Posted on 12/31/2005 5:35:13 PM PST by Coleus
IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys.
Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at these words - this is not really who I am."
That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."
Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.
The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"
It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry - men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and George Bushes - and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.
But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their 30s, by which time the world has passed many of them by.
Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women, and more likely to engage in crime. He'll be more likely to develop substance abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, since men who don't attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock, and are more likely not to pay child support.
When I worked as a counselor at a federal prison, I saw these statistics up close. The young men and adult males I worked with were mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that didn't promote education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they had attended. They were passionate people, capable of great love and even possible future success. Many of them told me how much they wanted to get an education. At an intuitive level, they knew how important it was.
Whether in the prison system, in my university classes, or in the schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem with how we teach and mentor boys that I call "industrial schooling," and that I believe is a primary root of our sons' falling behind in school, and quite often in life.
Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids). For many kids, this system worked - and still works. But from the beginning, there were some for whom it wasn't working very well. Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for them.
Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys. Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a lot of boys "in line" - competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child's education.
Now, however, the boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly clear. Many families are barely involved in their children's education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of 30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of preschool and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered, or "unmotivated." They will no longer do their homework (though they may say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it, they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or computers), and overemphasize those.
Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them - they don't, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents, and others how differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT scan of a boy's brain and a girl's brain, showing the different ways these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me, "Wow, no wonder we're having so many problems with boys."
Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male, yielding statistics such as these:
The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.
Boys and men constitute the majority of high school dropouts, as high as 80 percent in many cities.
Boys and young men are 1½ years behind girls and young women in reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the workplace).
Grasping the mismatch between the minds of boys and the industrial classroom is only the first step in understanding the needs of our sons. Lack of fathering and male role models take a heavy toll on boys, as does lack of attachment to many family members (whether grandparents, extended families, moms, or dads). Our sons are becoming very lonely. And even more politically difficult to deal with: The boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the last 20 years (an emphasis that I, as a father of two daughters and an advocate of girls, have seen firsthand), has muddied the water for child development in general, pitting funding for girls against funding for boys.
We still barely see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change from an industrial culture to a postindustrial one. We want them to shut up, calm down, and become perfect intimate partners. It doesn't matter too much who boys and men are - what matters is who we think they should be. When I think back to the kind of classroom I created for my college students, I feel regret for the males who dropped out. When I think back to my time working in the prison system, I feel a deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys whom we still have time to save.
And I do think we can save them. I get hundreds of e-mails and letters every week, from parents, teachers, and others who are beginning to realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and need help. These teachers and parents are part of a social movement - a boys' movement that started, I think, about 10 years ago. It's a movement very much powered by individual women — mainly mothers of sons — who say things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't know anyone who doesn't have a son struggling in school," or, "I thought having a boy would be like having a girl, but when my son was born, I had to rethink things."
We all need to rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting, and overly medicating our boys, as if we can change this guy into the learner we want. When we decide - as we did with our daughters - that there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in college again.
We must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and need help.
It's just that the war against boys is so apparently true, especially in our schools.
College degrees, when executed properly, can simply be an education into how to think. How to research. How to analyze. These are valuable tools which will serve anyone well over the duration of their career. I have a BA in Classical Civilization with an emphasis in Classical greek language. Now I sell drugs (legally). My education was indispensable in developing my ability to communicate and relate to others, as well as to analyze data and clinical research.
Though this is anecdotal evidence, I believe it is representative of what a college education should be. One of my philosophy professors said that one should become an expert in anything, say medieval french literature. It's not the topic that's important, it's developing the ability to study, to analyze, and to research. If you can do that with medieval French literature, you can do it with anything.
In the end, success depends almost not a whit upon which courses you took, but simply upon your ability to apply yourself and your wits to the task at hand.
bump for publicity
Just about EVERY ONE OF YOU (ironically arguing about the abuse of boys and men in today's society) is PARROTING THE LEFT_WING_COMMIE_ANTI-MAN movement!!!
LISTEN CLOSELY BECAUSE I WILL NOT REPEAT MYSELF!!!
ANIMALS ARE MALE OR FEMALE.
*PEOPLE* ARE MEN AND WOMEN.
IF YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT A MAN, SAY M-A-N!!!!
NOT MALE BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT AN ANIMAL LIKE THE LIBERALS WANT YOU TO BE.
God Damn It! (Sorry, am watching South park right now).
But this is serious. Using the term 'male' depersonalizes us down to the level of animals.
We are not 'male' or 'female' - we are MEN and WOMEN.
Resist the communization of our language!!! Don't use the language the ENEMIES OF CIVILIZATION have created in order to help facilitate our destruction.
Thank you for your time. (This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Ever see an old B&W movie where men were "males" instead of "MEN"? No? Didn't think so.
THINK, MAN!!! (and woman), THINK G-D-IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)(metaphorically slaps you across the cheek)...
gets off his soapbox...
The truth is that people don't go to watch men's sports either -- except football and basketball. Women's basketball gets some audience. For nearly all other sports (except special circumstances like Lacrosse at Johns Hopkins, or hockey at University of North Dakota, etc.) it's all friends and family in the stands. The main problems with Title IX are that (a) football is not exempt -- it costs a lot of money but it also makes a lot of money, it pays for itself oftentimes and subsidizes the other sports as well as requiring an extraordinary number of players and (b) cheerleading is not in the mix -- that would help alleviate the disparity, and it should be added to the list of sports just because it really operates as one.
There's always grad school!
I have a degree in M.E. I REALLY don't think college is "all that". There is not a place in the whole world like this country where the opportunity is still available for one to strike out on their own and start a business....with or without a college education.
"The truth is that people don't go to watch men's sports either -- except football and basketball. Women's basketball gets some audience. For nearly all other sports (except special circumstances like Lacrosse at Johns Hopkins, or hockey at University of North Dakota, etc.) it's all friends and family in the stands. The main problems with Title IX are that (a) football is not exempt -- it costs a lot of money but it also makes a lot of money, it pays for itself oftentimes and subsidizes the other sports as well as requiring an extraordinary number of players and (b) cheerleading is not in the mix -- that would help alleviate the disparity, and it should be added to the list of sports just because it really operates as one."
Hmmmmmmm...you've never been to the Spanish Moto-GP hugh?
How about a Brit SBK race?
just kidding....
Happy New Years FRiend.
Might be, but that is what the State of California. Latinos are a protected race.
And it is the feminists who will fight cheerleading becoming a sport all day long.
I'm not putting down English and History. I think they are quite important.
But the manner of teaching them leaves MUCH to be desired. I find that most students don't learn grammar until they take a foreign language. And most students know zilch about history. You will learn far more history by reading good books on your own than you will in a history class at most schools.
Too much time is spent pondering and essaying on the meaning of gender, racism, homelessness, poverty, etc., etc.
There are plenty of women in two engineering subjects - environmental engineering and chemical engineering.
Every other engineering major seemed to have about a 10 to 1 ratio at best at the schools I attended (CMU and Univ. of Delaware). Friends at places like Drexel, Penn State, Univ. of Wisc., Rutgers, MIT, reported similar ratios.
The 10 to 1 man to woman ratio in engineering can also be confirmed by walking into any local engineering constulting firm or construction office or the engineering department of a major corporation. After subtracting the women in administrative support posititions, you'll find about 1 woman working as an engineer for every 20 men - AT BEST.
must be a union job...
Would you like untrained construction laborers just randomly hopping into large cranes to lift objects as the need arises? I work in construction and I definitely wouldn't. For what those guys do, they deserve every penny of what they earn.
It starts in kindergarten. The great majority of teachers are women and they teach in a way that appeals to women. Furthermore, the content of school work is more and more skewed toward women. A very large percentage of college graduates are in psychology, social work, and teaching--all women's fields. The "harder" fields_-science, math, engineering--are still male dominated. Boils down to the fact that guys just don't like to compete in girls' games. More than that: guys just don't like to compete with gals.
It requires as much skill as flying an airplane. and those guys don't get paid peanuts.
In the first office I worked in, recent female hires made more money than me even though they were only working 2 days per week and were on the baby-track. Needless to say, once I had enough experience gathered, I departed said company for higher paying pastures.
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