Boys at school

When I was growing up, I heard a lot about girls not doing as well as boys in school. Girls were less likely to participate in class, I read somewhere-- maybe that explained why they showed less grasp of important concepts on standardized tests. Perhaps the problem was that teachers and parents had lower expectations of girls' math and science ability and didn't encourage girls as much. Or maybe it was gender stereotypes which made girls want to be ditzy rather than brainy, in order to be more attractive to boys. Something was going wrong for girls, anyway. Everyone agreed on that.

But when I went to college, most of my fellow math majors were women. I went to grad school in biostatistics, and again, it was mostly women. In fact, these days 57% of college students are women, and most bachelor's degrees being awarded nationwide go to women. That may now be true of master's degrees as well. If the trend continues, in just a few more years PhDs and professional degrees will also go disproportionately to women.

Younger boys and girls also show differences in academic performance, almost exclusively in one direction: girls do better. In 4th, 8th, and 12th grades girls test higher in writing and reading than do boys (see this page for a list of relevant charts/statistics), and are roughly equal with boys in math scores in those three grades. Girls used to be behind in math, so again, if the trend continues, they will eventually solidly outperform boys in math throughout the K-12 years.

One hypothesis I have for why boys don't do as well in school is that girls are socialized to be better behaved, quieter, more obedient, etc. than are boys. School places a heavy emphasis on obedience, conformity, and passivity (it's the only way one adult can direct and manage 25 kids-- it's just a structural necessity given the way we've arranged our classrooms). If girls do better, perhaps it's for behavioral reasons, since parents and society in general cultivate different behavior in boys and girls. Supporting this idea, I note that boys are more likely to be disciplined in school. And they are dramatically more likely to be diagnosed with learning disorders, or with behavioral disorders like ADHD or Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

A potential problem with this idea is that girls have always had their behavior tailored differently than boys. They've generally been taught to be quieter and more "ladylike" and more docile. What may have changed, though, is that children's lives are more scheduled and supervised than ever before, and schools are making increasing demands on children's self control. In this pressure cooker climate, girls' behavioral advantage over boys may have increased. (Well, I say "advantage" in the narrow context of traditional schooling, not because I consider it actually advantageous in life in general. Actually I think being ladylike is a hindrance. For example, 80% of Fortune 500 female executives say they were tomboys as children. I guess "demure" doesn't go over too well in the boardroom.)

Another idea is that girls and boys really do develop differently, gaining skills on different timelines (on the average). The theory here is that kids are learning certain skills earlier than they used to, for instance beginning reading in kindergarten or preschool instead of in first or second grade. Boys, due to biological differences in development, don't (again, on average) learn on that schedule. They tend to get labeled as behind, inadequate, or somehow disordered because their natural developmental timeline doesn't mesh with the new academic timeline schools want to impose. I'm not saying I buy this, I'm just saying it's a possibility.

When Anya was in preschool, I once heard a couple of moms talking about their kids' writing skills. One of them said: "Well, my daughter was writing her name at age 3, and he's 4 and he can't make his letters yet... but that's just how it is with boys." The other mom chimed in with "Yeah, boys are about a year behind." On another occasion I heard a mom explaining that she was going to keep her son out of kindergarten until he was 6. She stated angrily that she'd been reading about female and male development and that it was preposterous to think that boys had the manual dexterity to start writing at age 5, the ways girls do.

Once that becomes the common opinion, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Boys won't start writing until a year later than girls because boys' mothers aren't concerned about encouraging them to write. They won't learn to read until later because they enter school later. This idea can cement itself just as harmfully as the old "Girls are bad at math" idea.

On a slightly different topic, I found survey results for the question "How do you feel about school?" (Figure A in the list of charts I linked to above.) This question was asked in the senior year of high school, so keep in mind that it excludes students who hated school so much that they dropped out. In 1980, 42% of boys and 50% of girls said they liked school "very much" or "quite a lot". Only 14% of boys and 13% of girls said they didn't like school very much or didn't like school at all. Interestingly, girls' enjoyment of school has fallen faster since 1980 than boys' enjoyment. In 2001, 29% of girls said they enjoyed school very much or quite a lot (a 21% drop), while 30% of boys enjoyed school (only a 12% drop). The percentage who say they don't like school much, or don't like it at all, increased for both sexes (up to 24% of boys and 21% of girls by 2001). In other words, boys aren't falling behind academically because they dislike school more than girls. Actually, girls' satisfaction with school has fallen much more precipitously in the past two decades. Yet still they have overtaken boys in academic achievement.

Boys' lower test scores and more problematic existence at school is still a bit of a mystery to me, but I don't think it's fair that the new "gender gap" is garnering so little attention. And I'm a bit shocked that some mothers would accept the idea that their sons are inferior to their daughters quite so easily. It seems to me that the women's movement and the men's movement could come together with one basic message for the schools: Stop trying to socialize, label, pigeonhole, test, and cramp our children. Problem is, you'd have to start completely over and redesign schools from scratch, if you want a new generation of public schools to follow that advice.

Busy time of year

Sheesh, 10 days since my last post-- I guess blogging has taken a backseat to Christmas shopping, wrapping, decorating, cleaning... etc. I just wanted to put something up, even if it's miscellany:

Tristan has a new habit of putting his chubby little hands on his forehead and saying "Oh no!" when things fall or spill. It's very cute, though I say it myself. He also shakes his head wildly and says "No no no no no" pretty frequently, which is followed, if that doesn't work, by hollering at the top of his lungs while stomping his feet. His car obsession continues, with a high proportion of his spoken words being vehicular in nature: car, bus, truck ("tuh"), tire, wummm for any sort of construction equipment, and "tay" for train.

Another funny thing he does is babble this elaborate stream of nonsense when excited. I think I've got two chatterboxes on my hands. The night we decorated the tree, Tristan circled around it practically vibrating with glee over the Christmas lights, pointing to the ornaments and giving a nonsensical lecture in a high-pitched voice. Meanwhile, Anya talked right over him: "Do you want to hang this one Mom? I like the red ones but I want you to get some red ones to hang too, because I know you like red too, so I'll just hang this little drum and you take this one...."

I was feeling guilty the other day because I ordered these "base 10" blocks to help Anya with math, to help her learn the ones, tens, and hundreds columns. I wanted to teach her about adding two- and three-digit numbers by adding each column separately, but somehow, we hadn't gotten to it yet. But then she wandered over to me the other day, calculator in hand, and said "You know, if you add 333 and another 333 it makes 666. You can add the numbers by themselves. And 222 plus 222 makes 444." That boosted my faith in this whole process-- here I am feeling bad that I haven't taught her about adding the digits separately, and she goes and starts figuring it out on her own! I'm not a total unschooler, though, the way I had originally imagined I might be. My very next thought was "I've got to get those darned blocks out and strike while the iron is hot!" Still, we practice child-led learning, which is a foreign concept to many people.

Anya has been interested in learning European time, which has been complicated. How to explain that this isn't the time in Europe at this moment, it's the time right now, as Europeans would measure it? I think she is getting it... sometimes I am frustrated at myself for not knowing a better way to explain something, and I have to be really careful not to show it because she might think I was frustrated with her.

We've also been doing a bit of social science, because she is suddenly describing things as "girlish" or "boyish." I've explained that girls and boys are basically the same, and "the people with the factories" want to make us think they're different so families with both daughters and sons have to buy twice as much stuff. And that these people make commercials trying to make you believe that girls and boys need different things, but it's actually a lie. [Incidentally, I dressed Anya completely gender neutral until she was 3 and still avoid clearly girlie clothing. Tristan is currently wearing her old clothes.] I've also been trying to cultivate a certain defiant stubbornness, saying for example: "You like the color blue. Are you going to let them try to say you don't like the color blue because blue is "boyish"? They can't tell you what you like or don't like!" We've spent probably hours going round and round about businesses, advertising, and girls vs. boys.

On a different note, we were at the public library in the nearby college town the other day, and I got a glimpse of what life is like when one is devoted to traditional academics. There was a mom there who was being so very didactic and educational with her young sons that I began to feel she was showing off or attempting to compete with me (we were the only ones in the small child storytime/play area). She interrupted her 4-year-old's playing with a truck to ask him what he saw on the rug, which had roads and a small town scene. She pointed out different buildings and asked "What clues do we have that this might be a firehouse?" Her son never answered her, just waited and then resumed playing with the truck (wouldn't you give up after a while, if the schoolmarm tone resulted in your kid patiently ignoring you?). She also, over the course of the time we were there, asked Anya if she knew how to spell her last name and whether she could read, among other questions. I half expected her to quiz Anya on the names of the planets or her times tables. She tried to get her 10-month-old to identify the correctly colored car ("No no, the GREEN car-- where is the GREEN car?"). And she brought up her son's "class" and "school" a remarkable number of times, though he was not yet kindergarten age. I don't tell this tale to be catty, I just wanted to describe it because I had truly forgotten there were moms who acted this way. At unschooling group playdates, the kids just do what they want with little adult concern, and I have never heard any mom getting "educational" unless she was specifically asked a question. The homeschooled kids I know certainly are not micro-managed to this extent. There has to be some sort of psychological backlash from scheduling and micromanaging kids to the point where they can't play with a truck without being pestered and directed by adults.


[I'm hoping to post in the next day or two on some new graduation requirements in my own state of Michigan.]

Critical thinking

I was hanging out on Daily Kos today, and saw someone's comment that the powers that be in the US fear an educated populace, because an educated populace thinks critically and asks tough questions, and is generally harder to control. She/he added that in the late 1960's education was working quite well, and look at the counter-culture that spawned.

I used to think this too, but when I read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me I found out that higher levels of education were associated with more support for the Vietnam war, not less. In spite of highly publicized and televised college protests, more education generally made people more supportive of the government. I left this reply (in part):

Historian James Loewen once said in an interview:

I once did an exercise where I asked people about what kind of adults, by education level, supported the war in Vietnam. By an overwhelming margin-almost 10 to 1-audiences responded that college-educated people were more likely to be for withdrawing the troops, were more "dovish". When they explained their reasoning, they usually wrote that educated people are more informed and critical and therefore better able to figure out that the war wasn't in our best interests. Well, the truth was very different. Educated people disproportionately supported the war in Vietnam, were more "hawkish."

I went upstairs and got Loewen's book Lies My Teacher Told Me and found the old poll statistics. In January 1971, 80% of those with grade school education supported withdrawing the troops from Vietnam. 75% of those with high school education supported withdrawing, while 60% of those with college education supported withdrawing. (Loewen points out that polling consistently shows that those most likely to be sent to war tend to support it most strongly, as they feel compelled to find meaning in it. This makes the statistics by education level even more surprising.)

I support teaching children how to think, but this is very different from the kind of education we have now. Consider:

Only 4.2% of the homeschool graduates surveyed consider politics and government too complicated to understand, compared to 35% of U.S. adults. This may account for why homeschool graduates work for candidates, contribute to campaigns, and vote in much higher percentages than the general population of the United States. For example, 76% of homeschool graduates surveyed between the ages of 18-24 voted within the last five years, compared to only 29% of the relevant U.S. population.

...The current system was not designed by the citizens who attend public school, it was designed (largely during the robber baron era) by those in power, to ensure that they stayed in power (and made even more money). However hard dedicated teachers work today, I feel this history matters and that our pedagogy therefore requires massive reform before it will reliably produce critical thinkers and informed citizens.

The other commenter, in their response, suggested that schools needed to teach critical thinking skills early on because the potential to learn critical thinking might be lost forever. (My whole point was that schools don't teach critical thinking, but people are so used to harnessing all desirable mental functioning to "education" (meaning schooling) that I guess my comments didn't make sense to this person.)

The more I thought about the notion of "teaching" critical thinking, the sillier it seemed, because humans have surely evolved to utilize all sorts of beneficial thinking, no schooling required. We have an amazing ability to spot patterns, discover associations, test theories, and yes, "think critically" and skeptically. I certainly feel that hard thinking can be encouraged or it can be quashed, but this idea that it's up to schools to protect us from the irreversible loss of our opportunity to think is absurd. We are thinking from the day we're born (well, before that). If we're no longer thinking and analyzing the world around us at age 18, the question is not "Who failed to teach you to think?" but rather "Who destroyed your desire to use your brain?"

The message of regimented schooling is that children cannot learn on their own, cannot puzzle things out or make discoveries on their own, and that an authority figure will tell them what to believe and how to solve problems cookbook-style. Memorization doesn't promote thinking of any kind, and rewards systems dampen the intrinsic pleasure of learning. The hostile social climate of school is often anti-intellectual in nature, suggesting that using one's brain too much indicates a deficiency of character. Biased standardized tests and other inequalities tell most students, in various subtle ways, that they are inferior. I have no doubt that many teachers try to get their students to participate, to debate, to think, but it seems to me they are swimming against a hell of a tide.

The prevalent belief that we need school to help us think is incredibly frustrating. It would be great to see a school district try something radically different, like having small mixed-age schools which promote student independence and self-learning, as in Montessori schools (just to take one example). Give them democracy, give them autonomy, stop regimenting them by age or grade, stop insisting that all students learn exactly the same material, and kids will not lose their initiative nor stop using their minds. The students who emerged from such a school would be farther on their way to adulthood, much better thinkers, more likely to participate in politics and civil affairs, and harder to trick, seduce, bully, or stonewall than the students emerging from our current schools.

That, of course, brings up another of the sinister purposes of NCLB. You can'ttry a radical new form of schooling, because you have to pass those tests on a particular schedule. Thus government is safe from any true reform of our schools, and the politicians are largely safe from people who will investigate and form their own conclusions.

If you'll permit me a slight tangent: The government can, when the people have lost their interest in puzzling things out for themselves, simply "lose" the testimony of over 100 witnesses who saw a missile strike TWA 800 at the moment it exploded over the Atlantic. They need have no fear of a public clamoring for further inquiry. The FBI can casually dismiss the illogical selling of United and American airlines stock on September 10, 2001 (on the Chicago exchange) without even bothering to find out who was selling it-- because who is going to bug them about that? (Hardly anyone-- only a few widows from New Jersey who can't get any air time on cable news.) It can claim that Flight 93 flew straight into the ground in Pennsylvania, and not worry about the small handful of local people who ask, "Then why is the debris field 8 miles wide?" and "What about those fighter jets?"

It's not about whether people are "educated" or "uneducated." The question for those in power is: How can we get rid of the desire to investigate and think and research and theorize? How can we make thinking undesirable? Well, in the words of the US Commissioner of Education in 1889:

"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent overeducation from happening. The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they’re not tempted to think about any other role."

--William T. Harris

Or just not tempted to think-- period.

More on that censorship story

I had mentioned that 1,800 copies of a student newspaper were confiscated in a Tennessee high school in yesterday's post. Well, today I found more information. The paper was confiscated because "...Superintendent Tom Bailey said the contraception article needed more "editing" before it was acceptable for the entire school to read."

However, the contraception article was immediately followed by an editorial advocating abstinence:

The birth-control piece ran above another article, "Spenser advises students to wait until marriage for sex," by Spenser Walsh, in which the teen advises his peers that he is only trying to "talk you out of a decision that perhaps might change your life." Walsh goes on to warn of the dangers of STDs, unwanted pregnancies and the emotional toll taken by relationships that start with sex.

School administrators had no problem with this second article, though it touched on similar content. Perhaps the contraception article did contain graphic language, but in that case it could have been edited. In fact, it was replaced by an opinion piece on the school play.

The paper's student editor in chief, Brittany Thomas, said the school demanded the change. "I was told to fill it with another editorial," she told the Sentinel.

It occurs to me that these students were trying for balance by putting an abstinence only piece just below the contraception article. That seems quite fair and responsible-- moreso than the superintendent who axed an article he didn't agree with.

[A] statement from the Society of Professional Journalists released on Wednesday strongly condemned the action. "This is an example — a bad example — of school officials censoring news content simply because they disagree with it," SPJ President David Carlson said.

Mead Loop, SPJ's vice president for campus chapter affairs, said... "[H]ere we have an example where a principal teaches a lesson to students that censorship is preferred to an open reading of news."

Instead, Carlson said, "Educators should foster open discussion of ideas rather than attempt to limit the discussion. It appears the students tried to do good journalism, and the administration is holding them back."

The ACLU is said to be considering getting involved.