Letters to the Editor
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can't answer for the past
I only know what I see now. In my son's school, and I think this is pretty typical, 80 percent of discipline problems come from boys. 80 percent of kids on ritalin or ADHD medicine are boys. What this tells me is we are not creating an atmosphere conducive to boys learning as well as they can. I know female teachers have been around for many years. I am not sure why this is a problem. Maybe it always has been and we just didn't care. Maybe it's gotten worse with less physical education/recess time. I just know what I see now...and there is a disparity, and a lack of tolerance, especially at the elementary level, of boy-like behaviors (physical play, twitching/moving in class)....and more tolerance for girl behaviors like talking. We are different, we learn and process information differently. It's nice that we are realizing this and working to create a successful learning atmosphere no matter the gender.
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Education is based on ethnicity and economics....
OF COURSE.
If you are in a financially deprived situation all your life...you would see going to college as more as a threat then an advance....
Like my mother....who went to Bloomsburg University AND Penn college, when she was 21...she's 49 and she still owes thousands in student loans...and the amazing career in child psychology put her in an even bigger debt because it turned out to be not so rewarding.
As for my aunt...who never went to college but has worked in construction for 10 years...is doing just great.
Women just need to get more interested in manual labor...it's really not that hard...c'mon.
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What has changed?
One big change has been that full-day kindergarten is now standard. And I do mean FULL DAY. As in, long periods of worksheets and other seat work for 5-year-olds. If you have a boy, you are now discouraged from sending him to kindergarten until he is 6. Why? Because what they used to call 1st grade is what goes on in kindergarten now, and the old kindergarten is now preschool.
Everyone can learn to sit still and do seat work eventually - but the expectations are higher and higher for younger and younger kids.
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You don't even have to look to Little House -
in the 1950s boys were expected to sit still and behave in class. And they did. If a child of either gender is a slower developer, keep them out of kindergarten for another year. Children clearly ARE capable of following instructions and not running around like little hellions.
Perhaps the problem is not that schools have changed but that parents have. Send them out to play for several hours in the afternoon, don't let 'em back in until dinner and if they're not muddy they're doing it wrong. Kids of both genders have a ton of energy to burn off, and if they're sitting at home playing XBox, they'll burn it off in class when they should be learning. Stop being overly fearful of child abduction and smothering active children. The world is not a more dangerous place than it was when you were a kid.
Anyway, I find the preceding discussion about gendered jobs most amusing, if only because the utter lack of understanding of basic economics is baffling and hilarious. You're men, shouldn't your DNA be scripted to understand big, important issues like that? Guess not.
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Dangerous?
Smallfox, you're quite right. Does anybody have any idea on how to convince people that the world isn't more dangerous?
Maddog, earlier you mentioned the racial disparity in discipline cases. I've read mentions of that before, but I've never read an exlanation. I don't quite understand it. Could you elaborate?
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meganc, sure.
It does appear that there have been developments in primary education that are to the detriment of children in general and, maybe, boys in particular. If nothing else, kids don't appear to be growing up with much in the way of a comprehensive education, despite being shuttled off to school earlier and earlier.
I brought up the "Little House" books in response to the popular trope that boys are not capable of sitting still and listening to the teacher and learning stuff, because there is something inherent in the male brain that prevents it. In discussions like this, that argument pops up all the time -- boys will be boys, they are physically incapable of sitting still, they are biologically compelled to be rowdy and disruptive because it's their nature, and any attempt by anyone to curb that behavior is a sign that the Evil Feminazi Gynocracy and its armies of newfangled female teachers are just trying to turn little boys into little girls. But... you better believe that the Founding Fathers were expected to sit quietly in school without fidgeting and memorize indigestible chunks of boring information, and nobody would ever tut-tut about their victimization at the hands of our feminist overlords -- there weren't any feminist overlords yet!
Throughout history boys have been expected to maintain standards of decorum in school that make even the strictest classrooms of today look like Romper Room. Boys have excelled under those circumstances; furthermore, in places like western Europe and Japan and China and Israel they continue to do so.
Blaming structured classrooms and expectations of quiet attentiveness for boys' failure is transparently bogus. If boys are failing, it's not because of their Y chromosomes, it's not because of female teachers and it's not because they are expected to sit still and organize their thoughts carefully. History bears this out.
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"you better believe that the Founding Fathers were expected to sit quietly in school"
Yes, but not when they were 5.
And most of them were homeschooled anyway. The mark of privilege back then.
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boys can be beaten into sitting quietly while most girls love to sit quietly and dote on powerful females i.e teachers
the fact that boys can be made to sit still doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.
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More PC Pseudoscience from the AAUW
Of course there is a boy crisis, but it's not something the AAUW or other feminist groups want to acknowledge. Kind of like female-initiated domestic violence or the influence of career choice on salary rates for women.
From the Civic Report, No. 48 April 2006 by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
* The overall national public high school graduation rate for the class of 2003 was 70 percent.
* There is a wide disparity in the public high school graduation rates of white and minority students.
* Nationally, the graduation rate for white students was 78 percent, compared with 72 percent for Asian students, 55 percent for African-American students, and 53 percent for Hispanic students.
* Female students graduate high school at a higher rate than male students. Nationally, 72 percent of female students graduated, compared with 65 percent of male students.
* The gender gap in graduation rates is particularly large for minority students. Nationally, about 5 percentage points fewer white male students and 3 percentage points fewer Asian male students graduate than their respective female students. While 59 percent of African-American females graduated, only 48 percent of African-American males earned a diploma (a difference of 11 percentage points). Further, the graduation rate was 58 percent for Hispanic females, compared with 49 percent for Hispanic males (a difference of 9 percentage points).
* The state with the highest overall graduation rate was New Jersey (88 percent), followed by Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, each with 85 percent. The state with the lowest overall graduation rate was South Carolina (54 percent), followed by Georgia (56 percent) and New York (58 percent).
* Each of the nation's ten largest public high school districts, which enroll more than 8 percent of the nation's public school student population, failed to graduate more than 60 percent of its students.
* Among the nation's 100 largest public school districts (by total enrollment size), the highest graduation rate was in Davis, Utah (89 percent), followed by the Ysleta Independent School District in Texas (84 percent). Among the 100 largest districts, the lowest graduation rate was in San Bernardino City Unified district (42 percent), followed by Detroit (42 percent) and New York City (43 percent).
The gender gap extends across all major racial groups. Thankfully, wise women and men realize we are connected to each other through our families - no reasonable person want to slight a disadvantaged gender, especially in the educational arena.
Bigoted feminists and the divisive and incompetent AAUW celarly feel otherwise.