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e
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On fire! |
Location: currently So Cal
Registered: May 2002
Messages: 1179
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For the past several months I have been obsessing over this particular question. Certainly there is considerable evidence to indicate that there is a problem educating men/boys. But is this "boy crisis" in educationdue to some innate biological functioning that gives women the advantage, or is it due to changes in the education system that give the advantage to women, or might it be due to socialization and the redefining of the maculine roles in society?
However, there is a lot of disagreement, mostly from feminist groups who claim that the "boy crisis" doesn't really exist. Instead the reason boys are doing so poorly in school is actually a racial problem and one of socioeconomics. Middle class and upper class caucasian boys perform equally as well as girls in those classes and only Hispanic males and African American males of lower socioeconomic stature perform below girls with similar backgrounds.
Refuting this is mounting evidence that boys are being outperformed by girls in nearly every subject at every level of education across the board in the industrialized world. Girls begin school with better reading and language abilities and equal ability in math. Throughout school the gap in reading and language widens. 4 times as many boys are diagnosed with ADHD and are medicated. Boys get 70% of the Ds and Fs. Boys drop out at higher rates. Nearly 60% of college enrollment is women and women graduate from college at a higher rate. more than half of all graduate students are women and women outnumber men in medical school and law school.
Just wondering what you guys might think of the changing roles of men in the world. With women about to become dominant in society at all levels because of better education, what will become of men?
Think good thoughts,
e
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I suspect that the tough guy macho culture of men - the 'boys don't cry' myth and the objectification of women in the lad magazines may be what is holding boys back but there are undoubtedly differences between the sexes and no good reason to expect equality in everything.
My daughters both work in a private girls' school which has a junior school attached that takes boys up to about eleven. They are going to try to recruit boys into the whole school and use what they call the diamond plan of eduction which teaches the sexes separately for some subjects (where the differences in attainment between the sexes are large and noticeable) and some in mixed classes. I watch with interest to see how well this works.
My own education was exclusively for boys. There wasn't even any dramatic activity or a joint dance once a year with the local girls' school. When I left school I literally did not know a single girl within three years of my age. Strange how times change.
My prejudice is to say the differences are exaggerated and what I would like to do is treat everyone as an individual and try to discover their needs and supply them so that each can stretch themselves and each find things they can excel at. Of course the question I beg is "How?"
Love
Anthony
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I could probably write several pages on this, but have to leave to go to work soon!
I don't think there's any evidence that women are intrinsically more intelligent than men, nor vice versa. For many years the perceived problem here was the "under-achievement" of girls ... over the past 30 years that's changed and it's now the "under-achievement" of boys. This has coincided with radical changes in both the content and the format of our formal education and assessment, and massive social changes. I rather think that averaged across time and across cultures there's precious little in it.
I would, however, agree that as we in the west currently have our system organised, women tend to better at the "academic" thing. Whether this will eventually be reflected in a shift in the way power in our society is organised I'm not sure. Personally - having fought consistently for equal treatment including the removal of both direct and indirect discrimination (on grounds of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religion, disability) for all my adult life, I very much hope that we can stop the pendulum swinging when it reaches the centre point!
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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This could be an interesting thread to which I could contribute a lot. The reason I hesitate is that what I have to say stems from personal experience and talking to friends and former colleagues and is not quantifiable or attributable to any particular research, which leads to the risk of its being summarily dismissed by certain posters and a 'why bother in the first place?' feeling from me. Often when such research reaches the press it is greeted by us old sweats from the chalkface with the reaction it's research to confirm the bleeding obvious.
One such example from last year was when it was discovered that boys are turned off by women teachers because of the pitch of their voices and a tendency to nag whereas with male teachers a look will suffice. Immediately women teaching union officials took umbrage.
Women are not more or less intelligent than men. Our intelligence is in general different and in particular instances crosses boundaries. This has nothing to do with sexuality btw.
I remember from university the swatty girls who wrote down and stored everything. The blokes appeared more casual and when it came to exams swatted hard. The results and the degree classes were in the end equitably distributed.
In school coursework has taken over from, for want of a better term, learn and apply. This suits the girls better, therefore better GCSE and A-level results for girls.
Co-education works against boys, particularly for this reason as in the short term girls get better results and because boys don't compete at that level, they are turned off.
It is argued that girls in a mixed class have a civilising effect on boys. Maybe, but the need to show off often counteracts this, and the first reason for the classroom is to teach and learn school subjects, not teach social graces. That is secondary. These days it appears that the school and the family have both abdicated their responsibities here anyway. The point is that single sex classes learn better than mixed.
The school I was teaching in when I retired was a boys' school turned into a co-ed school, except that such was the political will to become 'co-ed' that the boys were distinctly marginalised and got a raw deal.
I'll stop there for the moment.
Hugs
N
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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Don't get hurt stopping the pendulum! Some of them are a bit closer to wrecking balls than grandfather clocks.
And I agree with you completely. Any difference is probably too small to be important. And both sexes should wash clothes, clean bathrooms, shop for food, cook breakfast, sew clothes, mend motor cars, and have fun.
So, when, at the age of about thirteen, Alison came back from a school trip to France the day after Emily and I drove the car to Inverness and needed her clothes to be washed before going on holiday, she and Sylvia sat in the kitchen reading the instructions for the washing machine! Neither of them had ever washed a single clo since I was around!
Love,
Anthony
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Interesting, Nigel, but you say "the need to show off" and I don't see that there is a need. It's the macho culture and the other things I said that make mixed classes imperfect for some subjects/sexes.
Daughter Alison says you can't comfortably teach physics in mixed classes because the boys hog the equipment and try to dominate everything that goes on. And she had to do it for the years she taught in a state school.
Of course I have no experience, as a pupil, of co-educational education at any level, but I did teach B-tech in IT and evening classes and I have been a school governor for about eight years (during which I didn't learn much!).
In fact really what I know about school education is mostly gleaned from my daughters - one's a teacher and the other works in the school office.
Love,
Anthony
[Updated on: Tue, 13 January 2009 18:05] |
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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I think just different. Women have different priorities from men, different imperatives and are likely to be wired differently in order to maximise the performance of those priorities and imperatives.
Difference is not "more" nor "less", it's just different
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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"The need to show off" is a heterosexual thing I've observed, therefore my gay nature has never needed to get involved with it. However more seriously, isn't the need to show off part of this macho culture?
Hugs
N
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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e
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On fire! |
Location: currently So Cal
Registered: May 2002
Messages: 1179
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I wasn't so much interested in whether people agree or disagree, but WHY they agree or disagree. As with most issues, many of your views are both supported and refuted by research. Btw - anecdotal evidence is perfectly ok even if it isn't all that scientific.
My own opinion is that men and women are more or less equal in terms of overall intelligence, but that there are specific differences that are giving women an advantage in today's society. Brain research is showing that women have more connective pathways between the two halves of the brain and utilize both halves of the brain whereas men use only one half. Women are better able to process more sensory information from different sources all at once, while men tend to attend to one stimulus at a time. This makes women natural multitaskers while men are more linear, step by step thinkers who task switch, rather than multitask. Females also develop language skills (speaking and reading) at an earlier age on average than do males and maintain this advantage throughout the lifespan. Girls also tend to mature socially as well as physically faster than boys and are genrally more prepared to start school at an earlier age giving them an even greater advantage in the classrom.
This is not to say that societal changes haven't affected things wither. I don't buy the feminist arguement that boys are too 'macho' or try to fit into traditional male stereotypes as the reason for their lack of success. Instead I believe that schools (and society in general) have attempted to destroy traditional male roles without bothering to replace these roles with new roles that allow boys/men to utilize their natural tendencies and strengths. Instead the natural tendencies of boys/men have been banished from acceptable society and have not been properly rechanneled. As a result, boys/men have disengaged fromn schools and are currently disengaging from society.
Changes in schools themselves also favor girls. Reduction and/or elimination of recess has eliminated outlets that are important for boys to expend excess energy and to allow them to focus on classroom instruction. Studies show that boys thrive on competition while girls thrive on cooperation. Classrooms today have all but done away with competivie exercises and rely more on cooperation between students as part of the learning process. Schools also utilize fewer labs and field exercises and rely more on the sit still, raise your hand, listen to the teacher, and take notes approach to teaching. Because of their superior language skills and boys need to expend energy through actiivty, this approach naturally favors girls. Studies show that boys learn much better through classroom demonstration, field exercises, and labs.
I found it very intesting that one of you mentioned that your daughters have observed that boys tend to dominate lab classes. It's a perfect examle of how to get boys interested in school and a learnbing situation in which boys thrive. I'm not a proponent of single sex education. I think there are too many benefits to coed classrooms. But perhaps on a limited basis, especially in early years in subjects like language and reading it might work. Because of they ways boys and girls learn things differently, I think there is a danger in single sex education that could be used to justify giving one sex an advantage over the other, especially since it may actually be more expensive to educate boys than girls. While differences between genders can have a huge effect on their success in school, those differences are rather small and both boys and girls would benefit from an educational system that employs a wide variety of teaching methodologies aimed at teaching to both boys and girls.
But what do I know? This is not yet my field of expertise, though with any lick it will be.
Think good thoughts,
e
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Dear e,
I've always used 'gender' as a grammatical term so there is (in some languages) a neuter gender. 'sex' on the other hand is a biological term and there are only two sexes (though it's easy to imagine more as the wonderful Ursula Le Guin has).
I'm sorry to say it grates on me when people use 'gender' as if it were biological. Sorry in the same way I'm sorry I was taught to recognise and notice split infinitives - because I am always being diverted, from what is being said, to the manner in which it is expressed. It's my loss, I think.
I think it is a bit of an overstatement to say that 'boys/men have disengaged from schools and are currently disengaging from society'.
I don't observed that when I go to pick up my grandson, Tom, from school and didn't observe it when I was a governor at my local secondary. What I do notice is that, compared with my own school days in a similar school, there is a LOT more physical contact between the boys.
But I agree with you that boys are probably more expensive to educate properly. Since Bristol state schools are so awful (only two out of 28 get exam results as high as the national average) the grandchildren have to go private and we help. The all boys private schools are noticeably more expensive than the girls'.
Love,
Anthony
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acam wrote:
(snip)
> I'm sorry to say it grates on me when people use 'gender' as if it were biological.
The usual practice - in Anthropology and allied disciplines, at least - is to use "sex" to denote a person's physical attributes. There are usually held to be 2 sexes. However, the variation in in humans is considerable, and includes far more than the usual XX & XY chromosomes (Klinefelter's Syndrome XXY, XYY, "Triple x syndrome", Turner syndrome (single X), XXYY, etc: up to 14 viable variants of sex chromosome arrangement have been found), and there seems to be a category of "other/intersex" in addition to the usual two which is semi-recognised but rarely explicitly commented on.
"Gender" is usually used for a social role, which is nearly always linked in a non-obvious way to sex. Many societies have more than two genders: for example, in parts of India "hijra" (often mistranslated as "eunuch") are a third gender. Wikipedia confirms "Most are physically male or intersex, but some are female".
History is littered with examples of where a persons "sex" and "gender" were at variance - the Pharoah Hatshepsut is an excellent example of a case where a physical female was always shown as being of the male gender (clothing, false beard, etc), because that was the gender-role appropriate to the powerful!
NW
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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Hi Nigel
I agree with a lot of your earlier post, especially about the shift to continuously-assessed work rather than exams.
But I can't - unfortunately - agree that gay men are immune from showing off: I think it's a "boy" thing, not a "straight" thing. (Actually, I think it's an adolescent thing in general, but girls often show off more in terms of possessions than actions). Gay clubs, in my rather limited experience, seem to be full of boys indulging in competitive "look-at-me" posturing!
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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Yes, NW but girls do it too! We thought that we would avoid sexism in our bringing up our daughters. Imagine our surprise at finding a five year old primping in front of the mirror.
But that child's children do it too. I've never been to a gay club, but walking along Canal Street in Manchester I saw enough through the open doors to amaze me!
People who dress like that, even only in a club, could not possibly be fazed by simple nudity! "Look-at-me posturing" is a mild description of what I saw.
I think I have the weakness too.
Love,
Anthony
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Yes, NW.
Perhaps it is special pleading but I'm inclined to think that the twelve unusual combinations of the X & Y chromosomes are rare enough to count as accidents - but I wouldn't want to say that face to face with someone with one of the twelve.
According to Tom Spanbauer's books American Indians had a special category for men who had sex with men, but it seems to me that it was rather dogmatic about excluding people who liked to play it both ways. (Me for example.)
If you decided to change you had to change wholly and permanently.
Love,
Anthony
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Hi NW!
I agree with your point in life in general. What I didn't make clear probably is that I was talking about behaviour in the classroom where the gay boys are unlikely to show off and where the girls' form of showing off is more likely to occur in the playground than in class - unless of course the teacher really has lost control.
Hugs
N
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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Anthony, I want to support you in the dislike of the way gender has attempted to become a synonym of sex. It's part of the way language becomes bowdlerised. It is clear from the three foreign languages I know, French, Latin and German, that there is a mismatch between gender and sex.
At the risk of hi-jacking the thread, split infinitives are ugly and unnecessary and why has 'to play down' become 'to downplay'?
Hugs
N
[Updated on: Wed, 14 January 2009 18:11]
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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Dear Nigel,
Thank you for your support.I will always wear it! (As the goon show had it.)
Love,
Anthony
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acam wrote:
> Yes, NW.
>
> Perhaps it is special pleading but I'm inclined to think that the twelve unusual combinations of the X & Y chromosomes are rare enough to count as accidents - but I wouldn't want to say that face to face with someone with one of the twelve.
As far as I remember, it's about one in every 400 live births ... I don't know how "rare" I'd consider that. But certainly uncommon.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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Cool: I'm sure you're right. My classroom experience is long-ago and single-sex (including, as a lab technician, single-sex classes of girls).
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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I'm old-fashioned enough to be with "Fowler" on this! (H.W. Fowler 'The King’s English, 2nd ed. 1908')
"The 'split' infinitive has taken such hold upon the consciences of journalists that, instead of warning the novice against splitting his infinitives, we must warn him against the curious superstition that the splitting or not splitting makes the difference between a good and a bad writer. The split infinitive is an ugly thing, as will be seen from our examples below; but it is one among several hundred ugly things, and the novice should not allow it to occupy his mind exclusively. Even that mysterious quality, 'distinction' of style, may in modest measure be attained by a splitter of infinitive "
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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I agree. But sometimes a split infinitive really adds value to a sentence. I really like it when that happens.
Other times it is a step too far. To boldly go where no-one has boldly gone before, boldly is not my idea of fun.
But when they really add value, then lets do it. Otherwise they are a construct up with which I will not put.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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>Otherwise they are a construct up with which I will not put.
Lol... Timmy 
I split my infinitives often as a youngster. Thank goodness my mother was an expert with needle and thread. ;-D
Youth crisis hot-line 866-488-7386, 24 hr (U.S.A.)
There are people who want to help you cope with being you.
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And thank you, e, for the marvelous education. Even when I was little I realized there were some differences between boys and girls. Now I have an even better understanding.
Youth crisis hot-line 866-488-7386, 24 hr (U.S.A.)
There are people who want to help you cope with being you.
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I wont to get my two cents worth in here, even if its just worth two cents. There was a time (and not to far in the past) when we turned out of our Universities the cream of the crop, brilliant outstanding young men and women. All Of a sudden we have this influx of Mexicans and socioeconomicly challenged men. They have dumbed down the requirements for University to the point that a rock can get a degree. So the young men of today are saying, "Hell I can do just as good with a HS diploma". At least this gives the Nerds and Geeks a chance to excell.
If you stand for Freedom, but you wont stand for war, then you dont stand for anything worth fighting for.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13800
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We don't have Mexicans. Instead we had Margaret Thatcher, who decided that every minor educational establishment that delivered tertiary education should become a University. Then we lowered educational standards in order to fill the new places that had been created.
Oh, then we had Bristol University who refused for a year to take straight A students on political grounds. This crap was under Blair. It's not to do with party politics.
This is across the two sexes, but we do have an awful lot of Media Studies graduates. Most of them are female. So does that make them more intelligent?
[Updated on: Wed, 14 January 2009 21:49]
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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You are deprived, Timmy!
We had a Mexican. She was an au père for Emily for a year and now has a degree in engineering. Both exceptionally nice and exceptionally clever.
And hard working to boot!
I wish we had more of them!
Love,
Anthony
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Tim said,
>This is across the two sexes, but we do have an awful lot of Media Studies graduates. Most of them are female. So does that make them more intelligent?
Media Studies is frequently derided as an easy subject taken by people who are too stupid or lazy to take a 'proper' degree. It isn't necessarily easy, but it can be made so if taught to unintelligent students by unintelligent lecturers. It can also be very interesting if care is taken to avoid the trivial and self-evident areas and instead to probe the areas of lively academic debate.
As someone who took a media-related degree (though not Media Studies per se) at university, I wondered at the time why more women choose the subject than men (a ratio of perhaps 4:1 on my course). The girls did not seem to have a particular aptitude for the subject; on the harder courses in the third year of the degree the sexes were much more evenly matched, sometimes approaching a ratio of 1:1. Perhaps, as a boy, I am seeing 'difficult' as a synonym for 'those that appeal to me, a boy', but I do not think so. The courses I took were not particularly 'masculine'.
Interestingly, the relative majority of those people who were either drop-outs or gave the impression they were apathetic and 'along for the ride' were women (and this is taking into account the considerably larger number of women than men on the course). On the whole these were people who thought it sounded like an easy or possibly interesting subject to take at university, but who lacked any real passion for the subject. In fact, this observation gave me the distinct (though possibly spurious) impression that boys are better at the subject than girls.
From this admittedly very anecdotal evidence I concluded that a large number of women study media because it's the quintessential 'female course' (perceived as arty and simplistic, and more acceptable for girls to take), but those men who choose to study it only do so if they are genuinely passionate about the subject (and may well be put off by that same perception). People with a genuine interest can be of either sex, and do similarly well.
My hypothesis is that the ratio has nothing to do with the intelligence or aptitude of the sexes per se, but more about the way the sexes perceive the subject.
David
[Updated on: Thu, 15 January 2009 21:14] |
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Yes, deeej, I think you are right. The reasons for uneven take up of a course between the sexes is because of the way the sexes perceive it.
But it can also be something to do with their expectations. I surmise without evidence now. When Alison taught at a state comprehensive more boys than girls chose to do physics and partly it was because boys like playing with experiments in laboratories, partly because it's more macho than geography or 'textile studies' and maybe not at all because actually it is a very demanding subject.
And, on the whole the girls were better at it than the boys.
I'm sure you are right that people who choose media studies because they think it will be watching television are those who will not distinguish themselves on the course.
Love,
Anthony
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Are women more intelligent than men? 
Thanks for all the replies 
