,learn visually. An overhwelming proportion of classroom instruction privileges verbal learners.”
Nope, this is wrong. It’s the opposite. Verbal learning styles are most common, and therefore those with more visual styles are at a disadvantage. What’s needed is more differentiated instruction, and more multi-modal approaches that help verbal, visual, and kinesthetic learners.
Lori,
“Finally, and I can’t believe I am hearing myself say this, I hope we can stick to the topic of what *boys* need educationally. I personally get accused all the time on this site of doing the “whataboutthewomenz” thing and since I’m the author of this piece, I’m going to try to keep the focus on the boys. I focus a lot on girls too!”
Thanks for keeping the topic focused. Having an article about boys does not mean that any attention is taken away from girls (unless we all have ADD lol).
You’re welcome. That’s the goal, anyway!
Couldn’t agree more — my son has always found traditional academic environments too confining. And I also wonder if Ritalin would still be consumed less readily if boys were able to be more physical during the day.
Amen. All kids need PLAY and exercise in order to focus. I was a distracted hyper girl. My son is a distracted hyper boy. Both of us need to be ridden hard. No one gets that in a regular school day.
But they used to. That’s all changed, sadly. Thanks Julie and Pauline.
Thanks for posting this. Aside from it being one of the worst ways to discriminate: denying education – from a broader societal perspective, denying boys educational equality is creating a growing disaster for our society. The worst victims are minority males. There is no real concern about this issue, save an article or book here or there. But, no action. Were girls on the short end of this, it would been addressed by Congressional action years ago, with actual policy change seen at the state and local levels, and evident in schools. We as a society are intentionally and aggressively… Read more »
Eric, I agree that minority boys (esp black and Hispanic) are suffering the most. Racism is a very real thing. But I also see this as a function of poverty, which disproportionately affects racial minorities. Urban schools are horribly overcrowded, with enormous class sizes and teachers often ill-equipped to deal with the very tough issues their students bring with them to school. These are also the schools with the tightest budgets that are forced to lay off the most teachers and make the most severe cuts to physical education, after-school sports, arts, and other outlets that these boys desperately need.… Read more »
“But I also see this as a function of poverty, which disproportionately affects racial minorities. Urban schools are horribly overcrowded, with enormous class sizes and teachers often ill-equipped to deal with the very tough issues their students bring with them to school.” Largely true. So, we are now re-doubling our efforts to ensure that the succeeding generation of men in those areas are even less educated and less equipped to handle life’s responsibilities, financially and otherwise, than the current generation. Great plan, isn’t it? To just let this situation be is incredibly short sighted because, like it or not, those… Read more »
Hear, hear. But we need not to lay ALL of this on the doorsteps of schools. They are so overwhelmed and beleaguered. It takes a whole community, and a proper social safety net…all of the woes of poverty need to be addressed, and help is needed FOR parents and schools. Money is not all of it, but a big part of it.