The war on boys is reaching mass-slaughter level, it would appear from this Washington Post op-ed. The U.S. educational establishment is beating them down so effectively that they've stopped going to college and prefer to play videogames into their thirties instead of working a decent job. Many other commentators have written about the problem. It's good to see a newspaper like WaPo recognize it.
The piece indicts every element of American education, from co-ed classrooms to industrial-style education. The writer appears to advocate spending more attention on boys so they can catch up with the girls. He wants schools to educate in ways that boys can appreciate. But it was that approach with the girls (create a girl-friendly learning environment) that beat down the boys. If we make the learning place boy-friendly, will the girls then slip?
There is no answer because the problem is based on wrong premises. It would be like trying to figure out how we can make 2-plus-2 equal 7.
America wants to treat boys and girls the same. It wants them to act like they're the same, and it thinks boys and girls will behave the same in the workplace and home. So they educate them the same way. The whole premise--boys and girls are basically identical--is a fiction, and the educational methods are based on that fiction. Until that fiction is rooted out, there is no answer to education's gender problem, and systemic problems will continue to plague it.
Excerpt from article:
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 pre-school 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 . . .
