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've got liberal friends (profs, lawyers, etc) who have pulled their kids out of very highly regarded public schools becuase they dont like the environment (no irony in their eyes, of course). You ought to try reading about the "enigma" of an educational system that ranks among the bottom among western nations, and put all biases aside, if you can.
You are right. I don't know what is going on in the classroom. It is rather easy to fashion an explanation as to sub par performance in secondary education in general. It is much harder to explain the gender differential. I just don't get it. Nothing in my experience gives me any traction at all, and the facile explanations offered up here and elsewhere leave me cold. Color me skeptical.
My, truer words have not been spoken in some time, but the people won't catch on to your exposition, particularly if third parties {government} are footing much of the expenses.
If you went to seperate facilities for boys and girls, my guess is that would help close the gap, but perhaps not entirely. There is definitely something about the current secondary school classroom that discourages boys (post 59 lists just a few things,). You can pretend thats just hogwash right wing blather, but the proof's in the pudding, dont you think?
But that's us (the taxpayers) who are paying for this system. It sounds like you are one of the few who know how little we get for this money.
Happy new year to you.
I don't know...my 25 year old stepson, a tile setter, makes
about $50 an hour. College isn't the only option.
I don't know what your point was, except that you seem very angry about something I said.
Happy New Year to you, too.
That is right. I had more Bull$hit classes than ones in my major. Heck, most of High School teachers could not teach their way outside of 3 sided wet box.
I don't remember getting 3 recesses a day, but how about being able to run and play and expend energy after school for several hours too? These days, so many kids to go a daycare, where again it's structured and they can't use their energy and their imaginations like we used to. I think boys especially need time to build (and destroy!) things.
Excellent -
About 99.9% of all TV commercials portray any & all male adults as fools
Women (wives & girlriends) and teenagers are all geniuses laughing at the white male jerk (breadwinner)
Who in media, advertising, PR, TV creates, writes, produces, sells, buys this garbage?
Male homos, lesbians, radical liberals, NAMLA scum, ACLU, NAACP types
Back a few years ago at a gay/lesbian national convention of nationwide journalists are little alleged NYT "man" spoke before the convention
He stated that homosexuals at the New York Times were 75% the 99.9% radical lefties at the NTYz that controlled daily "budget meetings", headlines, stories to be covered/ written/ edited/ published, agendas, political bias, editorial page, front page content.
As I know journalists at the NYT and several other large print, TV, and radio entities I am well aware of what they face every day and how the game is rigged.
I know how they think and why; what education most have, how editors and management are chosen and why
In the media you will find the highest rates of drug use/abuse/alcoholism, homosexuality, AIDS rates, employee turnover, divorces, early death rates, "burnout", etc.
Ethics, truth, morality is a joke -
"Scoops", "leaks", "exposes" - all in the radical leftist social and political agenda and rulebook
"I'm studying journalism to change things......" - a typical mindset
Most in the MSM that I have known would toss their grandmather under a bus to get a "good story"
They all are going to "someday write my novel(s)/book(s)"
Going to a dinner party with NYT editors and reporters is a unique experience
Going to a simple social party of press clones is much the same
Can you/we trust the MSM?
Does the MSM trust Bernie Goldberg (CBS), Bob Woodward (WP), Judy Miller (NYT) now?
They trust and stand behind and defend Jason Blair and Walter Durante (both NYT!) more........
A while ago since I wrote for several large newspapers or did TV commercials - and everything is much worse now - witness the tanking subscription and ad numbers and "layoffs/firings"- and the panicky Rather/Mapes style we see now that "creates" or "makes" the news
(no female journalists have been tortured, maimed, injured, killed in the writing this FR post)
This should annoy a few in the media -
I'm wondering: do you blow off your work now if it doesn't interest you?
All teenagers think they know what they need to know, but none of them do. Thus, basing education on making things interesting is going to (and already has, in my opinion) create a generation or more of people that won't do something unless it interests them. This leads to very mediocre and unprofessional work product.
When I was in HS and a good musician even then, I thought music theory was all key and time signatures, note reading, scales, etc. I learned it (at least that much) but didn't really concern myself with learning more than what I thought I needed because I wasn't interested. Later, when I got serious on the piano, I learned what I missed by not going deeper in theory. The stuff mentioned above is very basic. Theory and harmony are the foundation for an instrument such as the piano. What I learned later could have come in handy way back when. So, because of my ignorance, I didn't learn what I really would have liked to have learned.
Thanks for that reference. I perused some of it and agree, this guy seems to have it sorted out pretty well. In essence: educators don't educate these days, they socialize.
Blame it on his mom. :)
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