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.
Boy's will do what boy's will do, you can only hope and pray.
I have two female family members going to college, one studying art the other religion, both at $35,000 per year.
Kind of related topic:
Have you ever heard of characterization?
The easiest example is M*A*S*H. Who's the doofus on Mash? The white, male, conservative, Bible-toting, incompetant, etc..Frank Burns or Charles Winchester.
Today's commercials that have the doofus exclusively being the white male. (Capital One, some beer commercials, etc..)
And in sports. One of my friends in his speech class gave a speech about Title IX and how truly evil it is. The conclusion to his speech was that the only way people would come to watch women's sports in as great of numbers as they do men's sports is if the women were naked in mud pits when they were competing. Believe it or not this didn't go over well with his left of center speech teacher.
Indeed, the WASP is the whipping boy du jour for all the tolerant folks.
Great screen name, we need more like Nast!
"They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology."
Oh, I wonder why? Academe' knows where it can go. Young men can learn without them. Replace them with Internet programs run by the extremely few logical instructors in the sciences.
*Independent Study...one can learn about anything they want to learn. The NET offers courses, endless resources. I'm brushing up on my Spanish using a Free OnLine Spanish review which also offers audio for pronounciation and "accent."
Men tend to become more "scholarly" the more they mature.
If everyone's special then no one is special. Why bother if mediocrity is the best you can aspire to
Without recess it becomes torture to sit through all those boring lessons. Through all my schooling the part I remember best is recess. Somehow the knowledge soaked in during classes but recess was the only real reason to go to school.
Science and Engineering are the last refuge of male education without women. My Civil Engineering class at CMU had 37 boys and 3 girls.
Proof that men are smarter than women!
Also men are naturally more conservative than women and hate the liberal professors trying to shove liberalism down the student's throats.
In the sciences men still outnumber women.
No, no, no. Dodgeball requires adult organization. Manhunt, Capture the Flag, Smear the Queer, Hit the Bat, and any number of other great school recess period games requiring no supervision.
Actually, the main reason that this is happening is the public schools, not radical feminism (though radical feminism is a factor). The grade schools & high schools resent their cirriculum in a thoroughly dull, assembly-line manner. The emphasis is on sitting still in uncomfortable desks, being quiet, waiting for permission to do anything, paying attention regardless of the quality of instruction, and listening without any input. While no children are fit for enduring long-term boredom, boys are especially ill-equipped for this method of instruction. And they learn to hate learning. The shortage of males in colleges are a side effect of this.
Part of the problem is that the Liberal Arts today offers literally nothing to an ambitious lad wanting to succeed in the world. Any man wanting to succeed should do math/science/engineering type work, with a smattering technical and creative writing, economics, statistics, political science, accounting, business law, and a foreign language. Those are the subjects you REALLY need to succeed.
Modern day English, Psychology, Philosophy, and History classes are painful like a root canal without anesthesia. Unfortunately, some sciences are joining them, especially physics, "higher" math, environmental engineering, and science/engineering policy classes. These classes also tend to get flooded with women.
Most Universities haven't a clue what is really needed by their students though, because the Professors have no practical experience. If they did, the curiculums would radically chance.
That hasn't been true for years. Women tend to make more in the same job. The feminists have had to switch to "job equivalency" to argue that women are lower paid than men. For example, they try to equate day care workers (largely female) with construction workers (largely male).
The marketplace will only pay so much for a specific job. If women gravitate toward the lower paying jobs, so be it.
BS. A man that can make $150K a year operating a 120 ton crane will probably not like sissified courses in college meant for women. I have an engineering degree and put up with a lot to get there. Women won't do what I do. They think they can sit on their asses without me to actually work? It was 10 years since I saw a woman on a radar range because they can't use math and physics and make instant calculations and climb around to fix something.
I really want more women to do this with me. They just won't get cold or hot and wear the clothes needed.
This is what men are doing.
It's not only women who do that silly stuff. I have a friend who is beyond himself because his son has incurred tens of thousands of dollars of debt to obtain a PhD in "diversity studies".
The whole University system is flawed now. It's about making money for the colleges and Universities, not about preparing our young people to be useful members of society.
The key is to be able to reason logically and express oneself clearly, verbally and in writing. That is a generic and translatable skill, in any field, although of course critical in mine, the law. English, history and some other sissy subjects you put down can do that, if one masters the art.
Did you have recess? Did you have tests that made up a big part of your grade? Was competition encouraged? Were boys sent to the principal for having "ants in your pants"?
Theres no recess, mostly, tests are only 25 % of the grade (classwork, etc makes up the balance), boys are reemed for being disruptive and put on ridilin (9 out of 12 boys in my kids 4th grade class was on it), and so on. 40 of the top 50 ranked kids in my kids' high school were girls, and none of the administrators would acknowledge that it was a problem.
I went to school 30 yrs ago and I have had a son in the public schools. The classroom has been totally feminized (over 80% of teachers are women, mostly left wing). So.. , the screwed up culture goes hand in hand with the screwed up classroom. Count on it.
We need some affirmative action for boys.
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