Why are boys disengaging from school?
Have boys changed, or has the education system changed?
In Ali Carr-Chapman’s TEDx talk, she lays out the reasons boys are tuning out in school and offers a plan for re-engaging them in a way that actually works.
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Phenomenal Ted Talk. MOSTLY. I was with her 100% until about minute 12. Until then, Bravo! We MUST change the culture of schools and re-engage boys in learning. She mentioned many ways of doing so that I agreed with. What I DISAGREE with is improving/increasing educational gaming. Nope. This is not the answer. Neurologically, it is harmful. But until she said that, I was cheering, and there is much to be praised in this video. I have often said that today’s co-ed schools are girls’ schools that boys go to. This must change in every respect.
Educational gaming to the level of large budget games such as World of Warcraft, etc would be incredibly beneficial. Where are the studies showing it is harmful? The military use games now for educational purposes. Educational multiplayer games could be a great idea for out of the box, engaging team based activities (make sure you also have outside activities too) and potentially do activities they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Maybe have the class build n run a city, games that require budgeting, strategy games that encourage them to think. It doesn’t have to be a shootemup or violent game at all.
I know 100% in my heart that I could have learned quite a lot from educational gaming if it was anywhere near the level of the other games I play. VR simulation games would be a major benefit to secondary school kids where they could learn how various machines work, how to drive them, etc. I would have loved to have a good quality tractor simulation as the real version wasn’t available in any schooling I did.
Completely agreed, Lori. Her diagnosis has a great deal to recommend it, especially in its comments regarding the failure to understand boy culture. However, games REALLY are not the answer here. They are a quick fix for many of boys’ psychological needs, but they fail to meet those psychological needs in a manner that transmutes them into socially empowering strengths, and direct boys’ quest for the meeting of such needs away from the contexts where they will be much powerfully meet and fruitfully rewarded. A need for stimulation, competition, struggle, and independent attainment can be met by the video game, but it is a poor match for many of the other ways in which this need can be addressed, ways that could enrich and develop boys’ characters and strengths.
This is something that I have argued before, but it strikes me that the root problem may be more directly a matter of educational ends than it is one of educational means. What are our schools trying to produce? It seems to me that we have idealized an inclusive, affirming, sensitive, non-competitive, non-conflictual, and quiet classroom of conformist students, increasingly celebrating collaborative and egalitarian forms of teamwork, and a clearly defined curriculum, with educational success measured by grades and tests. Such a system privileges the student who can sit still, follow instructions without question, and absorb and regurgitate all that is taught. It disadvantages the student who is very independent-minded, self-driven, who thrives on competition, conflict, and challenge, rougher forms of interaction, and benefits from high physical and situational stimulation.
The first form of classroom suits the stereotypical girl down to the floor, while being a source of deep frustration to the stereotypical boy. This was certainly my experience. The stereotypical girl thrives in a situation where she is conforming to clearly defined expectations in an affirming environment. The stereotypical boy thrives in a situation where he is gaining the ability to stand on his own two feet and fight his corner in a context of non-vicious challenge and ritual conflict.
A teacher friend of mine recently commented on her experience in this area. Troubled by the degree to which the boys in her class were falling behind, she started introducing more debates, discussion, competition, chances for disagreement, and ‘taking the floor’ into the class, and gave more control of the classroom environment to the students. She described the result as one of heavily engaged boys and girls who were lost, requiring a readjustment to create a better balance. Most of the girls just wanted and needed to follow directions, but the boys wanted to have the freedom to think and act for themselves, and needed the space, freedom, and training to do so. Of course, this is unwelcome for teachers and an education system that wants to maintain a great degree of control over the educational results and contexts of their students. Conformist students are just so much easier to handle.
And this is the key point: it seems to me that we have idealized the conformist student and the non-conflictual classroom NOT because they produce better educational results, but because they are easier for teachers to handle, are easier to conform to a universal model, enable a greater degree of indoctrination, and lead to far more commensurable results (it is much harder to measure independence and creativity of thought and the ability to fight one’s ideological corner than it is to measure absorption of the curriculum and the ability to write a fairly safe essay). A vigorous society needs independent thinkers, agentic actors, and highly gifted ideological non-conformists, but our education systems are very poor at producing such persons.
This is a pity because such persons are almost invariably the most successful and dynamic individuals in any society. They are the inventors, the creators, the trailblazers and pioneers, the leaders, the entrepreneurs, and the visionaries. These are the people who will create the society of the future. They tend to dominate in the areas of wealth, power, and influence. I wonder whether society’s alienation of such individuals and failure to develop and to harness their gifts to serve the whole society comes back to haunt it in the future, as such individuals without a sense of any debt to the wider society start to exercise their talents in profoundly selfish ways.
The stereotypical boy would benefit greatly were we to shake things up and produce a less conformist and less stifling system, with fewer determined expectations of students, an environment where thinking and acting independently was encouraged and celebrated, and confident identities were forged through a benign challenge and struggle with peers and authority figures in competition and disputation. This would represent a vast improvement over the mothering systems that we often have today, with their focus on empathy, validation, equality, lack of conflict, sedentariness, conformity, and compliance, all things that have a sort of claustrophobic effect on many boys’ spirits and developing sense of masculine identity.
Great comment! I was way too tired to put this kind of time into it!
I want to take your comment and present it to our all school meeting on opening day. It’s all true.
Why are people so against gaming? Just the creativity alone that can be involved in games is a major benefit. I think educational games would be a great asset to education alongside more traditional methods, especially as a fairly cheap computer can have enough power to have interactive games showing places or activities that could be far outside of a budget of a school. A high quality engineering simulation game to show large scale forces acting on objects could be used alongside the old paddle pop stick bridges whilst also giving creative freedom to those students as a project could be to design a working bridge.
In the future, VR simulations will be a major source of education (zomg gaming!) and I am flabbergasted as to how people can’t understand this.