In the latest issue of Parents Magazine, there was a long article about how to bridge the growing achievement gap between boys and girls. If you haven't been keeping up with the research, this time boys are being left behind at alarming rates.
Even a cursory view of the actual research shows us that boys and girls brain structures are virtually identical. How can this be? After all 58% of college graduates are now girls, and girls are outscoring boys on all standardize tests, except in math and science where the they are neck and neck. It seems to be the conclusion of much of popular culture that our educational system is letting boys fall behind by expecting them to sit down and learn. Parents Magazine seemed to assume that the wetware, the actual brain, is different in a boy than in a girl. But of course, if that were true, then no amount of tricks or strategies would be able to undo boys inherent inability to compete now that girls had been liberated.
How short does our memory have to be to have forgotten that boys used to outperform girls?
Boys weren't allowed to go around playing games all day because they were just naturally active. To the contrary. Through the course of human history, boys have been doing better than girls by simply going to school and sitting through hours upon hours of drab and dry Latin classes, and lectures on algebra. In 1950's America, teachers weren't allowing boys to get involved in their learning by being more active. In fact, boys were expected to sit quietly and listen to their teachers without having any breaks until recess. So how could it be that in today's school environment, where children are more engaged in physical movement while learning, and play to teach, and everything else, suddenly boys brains have become incapable of focusing for the relatively small portion of the class period that they are expected to sit still.
The right blames feminism for all this. They see a conspiracy; an attack on boys. But if there is an attack on boys, it is from the right. By rewarding boyishness in boys, we are doing terrible damage. Americans have told boys that what it means to be a boy is to play wildly and with abandon. Boys play sports and watch TV.
According to the actual science, boys and girls learning abilities and styles are nearly identical until puberty. Whenever a child focuses on one activity for an extended period of time, they are developing executive function and attention span. Executive function is the single biggest factor in academic success, not any magical brain chemistry that is gender specific. And executive function can be learned, just as throwing a baseball or counting to 100. Going to a ballet, playing house, playing tea party, and decorating your dolly's play area are all ways to exercise executive function. Playing sports, playing video games, and watching cartoons are not. In the traditional gender roles, girls have a lot of executive function practice, while boys have a lot less.
In a way, forcing kids to sit through those long boring classes in the 1950's actually was good pedagogy. We now know that they didn't learn what they were supposed to be learning, but they were learning something far more important. They were learning the ability to sit through a boring lecture, a board meeting, a long exam, or a grueling all nighter before a deadline. They were learning executive function.
Childrens clothes today are more gendered than ever. Girls shirts are more pink, and if they are not pink, they always have frills and poofy sleeves (trust me, I've looked). Boys shirts are mostly about sports, military, or (for some reason) dinosaurs. Parents today seem desperate to make sure their children are identified with their proper gender, and if parents are desperate to make that identification, than their children will sense that desperation and do what they can to make their parents happy.
It is time to break the cycle before another generation of boys is lost to gender expectations.
Boys already commit violent crimes in far higher rates, and they already die young because of risky behavior at rates so high that even befriending a boy in early pubescence increases a girls rate of dying from risky behavior also. I am anxious to see what this hypergendered generation of boys is going to do. Hopefully, they will follow in the footsteps of so many generations before them and they will rebel. But this time, they will rebel from the WASPy gender roles that are being foisted upon them by their parents who are so terrified of themselves that they have spent the last decade hiding behind makeup and football helmets instead of trying to liberate themselves.
I write this with my 14-month-old son on my chest. My son is wearing a red and orange striped shirt, a pair of brown sweat pants, and a small pony tail sticking off the top of his head. He is asleep right now, but he will wake up!
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2 comments:
You know what one high school class' material has stayed with me into my 40s? Latin. Certainly not because I am gifted with language. It was Mr. Kozacka, the very old-school teacher and former priest, who was so strict that he would send someone to the principal's office for speaking without raising her hand. I had a few "fun" teachers, who's classes I enjoyed, but not one of them forced me to pay attention like Mr. Kozacka. I dreaded his classes. And I learned more in his class than in any other - and twenty-something years later I still remember the rules of Latin.
I doubt that he could have discussed pedagogy per se, with him it was all about being "proper" and "respectful," but that man knew how to teach. Not everything "old school" was off-base, eh?
As I recall, an argument commonly advanced against educating girls in the 19th century was that they were too flighty and therefore not suited to the rigors of academic life. Interesting how the tables are turning and suddenly parents are being that boys aren't keeping up because they just aren't "developmentally ready" to still still and learn. It was bull then and it's bull now.
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