I really don’t get the feminism/anti-feminism debate over boys lagging behind in school debate. I think we can help out the boys without holding back the girls. Everybody likes a little extra time jumping around in a gym. I don’t think the reasons behind this development are rooted in any feminist plot, just the growing demands of modernity and the natural slowness of boys. But I could be totally naive. That’s why I’m reading. Echidne and Ampersand Part 1 and Part 2.
12 thoughts on “Spreadin Love”
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Apt. 11d 
I don’t get it either. Reading the posts you link to, it sounds like these bloggers have declared some kind of gender war, and everybody’s about to be drafted. There’s no sense that they understand that a lot of women are mothers of BOYS and are worried about these BOYS. Sure, we white middle class parents are pretty good at closing the academic gap between our daughters and our sons, but we have to work hard at it.
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Ampersand’s postings offer a lot of useful context. Echidne, on the other hand. I kind of know where she is coming from — there are certainly plenty of feminist-blaming traditionalists to be annoyed by — but I don’t think beating up on John Tierney (whose wide-eyed expeditions into pop sociology don’t seem all that ideological to me) or Newsweek or the Washington Post accomplishes much.
And I don’t really get the triumphalism of saying, in essence, “Newsweek (or the Washington Post) got it wrong; it’s just minority boys who are in trouble.” Isn’t that disaster enough?
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> And I don’t really get the triumphalism of saying, in essence, “Newsweek (or the Washington Post) got it wrong; it’s just minority boys who are in trouble.” Isn’t that disaster enough?
That is true, but if it is a focused problem, then it could use a focused solution.
It is possible that nobody will do anything unless we pretend that this is a middle-class white problem, in which case, never mind.
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“That is true, but if it is a focused problem, then it could use a focused solution.”
Good point. Ampersand puts it this way: “Nonetheless, I’m convinced that wrong analysis will lead us to wrong solutions.” However, I don’t really agree.
The thing that makes me saddest about public education is surely not its “feminization” nor even its underfunding but rather the dreary lack of creative thinking in the face of a whole portfolio of failure.
I don’t think the “right” analysis would lead to the “right” solution. The problems are too complicated. Instead I hope any emphasis on educational problems might suggest that we try some new ideas. Some might work, some might not, but I think we need to encourage alternative approaches to see how they work — perhaps via those wingnut ideas like vouchers and charter schools.
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Trying new ideas couldn’t hurt. The availabilty of single sex schools, especially for high school, could make a difference.
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Echidne seems very closed-minded and doctrinaire, but the comments on her post are well-worth reading, particularly those by actual parents who have a boy and a girl. The thing Echidne doesn’t seem to get is that it is possible to want to teach boys and girls the same academic material, but to think that the average boy and the average girl will need different pedagogical approaches. For instance (from my own experience teaching English overseas) a class of girls might excel and flourish in classes involving lots of cooperative activities, while a class of boys might need lots of carrots and sticks like games and overt competition.
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Incidentally, I remember reading in Gilbert Highet’s “The Art of Teaching” that the classic Jesuit approach to teaching (for boys, of course!) involved lots of games and competition.
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Here is more reasons for trying same-sex schools.
As founder of the national association for Single-Sex Public Education, Sax’s favorite and perhaps most valuable theory is that co-educational schooling is frequently a mistake. He makes a strong case, especially concerning the years immediately following puberty. He cites the experience of two psychologists studying self-esteem in girls. They went to Belfast, where children can be assigned fairly randomly to coed or single-sex schools:
They found that at coed schools, you don’t need to ask a dozen questions to predict the girl’s self-esteem. You have to ask only one question: “Do you think you’re pretty?”
Similarly, the Coleman Report found, four decades ago, that boys put more emphasis on sports and social success in coed schools, and less on intellectual development. Sax argues:
Here’s the paradox: coed schools tend to reinforce gender stereotypes.… There is now very strong evidence that girls are more likely to take courses such as computer science and physics in girls-only schools…. Boys in single-sex schools are more than twice as likely to study art, music, foreign languages, and literature as boys of equal ability attending comparable coed schools.
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Joe:
The fact that both sexes do better at single-sex schools proves that the problems do not lie in the curriculum, but in the gender roles. Changing what the schools teach or how they teach it won’t really help boys; changing gender role expectations *will*. The problem isn’t schools, it’s sexism.
Specifically, the “cootie effect”. Anything boys see girls doing well becomes “girly” in their minds, and they can’t do it and still be boyish. That’s why boys take more art when they’re at all-boy schools: no girls to be seen, no cootie effect.
Do you think putting all kids in single-sex schools will eliminate the “cootie effect”? History predicts *not*, while it also predicts that “separate but equal” schools for boys & girls will not end up very equal.
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Doctor Science,
I really don’t get your comment. If we are going to wait until sexism is vanquished before making other improvements in how schools deal with girls and boys, we are going to wait a very long time. Make that “wait forever.”
I’m personally not all that excited about the idea of single-sex schools. However, girls’ schools do seem to produce confident, high-achieving young women.
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Vanquishing sexism isn’t something to wait for, it’s something to work for. In schools, I think it means teaching boys how not to be hobbled by gender roles, as we try to teach girls not to be hobbled by theirs. We’ll know it’s working when boys are as willing to read “girls’ books” as girls are to read “boys’ books”.
In other words, I think feminism isn’t the problem with schools, it’s the solution — if “feminism” is the name for “helping males get out of constricting gender roles”, which I think it is because only feminists want to do it.
Yes, American girls’ schools do have a great record. But in countries where all schools are single-sex the record has been much less impressive. I suspect this is because US girls’ schools are a specialized subset; when girls are paid for out of the pot for all education, they run into all the problems of “separate but equal”.
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Doctor Science,
Teaching boys not to be hobbled by their gender roles is an admirable goal. But that’s the problem–it’s a goal, not a strategy. How do we get there from here? My fear is that if the answer is “even more of the same,” we are going to find boys becoming even more feral and academically disengaged.
By the way, I liked your blog post on the dark side of the Little House books.
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