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.
I certainly agree with that. If people were to convert most of these useless universities to schools that included actual hands on experience, it would be better. I agree that pointless courses such as art and religion are best studied by one's own and on one's own time, not as part of a required curriculum. It's a complete waste and will not pay bills in the event of an economic catastrophe.
I don't mind colleges and Universities having courses in art, religion, or other quality of life topics. But those should be a minor part of the education.
Most education should lead toward a profession that will increase our economy, and give the student a self-sufficient life-style.
With regards to no-fault divorce, I would like to see Covenant Marriage laws in every state, where men and women could be legally wed under the terms of Covenant Marriage, i.e. real marriage in contrast to what exists otherwise.
True, and the effect on fatherless girls is equally profound.
Not sure here but it sounds like you'd have this be voluntary, where some couples could choose to be under covenant while others could be under the rules we have now. If that is the case I disagree. All marriage should be till death do us part except in the case of proven abuse, abandonment or adultery with the guilty party losing everything. Additionally, those who had no official marriage (one man to one woman of course) would have none of the benefits thereof.
People need to understand that marriage is a binding contract until they die so they had better be sure and they had better work hard to make it good. This would work wonders on the strength of the family. Sure the marriage rate would decrease temporarily but I'm sure it would increase again as society returns to the accepted norms that we had for centuries. One man married to one woman raising children together.
Lets see if I follow this correctly. Speekinout believes that people should be able to negotiate a salary with their employer and if they don't get a satisfactory one they should be free to seek employment elsewhere and you think he's bad for that?
What did I miss? Men and women have been paid the same in the same jobs for years. There's no company with the balls to face the unending legal challenges (which they will certainly lose) to discriminate in pay based on sex for the same job.
What do you miss?
"Probably. Just as there have been many cases where women have "slept their way to the top". "
________
"There's no company with the balls to face the unending legal challenges..."
Sure there is! If employees are not allowed to discuss their rate of pay with other employees, who's to know if they're being underpaid?
speekinout->Probably. Just as there have been many cases where women have "slept their way to the top".
Looking at the whole exchange I still don't see what got you upset. You made a statement of fact (there have been old boys networks keeping women underpaid) and he agreed and replied with another statement of fact (there have been women who've slept their way to the top). Both these statements are provable (I know several women who are where they are ONLY because they slept their way there or filed EEO complaints after seducing the boss)
Small sample bias.
My courses average about 80% male.
And men generally outperform the women.
But my courses relate to a male-dominated industry.
I work in Aerospace, some brilliant females work here, but the ratio is still about 7 males for every female.
you->there certainly have been plenty of cases in this country where old boy networks serve to keep women underpaid and under-promoted."
Wrong! That was quote from the article.
Not at all. It bothers my sense of justice however. But that's not a problem as long as they don't whine about good old boy networks. I'm a huge believer that EEO laws are unconstitutional as they deny the owners of the property (the company in this case) their right to deal with their property as they see fit. If they see fit to hire a slut because she's a slut then they deserve the employee they get.
Obviously the bosses in question were suckered...but they must've enjoyed their experience.
Some have, some haven't. One guy here had his life destroyed because after the slut seduced him she reported it as an eeo violation because he didn't come through with the promotion she thoughts she would get in a suitable time frame. Utter stupidity on his part but cruel viciousness on hers
So I still don't understand what your problem with Speekinout was.
Denigrating terms such as "slut" really don't further your cause or endear you to anyone.
If persons (male or female) wish to engage in immoral conduct, then they must own up to the ramifications and/or responsibility of their actions.
A lot of innocent people suffer at the hands of narrow-minded, ruthless, greedy, power mongers who don't give a rip about the Golden Rule and would rather see you dead than admit any wrongdoing. Clintonistas is a classic example that many in the corporate world see as the road to success.
If she sleeps around she's a slut. You want me to lie to make it sound better? Sorry. I just won't do that.
If persons (male or female) wish to engage in immoral conduct, then they must own up to the ramifications and/or responsibility of their actions.
Exactly correct. Sleep your way to the top, get labelled a slut. (although the penalties should be far worse)
A lot of innocent people suffer at the hands of narrow-minded, ruthless, greedy, power mongers who don't give a rip about the Golden Rule and would rather see you dead than admit any wrongdoing. Clintonistas is a classic example that many some in the corporate world see as the road to success.
While this is true (as modified) I have no idea how this relates to the discussion at hand or why you got upset at speekinout.
"Funny... the femilezis got what the wanted... NOW--- they don't want it!!!!!!
The chickens have come home to roost!!!!"
I'm not a feminazi and I never wanted this. I hate social engineers.
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