More Evidence that the System is Stacked against Boys

It is hard to take feminism seriously so long as it ignores the obvious: the system is stacked against boys. I touched on this once before. Methods of teaching and learning currently in vogue favor girls. A recent article in the NYT suggests that the problem begins to manifest itself at 4 and 5 years of age. Here is a key graf:

Terry W. Neu, an assistant professor at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut who studies achievement among gifted boys, said the gender gap in enrollment [at schools for gifted elementary school children] pointed to a larger issue in the education of young boys: the tendency for modern classrooms, in their growing emphasis on testing and literacy, to play to girls’ strengths and interests, not the propensity of young boys to think spatially and mathematically, through active play and hands-on activities.

“Sitting still, that’s where a lot of our gifted guys get into trouble,” he said, adding, “If they are not moving, they are thinking about moving.”

There are also plenty of girls who learn best through interactive play and hands-on activities.

What would a revamped system of learning and teaching look like that would level the playing the field for squirmers and hands-on learners? A squirmy boy myself, I have a few ideas in this sense. I think it helps for learning to be as multi-sensory as possible, and to be aware of how much learning takes place subconsciously and unconsciously, at the intersection of fidgeting and neurochemical cycling.

An embarrassing feature of my childhood was the way I processed mental and physical energy in bed before drifting off to sleep. I don’t know how my four other siblings put up with it. I would do “bong-bongs,” that is, I would bounce my head up and down on my shallow pillow, often with great force, all the while humming a favorite melody, with all my synapses firing at a subconscious level. This could last for a half hour. It allowed me to burn excess joy and energy and somehow prepared me for further emotional and mental processing during sleep.  

Fidgeto ergo sum. 

Comments

[David E. S. Stein]

I too have always been a fidgeter — ahem, rather: “kinesthetic learner.” So I resonate with your lament about how schooling has tended to discourage that learning style.

At the same time, I'm not impressed by the rhetorical flourish that opened your post. Doesn't follow. Yes, boys suffer for being boys, but that doesn't negate the fact that girls suffer for being girls (usually in different ways). Each gender is denied certain vital aspects of full humanness.

It sounds as though you are claiming superior victimhood for males. Is that really what you mean to say?

[JohnFH]

Hi David,

Another kinesthetic learner!

There are a number of current trends that suggest that the educational system is stacked against boys. If boys as a class pay a higher price than girls as a class for current teaching and learning methods, then the former are the greater victims. I don't see how one can get around that.

Beyond that, I am interested in exploring the role of victimology in forming policy decisions and in creating a metanarrative through which people interpret data. Since so much seems to depend right now on being a canonical victim, the obligatory route to being taken seriously seems to be, "Whatever you can do [being a victim], I can do better."

Seriously, how does one guard against creating a culture of reverse discrimination against one gender in the name of eliminating discrimination against another?

I don't think that feminism so far has shown itself adept at navigating this issue. I sometimes get the impression that in practice and according to feminism as a culture (there are exceptions), it's up to feminists to advocate for girls, and it's up to someone else to advocate for boys.

Well then, I'm not a feminist. I want to advocate for the defenseless regardless of gender. At the moment, I have a suspicion that there is a greater need to advocate for boys.

[Dana]

I homeschooled my two boys. One year they were involved in a production of "A Midsummer's Night's Dream". The eight-year-old had a non-speaking role. One day I found him on the floor, entwined in the rungs of a bar stool, reciting all of Puck's lines aloud while working on some math problems. It took all I had not to seat him at a table and admonish him to be quiet while he worked. I was able to walk away, but barely.

[JohnFH]

Hi Dana,

A brilliant example. Here's another one. To this day, when I process visuals, I do so better moving around at the same time. Even in college, in film class, I could not watch a Hitchcock flick without moving around, which was not acceptable, I remember, according to obvious unwritten rules.

It wasn't only that certain scenes in "The Birds" set me off and I needed to relate to them kinetically in real time. I needed permission during other films to give someone a hug, or cry on a shoulder. I was not given any of this. Life is very unkind to those of us who are kinetic beings.

Education is about stimuli, how we relate to them, the coping and transformative strategies we develop in their regard. It is not (only) about taking tests.

I am in favor of No Child Left Behind (the basic concept was already being pushed in Wisconsin from the left before Bush pushed it from the right). It's better after all than glorified babysitting, not an inaccurate description of way too much of K-12 education. Still, most children are being left behind by no child left behind.

[Dana]

I agree, I'm in favor of No Child Left Behind, although I do see the problems with it.

I spent a couple of decades in children's ministry and found that going over the same material in different ways (print, song, drama, art, etc.) had the best impact. Of course that involves a great deal of time, patience and interaction. If only we could make sure that all children received plenty of that!

[JohnFH]

And I can't be too different from many teachers in that I understand the importance of the seven kinds of learning, but feel really comfortable with teaching in a range of them, not in all. One reason I prefer to team-teach. Someone else to lead the games, drama, and role-playing exercises.

[Gary Simmons]

John, the ability to move around while learning is part of the reason I enjoy memorization. It's pretty hard to beat laying on your back in the pool, looking at the sky, and reciting the Sermon on the Mount.

I remember at OC I used to walk around in the forum and read aloud from the Greek NT. Good times.

[Sue]

The No Child Left Behind policy promotes the kind of literacy testing which is criticized in the citation above in this post.

Educators are very much against the kind of literacy testing which has been brought by the Bush government in the NCLB. I am at loss to associate the No Child Left Behind accountability and testing infrastructure with any kind of feminism.

[Sue]

I spend an inordinate amount of my time on this issue. Although I do the testing, I fight it, I have my objections to the testing recorded in staff meetings, and I challenge my male Christian administrator. This entire issue is extraordinarily misunderstood.

I have stageed full plays of Robin Hood, Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and many other plays for the purpose of increasing the reading level of the lowest learners, be they boys or girls.

Just as it is useful to get the involvement of someone who reads Greek when doing exegesis, the opinion of a literacy expert might offer some insight into educational issues.

I often get students who make 2 grade levels of improvement in one year in my program. This year our most difficult student went from reading at beginning of grade one to end of grade 3 in one year. Since he is in grade 3 this is considered to be success.

It is shocking actually that a feminist like myself, one who actually believes that both genders should be treated as equals, would put so much effort into teaching boys how to read - but I do. This is my life, I do it well and it would be nice to think that teachers might be invited to enter into this discussion.

[Sue]

In my school the gifted class is three quarters boys, and more boys than girls across the bvoard are identified as gifted. There must be some particular anti male bias going on in the USA that does not exist in Canada. I would be curious to know what it is - if in fact, it exists.

Statistics also affirm that more males than females are currently being hired in the univerities in Canada, so from the gifted elementary classroom, to the university hiring, males are significantly ahead of females in Canada.

[JohnFH]

Sue,

As a teacher you should need no special invitation to participate in this discussion. I have no idea what you are getting at, unless you are winding up to play the expert to all of us peons.

By the way, I'm glad to see you self-identifying as a feminist. For a long time you resisted that move, but the label fits your agenda remarkably well.

Standardized testing in and of itself has a long liberal and progressive pedigree. Perhaps you are unaware of the cultural matrix from which the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the California Achievement Test, the Terra Nova, the the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, and the ACT derive. For you to associate this with a right-wing agenda is absurd.

If there is a feminist critique of standardized testing (the basic concept of NCLB), please link to it.

The NCLB itself, a headache for teachers, was utilized by teachers unions to whip up anti-Bush sentiment, but the liberal journal of record in the US, the NYT, whose editorial board includes a number of feminists, has long pushed for more rigorous standardized testing. More of the same, not less. For example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/opinion/26mon3.html?_r=1

I am not surprised that you work just as hard with boys as with girls to improve reading skills. That's fine, and I commend you for it, but if you didn't, that would simply be grounds for dismissal.

What I seem to be hearing is steadfast unwillingness on your part to face up to what it would mean that boys as a class pay a higher price than girls as a class for current teaching and learning methods. If that is the case, it is not sufficient to treat the genders equally. It becomes necessary to develop teaching and learning methods more suitable to boys as a class.

It's very simple, really. Since feminism is by definition a project of women's liberation, it has to reflect on the unintended consequences of its actions. If it doesn't, there is something misanthropic about it, and ultimately misogynistic.

[JohnFH]

Sue,

The underlying issues I think are the same throughout the West.

What is interesting in the US is that they are finally beginning to receive attention across the political spectrum.

Still, the debate is polarized, with right-wing feminists seizing on the boy crisis for their purposes, and left-wing feminists for the most part still in denial.

For a summary of trends, go here:

http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/21190.pdf

On the Independent Women's Forum, go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Women's_Forum

For an example of a relevant conference, well-attended by Canadians, go here:

http://trueequality.com/

[Sue]

"By the way, I'm glad to see you self-identifying as a feminist. For a long time you resisted that move ..."

Please link to any comment in which I denied being someone who stands up for treating both men and women as equals.

- but the label fits your agenda remarkably well. "

Thank you. I am flattered that you see me as someone who truly believes in treating men and women as equals. I see that you deny this label.

It is true that I vehemently resisted the many things that you have said about me that are not true. In the past, you labeled me as a ____ feminist, and I resisted that label. It was not very nice, so I won't cite it.

Now back to the article. It says,

"a larger issue in the education of young boys: the tendency for modern classrooms, in their growing emphasis on testing and literacy, to play to girls’ strengths and interests, not the propensity of young boys to think spatially and mathematically, through active play and hands-on activities."

This growing emphasis is associated with the NLCB and not with a feminist agenda. Of course, there may be some feminists who support this testing, but I don't think that antifeminists are against the testing.

However, I am curious as to why you are promoting NLCB, and yet at the same time complaining that the emphasis on literacy and testing disadvantages boys, and somehow then suggesting that this be laid at the door of feminists.

If increased emphasis on literacy and testing disadvantages boys, what do you suggest as the answer? And why do you also support the NLCB?

"I am not surprised that you work just as hard with boys as with girls to improve reading skills."

I am interested in the fact that you seem to suggest that most teachers in the USA do not work just as hard with boys as with girls. Are you really saying that in the USA teachers do not work as hard with boys as with girls? Why aren't they all dismissed.

"Since feminism is by definition a project of women's liberation, it has to reflect on the unintended consequences of its actions."

I do not see how you have demonstrated that boys' poor performance on the NLCB assessment tools is a consequence of feminism. Would you mind explaining how these two relate to each other?

[Sue]

"Still, the debate is polarized, with right-wing feminists seizing on the boy crisis for their purposes, and left-wing feminists for the most part still in denial."

You have not indicated how the "boy crisis" is a consequence of feminism. The facts are that girls outperform boys on one scale, literacy and language, and boys outperform girls on another, math and visual spatial.

This is consistent across assessments of potential as well as achievement tests. This statistical difference is manipulated and massaged by so many different interest groups that I fail to see that there is any one position taken by feminists, conservatives, liberals or anybody.

[JohnFH]

Sue,

If only I could take your questions seriously. Long experience has proven that you are not interested in the questions, but in a knee-jerk apology for feminism as you understand it.

Such an old, tired pattern of argumentation. I recommend Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to you. It's still possible for you to refine or at least vary your methods. Far be it from me to suggest that you choose a constructive method of conversation. If the destructive approach suits your personality, who am I to try to change that? It is an object lesson to us all.

I love how you change the subject from one sentence to the next. First it's about you identifying as a "feminist." Next, you want me to show you where you deny that you are someone who stands up for equal rights. You give out interesting homework assignments. I can't figure out why you re-define feminism in such a way that everyone who does not deny that they are someone who stands up for equal rights becomes a feminist.

Being a feminist has always been much more than you imply. You are dumbing it down by defining it the way that you do. Maybe you are not a feminist after all. You have suggested as much in the past. But I think you would be better to embrace feminism wholeheartedly, to the point of being able to think critically about it, and about its icons like Simone du Beauvoir and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

It's as if someone has taken your identity away, and you have yet to come to a point of emotional and intellectual integration. You are attracted by feminism and atheism, if nothing else by the morality you attribute to them, which you laud as superior to that of traditional Christians and by extension, traditional believers of all faiths.

Yet you have not jettisoned your faith heritage completely. At least some of its outward forms you still appreciate.

Your journey is not that unusual. It has a ring of authenticity. It would be nice if you allowed other people, including myself, to journey in directions at odds with your own.

My journey is not that unusual either. I did not grow up as a fundamentalist as you did. I grew up in a family and in an environment that was as liberal as one can get. 60% of my classmates in high school were Unitarians. Sons and daughters of professors at the Berkeley of the Midwest. As freshmen in high school, we heatedly discussed Ivan Karamazov's atheism and the Grand Inquisitor, which remain among the most compelling (and in-house) critiques of the Christian faith. We learned about and from Freud, Darwin, and Marx.

The things you regularly lift up as means of salvation - financial independence, education, enlightened, modern thinking - they had and I had in abundance. But it was not enough. There is a restlessness in the human heart, as Augustine knew, a restlessness that does not find rest until it finds its rest in the one whom Augustine addresses in his Confessions.

I continue to have all of the things in which you hope to find salvation in abundance. I married someone who has the same things in abundance. We are raising three kids to have those things in abundance. But we have built our life around the conviction that none of that is the way of salvation. We work side by side with people who are of the same mind and the same spirit, who know that life's meaning is captured instead in the drama of the gospel story.

All along my point has been that, so long as (self-identifying) feminists like you do not address the fact that the system is stacked against boys, your claim to stand up for equal rights is hollow.

Rather than dealing with this, you choose to attack me. There is something very dysfunctional about it, as if you thought of me as a husband who has belittled you, to whom you respond by belittling in return.

[JohnFH]

Sue,

What would it take for you to admit there is a boy crisis? In one sentence you do:

"There must be some particular anti male bias going on in the USA that does not exist in Canada."

But you limit anti-male bias to the US, and then you question all over again whether it exists.

I don't know what it would take to have a straight conversation with you about feminism as a project of liberation.

Every -ism in the history of the world has been characterized by sins of omission and commission. Right alongside whatever good they have done. The concept itself of a sin of omission seems to be beyond your willingness to consider.

For you feminism and modernism are simply not up for discussion, and you despise those like myself who put them up for discussion.

This is the structure of your response to my questions and criticisms: a profound unwillingness to engage in in-house critique. It's always an "other" you are critiquing.

I see both good and bad in modernism and feminism. You see only good. That is our basic difference.

You are always "not seeing" on these comment threads. But I know you better than that. I suggest that it is disrespectful on your part to argue in the way you do. You play with people's arguments as a cat plays with a mouse. Your last comment is typical. You use the fact that the discussion is politicized to politicize it in accordance with your feminist viewpoint.

I see you going down an intellectually lazy path. A waste of an excellent mind if you ask me.

[Gary Simmons]

In my second grade year, I was in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE). Unfortunately, I don't remember if there were more boys or girls in the class. Ironically, the next year I was put in behavioral modification because I acted out just a little too much. From gifted education to special education. I stayed in b-mod through fifth grade before being brought back into regular education.

Unfortunately, those b-mod years gave me a second-rate education because the teacher had to interrupt lessons for disciplinary issues on a daily basis. You see, my problem when I was young was that I would fight physically when provoked verbally. And the school system's solution was to put me in with all the bad kids who provoke kids. Not exactly the best answer.

[Sue]

"Next, you want me to show you where you deny that you are someone who stands up for equal rights."

Yes, since you made that accusation, stand up for it. You write an imaginative essay about me without any evidence at all, as you always do, as well as somehow claiming that the "boy crisis" is the consequence of feminism - once again without supporting this thesis. ou don't have any intention of using facts, in either case.

The grace and mercy is that this time you don't also list the members of my family as people that you wish to demonize. You must be under the weather.

[JohnFH]

Hi Gary,

"Behavioral Modification." Do they still call it that? I certainly got into my share of fights as a kid. It's something of a mystery that I escaped disciplinary measures.

My favorite memory is from middle school. We were in shop class, otherwise known as institutionalized boredom. One of my classmates was picking on Tyrone, the only African American in the class. I caught something in Tyrone's eye that made me lose it. I went up to the kid who was teasing and told him to pick on someone his own size (I was his own size).

Soon fists were flying. The funny thing is that the teacher didn't intervene. It so happened I whupped him, but he and some of his friends got revenge later. I wonder what would have happened to me in this day and age. Perhaps they would have put me on Ritalin.

[Gary Simmons]

I don't know. They tried ritalin for me and it didn't work. Nowadays I take adderall, and honestly, I can't seem to concentrate on mental tasks without it.

I don't know if it's still called "b-mod," but that's what it was for me. We need to keep in mind that b-mod counts as special education. It's still important to compare the proportion of boys to girls in special education, but remember also that this doesn't always indicate intellectual development. In those three years there was only one girl. She was there because she had autism. That difference is also statistically significant.

So, we need:

Boys:Girls (Special education, combined)
Boys:Girls (Special education, behavioral)
Boys:Girls (Special education, academic)

I am guessing the IWF is looking at the combined statistic. I would hope that a future study would also look at the specific data and comment on that.

As a critique, I must say that creating more private schools and allowing more deviation from the public standard curriculum is change. Change is not always for the better. I do give that caveat. However, I think it's a whole lot easier to go "up" rather than "down" from where my education was. But then again, I wasn't challenged much by public schooling, so I am biased there.

[JohnFH]

Hey Sue,

The weather is great here. It's good to see you in such a feisty mood. It's great fun to see that your gift of selective misinterpretation is undiminished. You love to ask me to defend positions I have not taken; you never defend your own. That would be distracting to your goal. Don't think I don't know where every conversation you take up with me ends. With your cat claws outstretched.

Whatever gospel you have embraced, it is yours to cherish. My hope for you is that you come to terms with your own biography, rather than pretending you don't have one. I'm always curious as to why you disassociate yourself from statements you have made on this blog and elsewhere.

It's as if someone taught you not to exist. That's the thing I desire for you most, not that you agree with me - how boring that would be - but that you reach the point where you can give and take in a conversation. Any project of liberation that is going to endure has to have the capacity to accept criticism and learn from it.

You ask for evidence that feminism is not adequate to the task of confronting the kind of things the article I cite talks about. Your own comments are evidence in that sense. A project of liberation which cannot make an internal critique is not a project of liberation at all, but a form of slavery.

[JohnFH]

Gary,

You are so right to look for intellectual challenges. It will serve you well and those who know well. It will become a gift to share. You take care.

[terri]

I understand the thrust of your post, but I disagree with a particular conclusion.

Embracing victimhood as a way to bring about change is a mixed bag...one that I think becomes detrimental if it doesn't eventually get tossed aside.

There is no perfect balance in any facet of life. Issues tend to see-saw back and forth as people react, then counter-react. The hope is that eventually things begin to get fine-tuned to be as beneficial to the widest group of people imaginable.

Is the system stacked against boys? I don't know. My boys are both doing great in school, in the gifted program, praised by their teachers, etc. Of course, my kids have the advantage of coming form a stable, loving home, with two highly educated parents who have spent a lot of time teaching them and interacting with them.

It depends on what we are talking about.

Fidgeting...both of my kids do it, my youngest especially. His teachers learned to ignore it when they realized how smart he was. Would he have been given the same understanding if he was fidgety and not doing well academically? Probably not.

[JohnFH]

Hi Terri,

Playing the victim card often is an exercise in self-abuse. Playing the discrimination card, even if it is true, reinforces a pattern of politics in our culture that once again seems to boomerang upon those who play it. So I agree, caution is appropriate.

The best thing parents can do is give their children a secure attachment via the home and advocate for them at school, giving the teachers permission to hold them to the highest standards they can. It sounds like that you are doing that. What a wonderful gift you are giving your kids.

[Gary Simmons]

I found another article on this issue in The Atlantic. Of course, when I say "I found" it, what I really mean is that "I saw" it on The Colbert Report from Wednesday.