The "boy Crisis" In Schools Goes Babylon 5 :p

[Thurisaz]

Well this is... interesting. Anyone remember one of the central tenets of the goo' ol' TV show "Babylon 5", namely "Understanding is a three-edged sword - your opinion, the other side's opinion, and the truth"?

 

If the study found here is correct then the supposed gender gap in schools is a thing to apply that tenet to.

 

Over here in Germany it has become established dogma of an "everyone knows that..." level that girls are at a disadvantage in school due to the system traditionally being geared to favor boys and thus girls need special support in class. Many people, including politicians, keep clinging to this "everyone knows that..." stuff even though more and more reports are surfacing that actually girls have the upper hand already, on average at least (of course).

 

I'll admit that I assumed this is one of the consequences of the lunatic fringe of feminism reigning this country since... dunno... the 70s/80s, depending on where you draw the line. But the study linked above seems to suggest that actually girls have always been a bit ahead of boys on average. Just why that is the case and still never got noticed before is a thing to be examined... but one possible explanation offered is that simply in the "goo' ol' days" there were just too few girls involved in higher education for the difference to become obvious.

 

In any case, I hope I'll be able to follow this for a while.

 

So... your thoughts?

[miekko]

Here, it's been widely acknowledged for decades that schools basically favor girls in most subjects, because boys tend to be less inclined to like school-like contexts in general.

[VacuumFlux]

(Note that my experience is entirely with the U.S. school system.) I've heard that the problem is that girls in school are at an advantage until middle school, at which point it swaps to having more boys in STEM (Science, Technology, Math), and girls mostly in the humanities like English, despite younger kids showing no gender-based preference. I do know that male and female brains mature in different ways at different rates, so for the very early grades it's much easier for girls to sit still and pay attention, so the boys get labeled as rowdy or bad kids. Some boys do much better with school if they start a year later or do kindergarten twice, because one year is about how long it takes for little boys to be at a similar developmental stage as little girls. The biological differences even out before high school, so by middle school you probably can't separate learning styles along gender lines, because other individual differences start to take over. In... high school? we took some test to figure out whether we were visual, auditory, or kinetic learners. That wasn't an official state test or even school-wide, it was just something we did in one class. Didn't do anything to change the teachers' teaching styles, but it was supposed to help us figure out how to study as an individual.

 

By high school you're starting to see less female students in the STEM fields (despite tests showing no apptitude difference), and the higer drop-out rate of women compared to men continues at each level from there. The higher the educational level, the more you can prove that it's due to peer pressure (from people not in a STEM field), a hostile environment (from people in a STEM field) and not aptitutde or preference. Also note that the negative peer pressure and the hostile environment can come from persons of any gender trying to enforce their concept of gender roles.

 

I wouldn't necessarily think this has anything to do with feminism, exactly. I think it's more of a problem with corporate interests pushing schools to turn kids into obedient workers and not valuing people who "make trouble". At very young ages, girls are better at fitting into that mold, and then the teachers (even the good ones who are probably overworked and are forced to teach to a stupid test) have an easier time teaching to young girls' learning styles than accomidating the boys. But even at that age, you have some teachers (or parents) who believe that boys suck at English and girls suck at math, or that girls are good and obedient and boys are trouble, and will push those prejudices onto the kids by ignoring the actual situation whenever a kid's struggling with classwork of having problems with other kids. Kids will often live down to the expectations you hold them to.