The disappearing male, In College Classrooms, Men are Missing

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.

Probably another reason military recruiters aren't wanted on campuses. They're taking the best and most motivated young men, and the colleges and universities are left with the unmotivated, unpatriotic and anti-American youth. Just like the professors that instruct them!

It is a riddle wrapped in mystery

Bull, Torie (see post 59). A lot has changed in the classroom, some of it subtle, some not. I mean, really, if most of the teachers and the union itself is run by "independent women", wouldn't you expect the classroom to reflect that?

Of course, theres too many fatherless households with uninvolved fathers and too many heavily involved liberal women(in the NEA and the voting booth). It's a numbers thing, not a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in pretzel.

With a couple of exceptions, the best teachers I had were women in secondary school, and three of them really made a difference, along with one male teacher. Of course, back in the dark ages, women or talent were teachers, rather than lawyers, or MD's or MBA's. I don't think one can blame it all on drugs either. In fact, students were not disruptive at all when I was in school, male or female. Some tuned out, but were not disruptive, and my public school high school in Los Angeles took in some lower middle class neighborhoods. The public school junior high school was much more elite (mostly upper middle class), and the grammar school was an elite private school, I must admit.

You really think males failing is due to the ideology of female teachers? Heck, most of my teachers were liberal, and I loved it. I went after them. The conflict was the best drug of all; it gave me a high. Your thesis of poor male performance vis a vis women just doesn't ring true to me.

The piece makes no mention of the liberalism and feminist bigotry that saturate today's educational institutions. Those are huge omissions.

I live near a college. A few years ago, I walked into the local coffee shop/art house to find a college art history class in progress in the back room. The female instructor was lecturing on how objectification of women in art degraded women. Her thesis was that depiction of the nude female form in art was one way that males had subjugated women through the ages. Her questions to the male students made them answer for the evils that "men" had done. When not mumbling their answers to her questions, the boys squirmed in their chairs and looked at the floor. She did quite an effective job of humiliating them. It went on and on, a transparent abuse of her power.

Gurian's comments don't touch on what was wrong with that class. The students signed up to learn about art, but instead received feminist indoctrination at the hands of a bigot, and were subjected to intentional humiliation for their sex. From conversations with students and faculty, I've received the impression that what I heard was not unusual. No wonder they can't hang on to their male students.

Feminism has changed our country. Political correctness runs amok. Our founding fathers are treated as evil slaveholders. The military is banned from recruiting at many law schools. Mothers are banning recruiters from their homes that wish to recruit their sons. I'm not against equality, but this is not equality.

I don't think the problem really stems from expecting boys to sit still in a classroom and learn - boys could do that just fine when I went to school 30plus years ago,

I agree. I started school over fifty years ago, and we did just fine. Class of thirty, rarely a discipline problem, old ladies teaching, we stood quietly in line, didn't get out of our seats unless permitted, waited for breaks to go to the bathroom, ran around like crazy at morning recess, lunch hour, afternoon recess. Hmmm....Maybe there's something there to look at...how many kids now get a recess three times a day and are more or less required to go outside, run and scream and chase each other around? How many have physically demanding gym class three times a week?

These pop psychologists overlook the obvious because they just don't know very much about real life.

Maybe this blog excerpt has something to do with it too:

Dear current Management-Generation of Cubicle Land, please understand that:

1. My generation was misinformed—by elders and fortune—about the value of our college degrees. $120,000 of your/our money now buys, career-wise, just a hair more than your free high-school diploma used to. As many of my peers now lament, “A law degree is the new B.A.” We’re the best-educated generation in American history, yet the job requirements haven’t changed...

3. Are you aware of how little time it actually takes us to do things?

4. If you’d let us, we could make the computer system work right.

[...]

For many college students, the first thing they discover upon graduation is how low-paying and low-skill the job market is for them. If that information ever filters back to high school students or parents, maybe they will think twice about paying top dollar for tuition.

-- from http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/06/overqualified.html

Why didn't the males take the teach on? Why?

They were passive. Their answers ranged from "I dunno" to regurgitated feminist boilerplate intended to placate her. If I had to guess, I'd say the students were just trying to get through the damn class and get the damn credits.

I have wondered if I should have taken her on myself.

[...about the DOOFUS...]

Pardon me for intruding on this thread. I completely
agree with your observation about the image of white
males in TV. Nearly EVERY commercial, the female is
pretty and bright and the boss. Her male partner is
homely and dumb and relies on her for instructions on
how to do everything.

To me... if this chick were so together, she would
have an EQUAL for a mate. To me, she looks like the
loser... too inferior to attract and winner.

This is a good example as to why men don't go to college, because they get this negative BS both ways.

First they accused men of being born rapists and then when the men walk away from this BS, these bigots try to say how the men have no future if they don't go to college.

I know of more successful men of my generation (I am 25 years old) personally who dropped out of college than who completed college.

The classroom has changed.Pedagogy has changed, expectations has changed. You have been out of the classroom for years and yet you keep coming back to anecdotes about your favorite female teachers of 30 yrs ago. You havent a clue, Im afraid.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.