Pseudo-Science Paving Path to Sexism in Classrooms

As the studies accumulate in this new era of pseudo-science, it seems that some school systems are embracing the gender studies with a frightening enthusiasm that could prove extremely detrimental to future gender equality.

According to an article published by MSNBC in collaboration with Newsweek, some schools such as Foust Elementary in Owensboro, KY are trying a new program of dividing classes by gender, and using techniques that are gender specific to foster learning:

So Gray took a controversial course for educators on brain development, then revamped the first- and second-grade curriculum. The biggest change: he divided the classes by gender. Because males have less serotonin in their brains, which Gray was taught may cause them to fidget more, desks were removed from the boys’ classrooms and they got short exercise periods throughout the day. Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings. Because boys have higher levels of testosterone and are theoretically more competitive, they were given timed, multiple-choice tests. The girls were given multiple-choice tests, too, but got more time to complete them.

It seems that Kentucky classrooms aren’t the only ones to utilize this approach, the article claiming that over 185 classrooms nationwide have also separated the sexes and used the new brain difference studies to establish their curriculums. Critics of this wolf in sheep’s clothing approach are pointing out the obvious dangers of this, but unfortunately to little or no avail:

To some experts, Gurian’s approach is not only wrong but dangerous. Some say his curriculum is part of a long history of pseudoscience aimed at denying equal opportunities in education. For much of the 19th century, educators, backed by prominent scientists, cautioned that women were neurologically unable to withstand the rigors of higher education. Others say basing new teaching methods on raw brain research is misguided. While it’s true that brain scans show differences between boys and girls, says David Sadker, education professor at American University, no one is exactly sure what those differences mean. Differences between boys and girls, says Sadker, are dwarfed by brain differences within each gender. “If you want to make schools a better place,” says Sadker, “you have to strive to see kids as individuals.”

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95 Responses to Pseudo-Science Paving Path to Sexism in Classrooms

  1. 1
    Tapetum says:

    Sadker has it exactly right. Dammit, how many times does it have to be pointed out that slight differences between groups say NOTHING about the characteristics of any individual REGARDLESS of which group they belong to.

    If you treat the kids as individuals then it doesn’t matter which group has the tiny statistical advantage – the kids will get what they need. If you treat the kids as members of their group (gender, race, disability, whatever), then there are going to be kids that are in the wrong place getting the wrong thing – no matter how well you define the groups.

  2. 2
    Robert says:

    Very well. Let’s treat kids as individuals.

    That means, among other things, ability tracking.

    Do you endorse ability tracking?

  3. 3
    Jake Squid says:

    No, but I support ability grouping. It seems that the problem with ability tracking is much the same as w/ segregation based on gender, race, income level or disability. It tends towards permanent segregation. Ability grouping, according to wikipedia anyway, is fluid & groupings may change members several times over the course of a school year.

    If you have a better resource for ability tracking than wikipedia (which is very thin on the matter), I’d appreciate it.

  4. 4
    mousehounde says:

    But proponents say that unless neurological, hormonal and cognitive differences between boys and girls are incorporated in the classroom, boys are at a disadvantage.

    Ah, I get it. We can’t have boys being out classed by mere girls.

    Most schools are girl-friendly, says Michael Gurian, coauthor with Kathy Stevens of a new book,”The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life,” “because teachers, who are mostly women, teach the way they learn.” Seventy percent of children diagnosed with learning disabilities are male, and the sheer number of boys who struggle in school is staggering. Eighty percent of high-school drop-outs are boys and less than 45 percent of students enrolled in college are young men.

    So, what changed? Teachers have been mostly women for a very long time now. But now, all of a sudden the boys are falling behind. Could it be simply that the only thing that has changed is that girls are now actually encouraged to do well in school? How many years were girls told that education didn’t matter: find a man, get married, raise babies. Higher education? Sure, a great way to pass the time while you wait for that guy to sweep you off your feet and take care of you for the rest of your life. Just remember, guys don’t like girls that are “too” smart.

    Maybe it is just that when properly motivated, with encouragement, girls are simply doing better in school. Maybe girls just quit holding back so the boys could feel superior. Maybe the boys aren’t doing any worse now than they ever did, maybe girls are just doing better now than they used to because they know it’s ok to do their best.

    I have to wonder, if it were reversed, if it were girls who were disadvantaged, if it were girls with a high drop out rate and low enrollment in college, would they have changed the curriculum to help girls? Or would they have dismissed it as ‘girls just don’t have the brain power to do well in school’ and left things as they were? I am guessing they would have left things as they were.

  5. 5
    Kim (basement variety!) says:

    Wow, definitive smackdown there, Mousehound!

  6. 6
    Robert says:

    Jake, ability grouping would be fine with me – whatever the teacher(s) on the ground think is the best system.

  7. 7
    reddecca says:

    See if I believed the basic premise (which I don’t), I’d actually do exactly the opposite. Boys can’t talk about their feelings? We’ll give them those skills. Girls feel less comfortable with physical activity, let’s make sure they have more time using their body.

    I went to a hippy alternative primary school so my views are influenced by that. Robert I’d have no problem with individual programmes (I don’t know if individual tracking is some kind of US education code thing), if what that meant is that there would be time each week so that each child could spend time developing the things they enjoy most, and time each week with each child doing what they found hardest.

    For me that would have meant that I spent a morning each week riding my bike or using a ball, and a morning each week reading a book. Another child might have spent doing exactly the same, but for opposite reasons.

  8. 8
    Robert says:

    Reddecca, that’s an interesting philosophical question: should an educational process shore up weaknesses, or reinforce strengths? There are cogent cases to be made on both sides; I’d favor reinforcing strengths, within a boundary of raising weaknesses up to some minimal level. (OK, you can’t make conversation like Bill Clinton, but you can look someone in the eye and ask them a civil question without throwing up; you can’t integrate a volume in your head, but you can crack a math book and find the right formula for any reasonable practical problem.)

    Unfortunately our education system is pretty fucked up; deciding which philosophical approach we’re going to embrace is Titanic deck-chair shuffling at this juncture. The freakin’ thing is sinking and on fire. (In a nice model of bipartisan cooperation, both lefties and righties can point to lots of things that are wrong with the system, and they’re both right.)

  9. 9
    reddecca says:

    Well I guess what I’m saying is that any meaningful education system would do both. So people have a wide variety of necessary skills, but then have the things that they are good at nutured and valued. But then because I’m a lefty I wouldn’t neccessarily describe it the same way you do.

    I’d say that you give people the opportunity to develop skills in doing what they enjoy, and give people the confidence to tackle things they find hard. I believe that most people can do most things well, and that a lot of the time the reasons people find (say) maths hard, is because they’ve been told that they’re not good at it.

  10. 10
    Robert says:

    I’d say that you give people the opportunity to develop skills in doing what they enjoy, and give people the confidence to tackle things they find hard. I believe that most people can do most things well, and that a lot of the time the reasons people find (say) maths hard, is because they’ve been told that they’re not good at it.

    Yup. (Ah, the agreement! It burns, it burns!) Add to that the fact that math does require a certain mindset, and if people refuse to use that mindset to teach it, it won’t be taught. Mental frames are important.

  11. 11
    Kim (basement variety!) says:

    Actually it brings up a good, but perhaps obscure point (you’re being a lefty). I’m a lefty as well. It’s been shown that left handed and right handed folks often learn differently and utilize their brains differently too. What would the reaction be to segregating left handed children from right handed children?

  12. 12
    Robert says:

    What would the reaction be to segregating left handed children from right handed children?

    Depends. Would we get better outcomes?

  13. 13
    Jesurgislac says:

    Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings

    ….the very thought of this makes me want to run away. As Marge Piercy said, it’s only to adults that little girls are cute. To each other, they’re life-sized.

    reddecca: See if I believed the basic premise (which I don’t), I’d actually do exactly the opposite. Boys can’t talk about their feelings? We’ll give them those skills. Girls feel less comfortable with physical activity, let’s make sure they have more time using their body

    Right on!

    mousehounde: Maybe it is just that when properly motivated, with encouragement, girls are simply doing better in school. Maybe girls just quit holding back so the boys could feel superior. Maybe the boys aren’t doing any worse now than they ever did, maybe girls are just doing better now than they used to because they know it’s ok to do their best.

    Got it in one. Boys haven’t been “falling behind” anywhere that I know of: boys grades have been staying the same, while girls grades have been leaping ahead. It is entirely possible, of course, that the patriarchal setup which says “looking smart is sissy” and which values physical achievement over mental achievement has meant that boys have not been achieving all they could in school. But we know the solution to that: destroy the patriarchy. Feminism wins in the end, and, in the long run, to the benefit of men as well as women. Even though boys and men, being gradually deprived of their privileges that they always thought were natural rights, may not appreciate this at the time, in a century or so we’ll all look back at this and laugh. ;-)

  14. 14
    VK says:

    Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings.

    That sounds utterly terrifying. As a kid, I loved running around and fidgeting lots and _hated_ other girls, with their insistance on the benefits of pink. I’m still annoyed that they wouldn’t let me play football because I was a girl, I can only see this makes large numbers of young girls frustrated and extremely jealous of the boys getting to do what these girls want (and I would assume a number of boys doing the same thing). It just completely ignores the fact that while most girls/boys may like a particular way of learning, you’re still gonna have a deviant who would be benefited from the opposite approach. Any system that doesn’t allow for qualities of the individual rather than assuming all people of the same race/sex/colour/age are identical is gonna fail.

  15. 15
    Ted says:

    Because boys have more serotonin and girls have more oxytocin???

    This has to be one of the most ludicrous things I’ve ever heard. For starters, this is based on a faulty scientific premise. It makes no difference whatsoever if there is more serotonin or oxytocin if the receptor systems are not identical between males and females. This is unlikely, and I would reason to bet that the neurotransmitter levels are different between the sexes because it balances out different levels of receptor expression or activity.

    Morover, my understanding of this whole oxytocin/vassopressin bonding thing is that it is almost completely related to actual sex (as in the act, not the gender). Oxytocin is released during or after sex and is involved in solidifying some type of monogamous pair bonding that is more prevalent in females (but also works in males) of many species. I know some work has been done on this in humans, but its no where near the level of understanding of what has been done in voles, where all this work started in the first place.

    This will have to go down as one of the most ridiculous examples of over-extension of current knowledge concerning our understanding of the brain I have ever heard! I’m sure many of the basic scientists (neuroscientist and biologists, not sociologists or psychologists) whose findings are being utilized to push this agenda are up in arms over such silliness.

  16. 16
    Ted says:

    I probably shouldn’t just drop the vole reference without some more info, so for all interested parties go visit this site. Rather than posting 10-20 original articles on the oxytocin in prarie voles story, this site does a reasonable job of presenting the current state of knowledge and points out some aspects that might be similar in humans, while still acknowledging that there are considerable gaps in knowledge.

  17. 17
    Ledasmom says:

    This pisses me off on so many levels I’m not sure where to start. My gosh, as a child I loved multiple-choice timed tests and what I loved most about them was finishing them before the other kids did.
    The complete unwillingness to look at the actual kids and figure out their actual abilities – “You’re a girl. Sit on the touchy-feely rug.” Ew. Just ewwwwww.

  18. 18
    mythago says:

    What idiot thinks little girls need to sit around and “discuss their feelings” rather than run off some energy and play? Oh, right, an idiot who doesn’t like girls very much.

  19. 19
    Nick Kiddle says:

    In one of the seven hundred-odd parenting books I’ve been reading lately, there’s two lists, showing “how we handle boys” and “how we handle girls” – the point being that most people treat their boys and girls differently without even being aware that’s what they’re doing. It recommends that if you’d like your children to be closer to the middle of the gender spectrum, you should deliberately try out some of the ways of handling from the opposite gender list.

    That kind of approach might be useful here.

  20. 20
    Elena says:

    So, according to this sub-intelligent teacher from KY’s plan, girls get less exercise and are challenged less during evaluation. All because he has an idea that girls are doing too well compared to boys. And there must be a consortium of dunderheads in that community or it wouldn’t fly. I’m relieved once more that I live in a liberal community of educated people with wonderful schools staffed by real professionals, not someone who read an article in Newsweek and decided to f-over the girls in his class.

    I’m imagining my daughter being told she has to sit on a carpet and talk while the boys get to play and it’s breaking my heart.

  21. 21
    Lee says:

    Many members of my family are educators (not me, though – I decided a long time ago I don’t have the skill set necessary for classroom teaching), and when they get together, the shop talk is (to me) simultaneously illuminating and depressing.

    FWIW, the consensus in my family is that idiot educational experiments generally arise when some idiot needs to finish a Ph.D., and that eventually it will go away and you can teach around it until it does. Unfortunately, the guinea pig kids usually suffer a lot while this is going on. So I’m hoping the teachers in KY are teaching around this really amazingly misguided plan.

    I was never on good enough terms with the other girls in my class to sit around discussing feelings – most of my friends were in the grade ahead of me – and I probably would have been sent to the principal’s office for humming and rolling my eyes. OTOH, in 5th grade we were guinea pigs for an “open classroom” plan where we got the syllabus for the year on the first day of school and were supposed to work our way through it ourselves without any actual instructional time. I think that year was the worst one from a total boredom point of view.

  22. 22
    piny says:

    Robert, tracking is bad because it assumes that skill levels are permanent. The tracking programs I have experience with write students off into diploma-only as early as seventh grade. In my home district, it was de facto apartheid: you were tracked low in high school because you went to a horrible middle school in a poor nonwhite neighborhood. The high school provided second-class services to students who didn’t arrive at the high school with high school classes already under their belts. No AS algebra in eighth grade? Sucks to be you!

    Tracking is also problematic in practice because it tends to reinforce itself. My high school used to have “private university,” “public university,” “transfer from community college,” “diploma,” and “worthless.” Now “private university” has been merged with “public university,” “transfer from community college” has more or less disappeared, and “diploma” is being threatened by “worthless” all the time.

    If tracking is used to “track” students into programs where the more needy kids get help they need and the less needy kids get the challenges they need so that everyone can end up with a useful education, I’m all for it. If kids who could learn stagnate until graduation because the school can’t be bothered to tutor them, and if they have no opportunity to move up, it’s reprehensible.

    >>Because females have more oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, girls were given a carpeted area where they sit and discuss their feelings. >>

    Hee. “Touchy-feely rug.” Reminds me of the carpet in the nursery care center at the Y where we had LGBT youth group meetings. Two-year-olds can be very hard on carpets.

    I’d like to second everyone who said this was horrifying.

    Assuming, again, the we accept the basic premise, a tendency to bond means that you’re emotionally sensitive and likely to place great importance in contact with other people. That doesn’t necessarily make you good at forming and maintaining positive relationships. It just means that you really need them. Forcing girls to spend even more of their time “bonding” would have made my school life even more miserable than it was: I would have spent even more time feeling excluded and lonely.

    That having been said, it seems possible to this layperson that a greater tendency to bond–and even higher levels of a hormone related to bonding–might be explained by a culture that teaches little girls from a very young age to be cooperative and to base their self-worth on the approval of others. For the same reason, a culture that teaches small boys to be physically active might have a hard time getting them to sit still when they enter school.

  23. 23
    piny says:

    Okay, (slightly) shorter me:

    Tracking as practiced most often is not a method of suiting programs to students’ needs. It’s a kind of triage: the highest tier of students get no special help because it’s assumed they can pass without it; the students in the middle get the most help because they can use it and are most likely to succeed with it; the students on the bottom get nothing because they are most likely to fail anyway.

    So tracking functions to excuse an appalling lack of educational resources–and as resources shrink, it provides a ready population of students who become less and less likely to succeed as more and more help is diverted from them. As you would be likely to notice, Robert, it also functions to punish academic excellence: brilliant students are maintained at average but not otherwise challenged. If my friends are any indication, they eventually decide that school is nothing but tedium.

  24. 24
    Matan says:

    What I haven’t seen anyone mention yet is that chemical brain states can be an effect, rather than a cause, of certain kinds of socialized behavior. If you’re taught that running around is good, then you might have higher concentrations of the running-around chemical. When I was in elementary school, I hung out primarily with other boys, but I sometimes was able to cross this boundary, and of course, as with crossing any social boundary, found it greatly rewarding. Reifing social divisions in this way sucks.

  25. 25
    Antigone says:

    Althought I agree with the premise that seperating genders out is ultimately going to be harmful, and that ability tracking isn’t going to do anyone a damn bit of good (personal anecdote at bottom), I have to disagree with one point. If the number of women whom have graduated has grown by leaps and bounds, and the number of guys graduating has stalled, we still have a problem. I’m not necessarily advocating for feminists to HAVE to do anything, nor am I saying that guys should only suceed to the detriment of women, but I am saying that maybe there is some merit to the idea that school systems and possibly social systems need to change so that males are progressing as well. I don’t think that success is a zero-sum game: I don’t think women need to fail so that men can progress, and I don’t think that men need to fail so women can progress.

    There should be an emphasis on the indvidual learner, and I think that if we did that, there wouldn’t be a gender disparity AT ALL. But, there is one, one that works in favor of women, so we have a responsibility as moral individuals to try and help the males rise above.

    Oh, and something on ability tracking: it sucks. It is completely and utterly worthless. And I’m saying this from someone who had a “top down” experience. Not only do most “exceptional ability” classes lack any type of additionally challenging experiences, but they are difficult to circumvent, especially if you moved around in them. Not to mention, that when your focus is “heavy” acedemics, you lose the “light” acedemics, and school becomes a chore. (*NOTE* I’m saying ‘heavy” to mean math, science, English mechanics, and history to a lesser degree. I’m saying “light” acedemics to refer to art, music, theatre, literature and physical education). Without the “light” acedemics, there’s really no reason to want to go to class, particularily since teaching to the test is about the most boring way any individual could learn. To this day, I am convinced that school is trying to teach us to hate learning, not embrace it.

  26. 26
    Tapetum says:

    To respond to Robert’s #2 post, and provide a counter-example to Antigone.

    I have no problem with the concept of ability tracking. How it’s practiced in most schools that use it is an entirely different thing. In a school that keeps in mind that student abilities can change from year to year, and are not necessarily level across different tasks (the idea of a student being in heavy academic, or remedial across the board is just repulsive), it can work very well.

    My middle school and high school practiced tracking. They did it so subtley that most of the students never noticed. All levels were well funded and well staffed, and it was easy for a student to upgrade (or downgrade) as required. E.g. my biology partner for Regent’s Bio had been in remedial science two years before. Schedules were very flexible – on a heavy academic set, I had enough time to take choir and voice as classes. The result? 97% of our graduates went on to college in one form or another. And yes, this was a public HS.

    Unfortunately I’ve never run into another place near as well run academically speaking. (It had it’s own problems, but they were in other areas.)

    The touchy-feely rug gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’ve always been very reluctant to share my feelings with people I don’t trust – which would have included most of my classmates. Generally the bullies among the girls would take any revelations they heard and use them for blackmail or other charming purposes.

  27. 27
    Grace says:

    Tapetum, what you’re talking about sounds more like what is now called “ability grouping”, where students can move between levels from year-to-year, or even on an as-needed basis. For instance, if a student has trouble with, say, grammar then he/she could be in the middle level class for this unit. If they are excellent at, say, research/writing, they can move to the advanced class for this unit. It requires a tremendous amount of shared planning time (more money) and qualified teachers (more money).They were planning to implement this in the middle school where I teach but, alas, it is an expensive propostion.

  28. 28
    AndiF says:

    What happens when a girl in that class doesn’t want to sit down on the rug and talk. What happens when a girl in the class wants to run and play? What happens when a girl in that class hurries to finish her test and brags how much faster she did it. Does she become a disciplinary problem?

    What happens when a boy in that class doesn’t want to exercise? What happens when a boy in that class cries when he has to do a multiple choice test in a limited amount of time. What happens when a boy in that class would like to sit at a desk and read a book? Does he become a disciplinary problem?

  29. 29
    Linnea says:

    I wonder if Tapetum went to the same high school I did. When it is practiced correctly, ability tracking is can be excellent. I knew people in my honors classes who had moved up from regents, and they were up to the task. Within my tracked classes we tended to work in groups where the strongest students were paired with weaker students to help them learn, and the stronger students learned by teaching.

    Where this did not work was in classes that were integrated across too many ability levels, because I ended up doing only teaching and no learning.

    As far as gender tracking goes, I can’t think of a worse idea, as outlined above. I, a female, would have hated it. I was very academically competitive and finished tests quickly. No matter what the individual qualities of the girls in the class, this seems like a way to keep girls ignorant and unable to compete in todays colleges and job market. Seperate is rarely equal.

  30. 30
    Ledasmom says:

    Just a minor quibble, Antigone – there’s kids that would be delighted to go to school and study nothing but math and science. Me, I would have skipped art if I could. Hated it. Was, in addition, on sit-down strike from PE for most of high school (philosophical differences with teacher).

  31. 31
    Dianne says:

    “there’s kids that would be delighted to go to school and study nothing but math and science. ”

    I would have been. I hated art, PE, etc. I thought I hated English, but it turned out I really just hated SAT prep classes. Without those, English can be quite fun, as I discovered in college. I think if I’d been forced to sit on a rug and “bond” with the other girls in elementary school I would have killed myself: school was horrid enough without that. Learning things was kind of fun but as to my peers…let’s just say I still hate them and leave it at that.

  32. 32
    Antigone says:

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that we get rid of math science (Holy Christ, no!). In fact, I would have done quite well with the PE gone, as I don’t really like the hierchies it stems (and am athletically disinclined in everything the school offered: public school’s not much for belly-dancing or tae kwon do). What I’m saying is this: don’t make learning a chore. Don’t undervalue the arts, and don’t overvalue the three R’s to the point where you suck all the fun out of them. I loved science, and I loved English but I hated it when it was no longer “let’s perk your natural curiosity” and became “let’s burn dry facts into your head”.

    As for math, sometimes I wonder about why I dislike it so much. I’ve always gotten A’s in it, but except for a few rare exceptions (like Calculus: my teacher let us fingerpaint to illistrate derivatives. The derivative of 2x^2 is 4x baby ) I hated learning it. I sometimes wonder if that was because I was taught it differently: I remember my first grade teacher gushing about how good Aaron Forsberg was at math, and when I beat him in “Around the world” she told him “Don’t worry, everyone has bad days”. Funny how stuff like that sticks with you.

  33. 33
    Dianne says:

    “I loved science, and I loved English but I hated it when it was no longer “let’s perk your natural curiosity” and became “let’s burn dry facts into your head”.”

    Drilling students in facts is not teaching science. Even leaving aside the gender discrimination problem, the way science is taught in the US (and probably elsewhere, but I only know the US) is appalling. I’m convinced that one of the reasons people fall for craziness like creationism/intelligent design is that they aren’t taught that science is about learning about the world through observation, not memorizing the results of someone else’s observations. If your results disagree with the results that everyone else has gotten up to now…maybe everyone else is wrong. On the other hand, one has to learn to evaluate data, including one’s own data, with a healthy skepticism and learn how to set up controls to demonstrate that the experiment is valid. Something Gray could use a refresher course in.

  34. 34
    Elena says:

    Go to a public pool and watch how parents teach their kids how to swim. Parents take it very seriously when boys are too afraid to jump in, or if they don’t know how to dive. They go easier on girls. They go easier on the boys when it comes to manners, as anyone who has been at a birthday party with boys can tell you. Now that girls’ star is rising, people are beginning to feel uneasy, as if this has to mean that boys are threatened. Just two weeks ago when my daughter and I were climbing a dune ahead of a father and his sons he said right in earshot: are you guys going to let that little girl beat you to the top? (we both beat them).

    Are boys having real problems or are girls just showing their true colors? I don’t know- but how many hours of video games do boys play compared to girls? How many fewer books do they read? If feminist families and educators have boosted their daughters by awareness and encouragement, shouldn’t parents examine what is fixable about boy-parenting instead of telling girls their brains are made for touchy feely bs? Remember that if you say girls are emotional, then their feelings have less value.

  35. 35
    Lee says:

    I always was good at math but was ambivalent about it because my dad was a math teacher. Even in college there was this expectation that I would be a math major, because a) I was good at it; and b) the profs knew my dad from when he was working on his master’s degree. But if I’d had a curriculum in elementary school that had emphasized math a lot more and not sucked all the fun out of it, maybe I would have embraced it. (Or maybe not – I was pretty contrarian back then.)

    I think part of the problem with modern American education is that our society tends to value individual abilities and effort everywhere except in the classroom, where economics dictate a cattlecar approach to teaching. OTOH, am I correct that in Europe and Japan the educational system’s attitude tends to be more Darwinian?

  36. 36
    Antigone says:

    I’m not entirely sure that I would go all the way for the Japanese model either though. The rates of suicide among the students is enough for me to want to temper it.

  37. 37
    RonF says:

    Oh, that touchy-feely stuff sets my hair on end, too. Maybe what we need to teach is that if feelings are getting in the way of your ability to deal with facts, you need to learn to control your feelings. 1 + 1 = 2 no matter how you feel about that.

  38. 38
    RonF says:

    Antigone writes:

    Without the “light” academics, there’s really no reason to want to go to class,

    Yow! Speak for yourself! When I moved from Massachusetts to Illinois, I was astounded that I could actually sign up for 2 science classes in my senior year. Not only that, but one of them was two periods and was a lab! That gave me 4 periods of math and science my senior year and I was more excited about school that year than any other. It beat the crap out of analyzing what some poet meant in the 1870’s or trying to make a recognizable image out of paper and paint. English was cool my Junior year but just barely tolerable to me my Senior year (although was that an issue with the teacher, in both cases).

    My biggest dissapointment in high school was that I couldn’t take Calculus because they didn’t offer it.

  39. 39
    RonF says:

    My kids went to a high school that has 5 levels. I forget what they call them, but “private U”, “public U”, “community college”, “diploma”, and “other” describes it well. It also made, just barely, a list that came out of the 700-odd best HS’s in America because their ratio of AP classes taken to students enrolled is (just barely) > 1.00. My daughter was in “private U” all the way. My son moved up from “public U” to “private U” during his sophmore year, so it isn’t something there that’s carved in stone. And there is a definite difference in the material covered and the challenges given to the students in the different levels. You can also mix and match; you can be “private U” in math and “public U” for English, for example.

  40. 40
    RonF says:

    Go to a public pool and watch how parents teach their kids how to swim. Parents take it very seriously when boys are too afraid to jump in, or if they don’t know how to dive. They go easier on girls.

    I can’t answer for other people, but my wife and I both had the philosophy that “a kid has to eat a pound of dirt before they’re 7”; in other words, we expected both our son and our daughter to face physical challenges and get their faces and hands dirty.

    I’m a Boy Scout leader. I can’t answer for how people teach their girls, but I can for how they teach their boys. Many, many parents seem to not take getting their kids to accept challenges and deal with failure very seriously at all. Whenever we have a campout that features an activity that is at all challenging or hazardous (rock climbing, white-water rafting), it seems as though there is a cohort of parents who collapse at the slightest hint that their son might get bruised or that might have his self-esteem damaged because he might not be great at it. These parents wouldn’t let their son get anywhere near a diving board. They seem to obsess about their kid’s feelings, without considering that he’ll probably feel better about himself if he accepts a challenge and has any kind of success.

    From what I’m seeing in my neighborhood, any disparity between the way girls and boys are taught in such circumstances is by having the attitudes towards instructing boys approach that of girls, rather than vice versa.

    They go easier on the boys when it comes to manners, as anyone who has been at a birthday party with boys can tell you.

    Given what I remember from what my daughter’s friends and my son’s friends acted during their birthday parties 15 years ago, I didn’t see much difference.

    Now that girls’ star is rising, people are beginning to feel uneasy, as if this has to mean that boys are threatened.

    What’s threatening boys is not what’s changing for girls, it’s what’s changing for boys. I see a lot of parents going a lot easier on boys, to their great detriment IMNSHO.

    Just two weeks ago when my daughter and I were climbing a dune ahead of a father and his sons he said right in earshot: are you guys going to let that little girl beat you to the top? (we both beat them).

    When we take the Troop rock climbing, a few of the adults have to go early to hike the gear up to the top of the bluffs and claim a good spot. The climb is about 600 feet up on a very difficult and steep trail; one often has to use both hands as well as both feet to climb up. Plus, we are carrying about 200 pounds of gear among us. We started up one day, only to find us being trailed by 2 young men and a young woman. We damn near killed ourselves rather than let us be shown up by 3 kids half our ages. Genders didn’t figure into it, it was more of a “we ain’t that old yet …!”

  41. 41
    RonF says:

    Drilling students in facts is not teaching science. Even leaving aside the gender discrimination problem, the way science is taught in the US (and probably elsewhere, but I only know the US) is appalling. I’m convinced that one of the reasons people fall for craziness like creationism/intelligent design is that they aren’t taught that science is about learning about the world through observation, not memorizing the results of someone else’s observations. If your results disagree with the results that everyone else has gotten up to now…maybe everyone else is wrong. On the other hand, one has to learn to evaluate data, including one’s own data, with a healthy skepticism and learn how to set up controls to demonstrate that the experiment is valid.

    Dianne, you are so right its frightening. Not one person in 10 could probably tell you the basic concepts of the scientific method, and in a country whose preeminence in the world is in great part based on our technological advances that’s scary. The ability to observe, evaluate, and analyze on a rational basis, without reference to ideology (religious or political) is essential. Schools need to stress that kind of thing a lot more than worrying about emotions and feelings.

    I personally think that part of that is that people who are good at math and science can generally make much more money doing something other than teaching. Whatever the reason, a lot of teachers don’t seem to be particularly good at math and science, and aren’t all that good at teaching it. If I won the lottery and didn’t have to worry about money, I might do it myself.

    Ask people what they think about a subject, and see how many times the answer comes back “I feel …” instead of “I think …”. People actually don’t understand the difference these days.

    If I could make one change in High School curriculums across the country, I would require that every HS Sophmore take a course in formal logic. Even just one semester would give them a tool to separate what’s rational from what’s not, and enable them to blow away marketing and electoral rhetoric and have a better chance and understanding what’s really being said (or not said).

    The other thing people need to learn is that once a valid experiment is done and you have good data, don’t try to extend your conclusion past the data. So many times I’ve seen a headline that “Studies show …” only to find out that the actual study conclusion was far more limited, but didn’t make nearly as attractive a headline.

  42. 42
    mythago says:

    Given what I remember from what my daughter’s friends and my son’s friends acted during their birthday parties 15 years ago, I didn’t see much difference.

    As long as we’re flinging around anecdotes, I can tell you that the reactions my daughter got as a little child were very different than those my son got at the same age, for the same exuberant behavior. And this was in ‘liberal’ California.

    I believe you when you say that a lot of parents don’t want their sons to fail. Don’t mistake that for assuming that parents are therefore doing the opposite with their daughters.

  43. 43
    Tapetum says:

    Competitativeness is definitely something that’s more encouraged in boys than in girls, even today. Frankly though, I think a lot of competativeness is inherent in some people (witness the number of women who’ve cropped up here to say they are competative themselves). It’s one thing when someone decides for themselves that they want to do better than anyone else (or someone else specific). It’s something else entirely when my karate teacher yells at one of the boys “A girl could hit harder than that!” when he has a wimpy kick or punch. Particularly when a full half of his class is girls and women.

    My competative streak was not extinguished in school, but mostly because my school was so utterly competative in everything. Even in that situation I paid a heavy social price among the girls.

    Linnea – I assume you were in NY, since you mentioned Regents. Rochester by any chance?

  44. 44
    Ledasmom says:

    Ron, they didn’t offer Calculus at your high school? I think I may cry.
    One of the advantages of having a son who is more or less oblivious to social cues is that, if there’s any social pressure for boys to not read, he’s not aware of it. Mind you, he was raised in a household that has more books than square feet (in fact, possibly more books than the entire lot has square feet), which undoubtedly had something to do with it – there were so many times he nursed while I was reading that we were afraid he might think his “mama” was a paperback.

  45. 45
    LC says:

    This will only disadvantage girls when it comes time to take the SAT, a timed mutltiple choice test where you are competing with other test takers, when they apply for college. We already have enough problems retaining women in math and science without this crap.

  46. 46
    alsis39 says:

    Jesurgislac Writes:

    As Marge Piercy said, it’s only to adults that little girls are cute. To each other, they’re life-sized.

    I recall Margaret Atwood’s narrator in Catseye saying that. Great minds think alike…. ?

  47. 47
    Fielder's Choice says:

    Of course this is pseudoscience. It’s also materialism. It’s the idea that people are no more than their hormones. And it’s the notion that men and women should be separate but equal and it is really very ignorant.

    Boys were put through running. Girls were asked to chat.
    Boys were given harder exams. Girls were given easier ones.
    Boys are prepped for soldiery. Girls are prepped for servantry.
    Boys are prepped for work. Girls, for idleness, by lot.

    Materialism is the philosophy of treating people as only matter. End it.

  48. 48
    Jenny K says:

    Elena, I think that you bring up an interesting point. (one that feministe brought up at pandagon as well)

    Boys may be taught to be competitive, but they have also picked up on the idea that academic acheivement, reading especially, is “girly.” While girls have been encouraged to cross gender lines (somewhat) boys are still extremely discouraged from doing so.

    This means that the girls who come into the bookstore I work at are often willing and eager to read just about anything, while the boys are more likely to be dragged in by their parents mothers and refuse to read anything that is not about a boy character doing “boy” things.

    IMHO, the long term solution is not for mothers and teachers to pay more attention to boys, but to get more fathers involved in childrearing and more men in elementary school classrooms.

    (but of course, to do that we have to tackle a gendered society that speaks of fathers “babysitting” their own children and is highly suspicious of men who spend time with children who are not their genetic offspring)

  49. 49
    mousehounde says:

    This will only disadvantage girls when it comes time to take the SAT, a timed mutltiple choice test where you are competing with other test takers, when they apply for college.

    LC, you say that like it is a bad thing. It’s only bad when boys are disadvantaged. It’s perfectly fine if it’s just girls. The important thing is that boys start doing better. If the girls start falling behind because of the new curriculums, well… it’s not like girls are really suited to academics. Boys are naturally smarter. The problem is those evil women teachers. They don’t recognize the superiority of the male student and have insisted upon teaching both sexes in the same manner and fashion, almost as though they were equal. This new method will work much better. I am sure in the end it will produce the desired outcomes down the road.

    Maybe they could speed things up: while the girls are sitting on the “touchy-feely rug”, they could play with dolls. You know, encourage those feminine maternal instincts so they know how to act in their future roles as wives and mommies. They could have tea parties, get used to serving and waiting on others. It’s not as though they need “that” much education. Reading, is ok. Those recipes don’t cook themselves. Gotta understand the directions. A little math wouldn’t hurt. There might be shopping. Beyond that, I am sure the men in their lives will tell them what they need to know.

    /sarcasm

  50. 50
    mythago says:

    but they have also picked up on the idea that academic acheivement, reading especially, is “girly.”

    When did high-level math and science become “girly”?

  51. 51
    Brian Vaughan says:

    No, materialism is the basis of natural science. Pseudoscience merely looks like materialism, but isn’t.

  52. 52
    Ledasmom says:

    Mousehounde, I can see dolls being tremendously useful in education: “Let’s see what combination of propellant and caliber makes the doll fly farthest, girls!” Double points if you take out the field-hockey goal!

    (Yeah, I hated field hockey. What’s the point of sticks if you can’t hit people with them?)

  53. 53
    MAchick says:

    I agree with Jenny K. In my recollections of public school, boys were always made fun of for academic sucess (moreso if they were in the “jock” group) where girls almost never were.

    And on the “boys are more likely to be dragged in by their parents mothers and refuse to read anything that is not about a boy character doing “boy” things”, who suspects that if Harry Potter was a girl, the series would not be anywhere near as successful?

  54. 54
    AndiF says:

    I’d like to some legal opinions on a couple things:

    1. Is the school subject to a lawsuit on the grounds of sex discrimination (for either sex) since they are not educating the children equally?
    2. Can the school refuse parents who want their “wrong gender child” put in the other gender’s room.

  55. 55
    AndiF says:

    Maybe they could speed things up: while the girls are sitting on the “touchy-feely rug”, they could play with dolls. You know, encourage those feminine maternal instincts so they know how to act in their future roles as wives and mommies.

    Unfortunately, mousehounde, this is not sarcasm. Gurian believes in the “sacredness of motherhood”, in women’s “natural need for dependency on men” and that parents should prepare their daughters for “the sacrifices of motherhood.”

  56. 56
    mythago says:

    Is the school subject to a lawsuit on the grounds of sex discrimination (for either sex) since they are not educating the children equally?

    No lawyer is going to give a ‘legal opinion’ a) without having all the facts of the case, b) knowing the laws of the state where the school is and c) for free. :)

    That said, if I were a parent of one of those kids, I’d be calling my lawyer right about now. There are situations where schools may treat boys and girls differently, and “I read in Newsweek that their brains are different” is not generally among them.

  57. 57
    RonF says:

    (Yeah, I hated field hockey. What’s the point of sticks if you can’t hit people with them?)

    Too bad for you that you missed women’s lacrosse. But then, the “powers that be” sissified up the rules for that, too. The players don’t get to check (which in men’s lacrosse includes being able to hit the other player with their stick under particular circumstances), they don’t get to hit; they even blow the whistle if your stick comes within a foot or two of the other player’s head. What’s wrong with putting helmets on the girls like they do the boys? Stupid.

  58. 58
    RonF says:

    Ledasmom, I asked about Calculus, and was told that no one on the faculty was qualified to teach it. Of course, this was back in 1970 (I be oooold).

  59. 59
    RonF says:

    Ledasmom, I end up in a lot of kids’ homes because it made it a point to visit a kid’s home at least once during his first year or so of Scouting. To advance in rank a boy needs to have a 1:1 conference with their Scoutmaster, and I asked to do that at the Scout’s home at least once in the first year so that I understood what his home environment was like. What I noticed was that one major difference between my home and these kids’ homes (other than the fact that almost all of them were cleaner and better maintained than mine) was that there were so few books around. In my house, every room has piles of books and magazines. None of these folks have anything like that. If you want your kids to read, read in front of them. Have lots of things to read around. Talk about what you’ve read. And don’t buy an X-Box!

    mythago said, “I believe you when you say that a lot of parents don’t want their sons to fail. Don’t mistake that for assuming that parents are therefore doing the opposite with their daughters.”

    I’m not making any assumptions about how people raise their daughters, as I have much less experience with that. The only insight to that I have are the parents of my daughter’s hockey and softball teammates, and I suspect that’s a non-representative sample of the population.

  60. 60
    Lee says:

    As a Brownie troop leader, I can say that many of my parents are what I consider to be hyper-paranoid. I tried for many months to convince the parents that we should take advantage of having a camp-certified parent in the troop to go camping for one night – in a nice, safe, GSUSA-approved park 5 miles from home with cabins and real bathrooms with electricity and everything – but was told they were too young for that. So I switched up to a church lock-in, at a nice, safe, approved church less than a mile from home, with bathrooms and a full kitchen and carpet and TV and everything, and was told they were too young for that. These girls are 7, 8, and 9 years old, and I can tell you I was flabbergasted that their parents did not consider letting them try any kind of overnight, sleepaway experience for even one night. My parents were sending me to week-long sleepaway camp at this age, for Pete’s sake.

  61. 61
    AndiF says:

    Thanks, mythago (and do you have a special billable rate for internet nuisances?)

  62. 62
    sofakinglazyboy says:

    I confess to being a huge advocate of same sex education and I’m also a proud graduate of the Citadel before the pre-integration era. Let me say though, that I agree whole heartedly with the criticism being offered against the notion that boys and girls should be taught differently simply because they are boys are girls. The strength of single gender education is a removal of distractions, not the opportunity to cater to one gender’s supposed best methods of learning. Life doesn’t make special concessions for men or women, so schools shouldn’t for boys and girls.

    I was never under the assumption that men were smarter than women while I was at the Citadel, I just knew that I was a hornball and if I had gone to a co-ed college I would have flunked out and contracted something.

    There may be some truth to the fact that men (in general) do learn better one way, while women (in general) do learn better in another. Catering to these predilections might in fact lead to a more efficient educational process and generate a more educated student. It would not however create a more fully developed human, or a more responsible citizen, or a better potential father/husband, or mother/wife. Learning how the other gender thinks is about as important a goal I can think of in grade school education. Have any studies been conducted as to the formation of societal conventions in the grade school years? What would the long term impact be of raising a group of boys and girls bereft of contact with the opposite gender ? Didn’t ANYONE read Lord of the Flies?

    As probably the only person on this board to make a comment who has actual first hand experience with protracted single gender education, let me tell you that women have a mitigating effect on certain male tendencies. While I believe this may actually improve a college experience by dramatically increasing competitive drive, rugged independence, and understanding of how to manipulate rigid social hierarchies, I think it would be positively horrific to raise a generation of young boys who had never known anything different. They would be monsters. Im not being flippantly categorical either people. They would be freaking monsters. I cant speak as to how the women would come out (shudder), but I doubt it would be much better.

    I think that a truly effective analysis of this program would have to first investigate what the exact goals of public education are. That would take months, but seeing how this program fits into those goals might prove exceptionally enlightening.

  63. 63
    mythago says:

    You couldn’t pay me enough. ;)

  64. 64
    Rock says:

    What is the problem with providing academics, rugs, sports, and clubs, social and academic and let the kids do what attracts them and quit worrying about who does what? (Gender) Segregation based on generalities made about hormones? You got to be kidding. (I suffer from low serotonin, it is called depression.)

    As far as the girls outgunning the boys academically, I can say that happens in my home. My daughter (4.4 GPA) and my wife (3.8) out rank my son and I in school. My son prioritizes and does only what he sees as beneficial and is much more adapt at “reading” folks. My daughter is so competitive she wants to win at everything she does, always has, from poetry to climbing trees, she is fearless. She also believes everybody at face value. Is either a better person for it?

    I have to be honest; I could give a happy crap about the academics relative to how they get along with folks. Are they going to be fair and honest? Are they going to stand up for the little guys in life? Are they going to respect their mates (and receive respect)? Are they going to give time and materials to causes that require them? Will they judge others? The Scientific Method is important, Math and English are important, but so is having a solid social conscience, and loving ones neighbors. Much of which is worked out on the rug, the field and the Arts.

    As for the suggested exclusion of being intelligent and only embracing evolution or the implication of an ignorant theist, my immediate family has 2 PhDs, 3 MAs, and a gaggle of undergraduate degrees and has no problem acknowledging both, love those generalities. Blessings.

  65. 65
    Aaron V. says:

    Regarding Comment #62 – “elimination of distraction??” I would think the hazing for “knobs” at the Citadel is a thousand times more “distracting” than having women in your classes or on campus.

    At least at a coed university, I had the knowledge that upperclassmen wouldn’t break into my room and make me do calisthenics or go on a forced march when I should have been sleeping so I could be alert in class the next day. The Rat Line hazing (or the more extreme kinds of fraternity hazing) is exactly what I think of when I think of people becoming monsters when surrounded by the same sex.

  66. 66
    Robert says:

    What is the problem with providing academics, rugs, sports, and clubs, social and academic and let the kids do what attracts them and quit worrying about who does what?

    Nothing at all, to people who aren’t social engineers.

  67. 67
    Antigone says:

    Not to mention studies show guys do better acedemically in mixed gender groups. So there goes the “distraction” theory.

  68. 68
    Ledasmom says:

    Believe me, lazyboy, you’re not the only one with experience of single-sex education. My last two years of college were at a women’s college. We acted pretty much the way women do anywhere else, minus (mostly) the flirting. Mind you, it wasn’t as if we didn’t see men on campus (especially on weekend mornings), but they weren’t a part of our everyday life. I can’t say it was a particularly big deal not having them there.
    Rock, as long as everyone capable of it comes out of school with a basic educational skill set (at the very least), no problem. I’d be seriously pissed off if a child of mine was allowed to get away without learning math, for instance, because he wasn’t particularly attracted to it.

  69. 69
    RonF says:

    lazyboy, I went to an engineering school (back in the ’70s) that, while technically co-ed, was male:female::10:1. And a lot of the guys were socially arrested. We were in a major urban area, so there were plenty of other schools around if you wanted to go looking for a date, but the on-campus environment was heavily male. I lived in a fraternity house, but there was no hazing, particularly.

  70. 70
    RonF says:

    Lee, I’d be interested to know what kind of area you live in. I talk to a lot of Scout leaders in my Council, and what I’ve found is that the area I draw Scouts from whose families have this issue tend to be “new money” – families that come from less-advantaged backgrounds who have moved up in their generation to upper-middle class status, or even lower-upper class (class = economic). Other areas in our Council that are equivalent in income but have been at that income level for more than the current generation don’t act like this.

    The other thing about the “new money” folks is that we have a very hard time getting the adults themselves in the program. As you know, Scouting (either BSA or GSUSA) depends on the active participation of the parents to be successful. The lower income folks and the “old money” folks seem to be able to find the time to participate, but the “new money” folks tend to want to throw money at Scouting but profess not to have the time to participate directly.

  71. 71
    sofakinglazyboy says:

    In reply to Aaron V: I have not seen such a study and do not know at what age it was conducted, level of education, and most important in my circumstance, what type of student was being studied. I can tell you that the Citadel primarily attracted four “types” of person; southern traditionalist legacy types, minorities (yes, the Citadel of all places has one of the best records of any college in the south for producing minority college graduates who go on to either graduate studies, military advancement, and even flat out financial success), what I will call patriotic types who go on to the military, and finally those with disciplinary issues. 7% of all Citadel graduates at one time or another were on the wrong side of the law. The school used to actually have a liaison with the South Carolina Judiciary who encouraged these kids to attend the Citadel. The original mission of the school was to provide an education for the “poor but deserving” youth of South Carolina. True, when that policy was written, it wasn’t for blacks, women, or anyone from another state, but the spirit of that policy has evolved and encompassed its true intent.

    Anyway, speaking as part of that 7%, I can tell you that the knob experience changed my life in a way that you can not understand and which it would be impossible for me to explain. I have debated this with people for 8 years now (since I graduated), and I have come to the conclusion that unless you were there, you wouldn’t get it. All I can say is this. I had been arrested 6 times, gotten a girl pregnant, and caused more pain to my grandmother who raised me than I care to recall. I now own my own architectural firm designing “green” buildings, and do all I can to make up for the person I was when I was younger. I even set up a college scholarship fund in my grandmothers name for any hard luck case that makes application to the Citadel…only juvies need apply.

    So, if the knob experience was a distraction, I honestly feel the world would be a better place if everyone had just taste of distraction at least once in their lives. You never really appreciate the freedoms you have until they are taken away.

    Back to the original point of these discussions, has anyone read The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson?

  72. 72
    Ledasmom says:

    Oh, my goodness – I loved Diamond Age. Wonderful book.

  73. 73
    Rock says:

    Ledasmom,

    I hope you didn’t gather that I believe in giving kids the choice as to learning the basics. (I would also add the humanities as well.) We are seeking ways of getting kids to stay in school and get diplomas and degrees, and be able to have the knowledge and not just the ticket. In our situation our kids went to the poorest performing state in the nation, and rank very high in the national standard testing, I do not believe it is all on the school to teach our kids. The problem is that aside from being a bit nuts, my kids have educated parents and Grands. For the kids who’s parents assume it is the role of the school to educate them, or lack the skills, I agree then the parents need to stay involved and should be upset if the kids are not performing and are being advanced as though all is well.

    The current trend towards testing for the measure of success in educating the little gems is problematic. I see lots of books, lots of homework for little ones, staggering with backpacks going home every night much of which is memorization. We are loosing something when the kids can’t be kids, while they are kids. I do not see Annie Dillard, Loren Eisley, Eric Hoffer, Whitman, Dideon, (I probably have botched all their names… spelling one of many blind spots.) in any of the older ones hands either. Information without a frame work to being human leads us to genius engineers working to make better bombs. Or worse dropping out, using dope, and never finding their purpose in life.

    Rats! I am getting depressed. Blessings.

  74. 74
    Aaron V. says:

    lazyboy: Nice job at evading the question, and from my knowledge of The Citadel, it’s nothing more than hazing and abuse heaped upon the knobs by upperclassmen, and that abuse (with its accompanying fear and physical exhaustion) is not an ideal environment for learning.

    I certainly would NEVER want to have that distraction in my life. My father had the same experience when he was in the Marines, but the difference between him and you is that he beat up the peers (fellow enlisteds) who were harassing him without consequences.

  75. 75
    mousehounde says:

    I do not believe it is all on the school to teach our kids. […] For the kids who’s parents assume it is the role of the school to educate them, or lack the skills, I agree then the parents need to stay involved and should be upset if the kids are not performing and are being advanced as though all is well.

    Rock, I do not understand your comment. Most parents send their kids to school with the assumption that they will be taught and educated.

    We are loosing something when the kids can’t be kids, while they are kids.

    I think this is a recent invention of society. The whole “ideal” of childhood is highly romantic. And it doesn’t seem to be working. If you treat children like little adults and give them responsibility, odds are they will grow up to be responsible adults. If you treat them like children for a very long time, they will grow up to act like children and expect others to fix all their problems.

    The current trend towards testing for the measure of success in educating the little gems is problematic. I see lots of books, lots of homework for little ones, staggering with backpacks going home every night much of which is memorization.

    Expecting kids to do homework, which is pretty much their only job, doesn’t seem like a big deal.

  76. 76
    Rock says:

    Mousehound,

    How old are your children?

    I do not believe it is the states job to educate my children. They did not teach my kids to count, to read, much of the arts, natural history; instill a love of books, political science, theology, or any number of issues and themes. Much of the knowledge came over the dinner table, on the sofa, piled up in the bed reading, hunting mushrooms, pressings flowers, wandering in galleries, films, (we did not have TV for over ten years, and there was much time to spend.) camping, going to Church, helping those in need, working jobs… The school had far less to do in educating my children than their family(we were at the school often as well). I pity children who go from school to the TV, to bed, who only see People magazine for literature, and may not be blessed to be captured by a great teacher or two in the schools. I think you are correct most people do send their kids to school to be educated, unfortunately for many reasons including overwork, underpay, excessive numbers of students, under budgeted districts stretch many very good teachers so thin they cannot possibly take on, what IMO is still the responsibility of the family to attend to most.

    Children are not little adults. Children are children. If you treat a dog like a chicken you will not get a chicken you will get a neurotic dog that can’t lay an egg. All things have their proper season, children can have many responsibilities, and handle many realities and still be kids. Piling on work to memorize at 8 years old will not produce a better more intelligent adult, dreaming and play are as essential to health and development as hitting the grindstone. That is not romantic, it is fact. Most children are far more enthusiastic about work when it is balanced with play.

    My kids had jobs very early on in life, most of their own choosing. (They loved the independence, my daughter printed up cards at 7 years old, “Mother’s Little Helper” where she would entertain small children while mom was home so they could get things done for less than a baby sitter, for example.) They also had age appropriate chores. I never made education a “job” or discipline one of many reasons they have always done well with it.

    It is my belief that panic and fear of decline has pushed many to believe the children need to work much harder to “keep up” with some unknown group. Parents accepting responsibility and participating seems to make a bigger difference IMO than teaching based on hormones. Blessings.

  77. 77
    mythago says:

    I do not believe it is the states job to educate my children.

    That’s nice, but in fact it *is* a requirement that the state provide an education for your children through public schooling. You can decline this offer by choosing private schools or homeschooling, of course.

  78. 78
    jaketk says:

    mousehounde writes:

    I have to wonder, if it were reversed, if it were girls who were disadvantaged, if it were girls with a high drop out rate and low enrollment in college, would they have changed the curriculum to help girls?

    yes, they would, which is why girls are fairing better in math and science than they were. if males learn differently than female, i.e. certain methods of teaching work better for different genders, then it would seem better to apply those methods which work best to the specific groups rather than force one group to attempt to learn a way which makes it far more difficult for them.

    i agree that the serotonin/oxytocin is nothing more than the polar opposite of the socially engineered androgyny proported by feminism. but i hardly see how helping boys–whom virtully every study done in the last ten years show that they are failing in education–is a bad thing or will somehow harm girls. i think there is an element of truth in the idea that the teacher teaches how s/he learns. i went to a co-ed grammar school but an all-boy high school, and there was a very clear difference in how the boys learned when they had female students in the class. there was also a difference in how they learned when they had female teacher versus a male teacher, and when they had a more vocal teacher rather than a visual teacher. in my junior english class, the teacher, who was female, told us before we took our ACTs that we really shouldn’t try that hard because girl scores would be higher anyway. and i noticed that teachers like her, both male and female, would give off that attitude, that because we were male, we shouldn’t put forth that much effort.

    if you look at how our education system has changed in the last thirty years, particularly public schools, it’s all about testing and removing any element of competiveness, which would seem like an oxymoron. i’m completely in favor of lessening the testing and allowing in more competiveness, (and bringing back recess) and allowing boys and girls to learn separately so long as both feminists and non-feminists social engineers stay out of it and let the kids learn.

  79. 79
    mythago says:

    but i hardly see how helping boys”“whom virtully every study done in the last ten years show that they are failing in education”“is a bad thing

    Are those studies showing that boys are ‘failing,’ or that girls are pulling ahead of them? Why on earth do you think it is wise to separate students by gender?

  80. 80
    Rock says:

    Jaketk,

    I like the idea of using all manor of approaches, however people are so dynamic and diverse, simply teaching by gender may prove harmful to kids who might respond to a personality or a method aimed at the opposite gender, age group or what have you. I find it ironic that that it takes studies to show that men or women, girls or boys act differently around each other or separated. A trip to a bar, sweat lodge, locker room, stag meeting, camp out, etc. have born this out I am sure for eons. The thing is, it is important to quit trying to pretend it isn’t there, and move on and aim for as many kids as we can, without the labels and the stigmas. I was in Special Ed for a few years, thought I was “retarded” (their word) severe dyslexia and abuse in the home were the issues. The label stuck in me for years. I was more of a rug person at that time; aggression freaked me out until I learned that it is appropriate in sports etc. I do not get the propensity to seek the extremes and the either or mentality. Neither do I understand the need to deny that there are propensities that may well indeed be weighted towards genders and try and be sensitive to them. It seems that boys need to deal with more aggression and shorter attention spans when young. Why not allow for this without excluding girls that may be the same or forcing boys that aren’t?

    Mythago,

    It is true they do and should provide schooling; however this IMO is nothing but a facet of what a person needs to learn or know. The schools are equipped to teach, however I do not believe they are solely responsible for ones education. It is up to parents, student, and interested others to see the job is done well. If Bobby can’t read, it should be no surprise to the family, what are they going to do about it? (We offer after school tutoring as many kids’ families are not equipped to help, it does take a village sometimes, as the schools are poorly funded where parents are least available one has to wonder if there is not an agenda.) Blessings

  81. 81
    mousehounde says:

    Rock says:

    I do not believe it is the states job to educate my children. They did not teach my kids to count, to read, much of the arts, natural history; instill a love of books, political science, theology, or any number of issues and themes. Much of the knowledge came over the dinner table, on the sofa, piled up in the bed reading, hunting mushrooms, pressings flowers, wandering in galleries, films, […]

    I think your kids are lucky to have you. Wouldn’t it be great if every parent had the time, the ability, the skills to do as you have done? Sadly, a great many can’t do the things you have. Some are too busy working to pay bills to spend time at home. Hunting mushrooms, wandering in galleries? If one doesn’t have days off because they work two jobs, when should those activities be scheduled? While I am glad your kids have turned out so well, your attitude seems a bit smug. “Gee, look what I did. Why can’t everyone?” Well, I am sorry, but everyone can’t. And those who can’t, depend on the public schools to teach their children. And the thought that schools are spending limited funds on half ass ideas like separate curriculums for boys and girls is scary.

    Children are not little adults. Children are children. If you treat a dog like a chicken you will not get a chicken you will get a neurotic dog that can’t lay an egg.

    Now you are just being silly. Puppies don’t grow up to be chickens. Teaching them to act like chickens would be foolish. Children, however, do grow up to become adults. So teaching them to act like adults is not foolish.

    It is my belief that panic and fear of decline has pushed many to believe the children need to work much harder to “keep up” with some unknown group.

    But it isn’t panic and fear. It is reality. And it isn’t some “unknown group”. It is the world. The US is falling behind in education.

  82. 82
    sofakinglazyboy says:

    To Ledasmom: On Diamond Age; The character of Lord Finkle-McGraw engages Hackworth in an interesting, if Socratic, dialogue about the flaws of public education and the necessity of teaching counter-conformist values. To what extent do you think the current debate illustrates a potential real life application of the educational system unwittingly instilling characteristics into its students just because of the educational format? i.e. Diamond Age points out that the form an education takes is just as important as the quality or content. Perhaps more individualized educational formats are not bad things at all. I just think the boy/girl division isnt the right grouping.

    To Aaron V.
    In my experience…which is first hand, it is MUCH more than hazing and abuse heaped upon knobs by upperclassmen. Hazing, when it occured, was usually waranted, with cause, and instructive. Actually, much of it was geared towards academic performance. The fourth class system is set up such that each successive class is under the direct academic supervision of the one that came before it. The academic support structure was quite impressive I assure you. Mandatory study time, which was EVERY NIGHT from 6:30 to 11:00, was completely uninterupted until after 10:30. Hazing, if it occured on a weeknight at all, only happened when an academic officer encounted a student NOT studying when they were supposed to be. The lesson being: If you dislike studying so much that you arn’t doing it when you were ordered to, we will come up with an alternative activity that will make you reconsider your priorities.

    Also, each knob had an upperclassman who was their mentor. This person was responsible for monitoring their studies and interceding on the knobs behalf should military or disciplinary intersts be interfearing with academic. Since this upperclassman’s own leave and liberty policy were usually directly linked with the knob’s academic performance, they were zealous in their duties.

    Im not sure which question of yours I evaded…I dont really recall you asking one, but if you would like to re-ask it, I would be happy to satisfy your curiousity.

  83. 83
    jaketk says:

    mythago writes:

    Are those studies showing that boys are ‘failing,’ or that girls are pulling ahead of them? Why on earth do you think it is wise to separate students by gender?

    would you allow for your first statement be applicable to girls’ grades prior to the changes made to the education system some 20-30 years ago? in other words, would it not be fair to state that girls weren’t being left behind, but that boys were simply pulling ahead of them?

    but to answer your question, if boys grades were not improving once the teaching methods and envirnoment were changed to better suit how boys learn, then your point would be valid. however, such is not the case. boys appear to do better when their learning needs are met instead of ignoring them and expecting boys to learn as girls do. not to send you to an obviously biased site, you should seriously read the research and studies that have been conducted on this subject.

    but why on earth do you think it is wise not to separate by gender? i assume that you support girl-only schools, classrooms, sports ,etc. that focus on girls need, so i’m seeing an inherent contradiction if it is okay to do the one but not the other.

    Rock writes:

    I like the idea of using all manor of approaches, however people are so dynamic and diverse, simply teaching by gender may prove harmful to kids who might respond to a personality or a method aimed at the opposite gender, age group or what have you.

    unfortunately, the current situation is that teachers are simply teaching by gender. leaving the situation as is simply will not work, boys will continue to fail. and expecting a teacher to see to the individual needs of 30+ students is completely unrealistic. i went to an all-boy high school. few teachers’ personalities were exactly alike. i had just as many female teachers as i had male teachers, and their methods were rarely the same. the only real similarity was that they were boy-oriented. they molded their methods into a fashion that better suited boys. were there students who still didn’t get it? yes. were their boys who were more comfortable learning in a girl-oriented way? yes. but for the most part, they were a very small number of students.

    you cannot treat every child as exactly the same as another, i agree with that. however, we there are differences in the way boys and girls learn. that is a fact. and just like we provide students who find their classes either too easy or difficult with classes that suit their needs, it would be wise to do the same for boys and girls, particularly given the results that we see when that is done. if did not work, i would not support it. but it does, and we should provide it.

  84. 84
    Jenny K says:

    “When did high-level math and science become “girly”?”

    Well, if “Freaks and Geeks” is any indication, by 1980. (until you get to college, anyway) All the Mathletes for McKinley High are girls. :)

    sofakinglazyboy:

    I went to a single sex school for a while too – my college – which I loved. My take has always been that it has to be the students’ choice, which rules out elementary school (and I would add should only include the occassional middle school class), and that while some students may need it, most don’t, and so it should be mostly avoided since we all need to live and work with different types of people.

    Your comments about hazing being a larger part of a peer support system remind me a lot of some of the stuff my college did. Every upperclass had a special connection with the incoming first-years and our dorms were deliberately balanced so that there were a variety of classes in each dorm, often on each floor. This, as much as anything else, is part of what made the school work.

    One of our favorites was Disorientation, where the seniors would make the first-years do all sorts of stupid, silly things. We were warned to keep it safe and fun, and it was technically optional, but obviously peer pressure was to join in and/or make the first-years do outrageous stuff. So I can see how very good and useful peer support systems may end up including some not so good hazing.

    The important dividing line to me is how much the support system creates a heirarchy, and how much it fosters mutual respect. IMHO, support systems that reinforce heirarchies, and allow peer implemented punishment, are more likely to lead to abuse that systems that don’t. We may have “made” our first-years do stupid stuff, but unlike the Greek system where you have to pledge to get in, the ony initiation you had to pass to join our “sorority” was to be accepted into the school, which nicely avoided the whole “upperclasswomen as gatekeepers” thing. I don’t think the support systems would have worked as well otherwise.

  85. 85
    Rock says:

    mousehounde,

    I think you could not be more right on one side and mistaken on the other.

    The mistake: I have worked 6 days or more a week for the last 25 years. When the kids were growing up I started my own business. For 3 years it looked like it was going to work. The last two were frantic trying to save it and going into heavy debt. I would drive all night to meet with clients and prospects, arrive at home rest for an hour shower and go back to work. When it failed, we were so far in debt my attorney thought I would never pay him and told us solvency was impossible and to declare bankruptcy. (I refused.) It took another 5 years to pay off the debts working at anything that would pay a dime, selling everything that was not essential, negotiating every bill over and over. We rented out our home and moved into a cabin. Just when things were looking like we might be OK I broke my leg badly and was unable to work for three months. (It was the only time in my life I was not insured. My kids emptied the urinals and brought me food in my bed. It was very, very hard.) My wife and I did not go on a date for years. We prioritized, no cable, library cards instead. We both came from terrible family situations and were not going to let another generation suffer. It was not going to happen because of the schools; we did everything we could to provide positive experiences for our kids. If it meant getting money from the Elks, or the Church or Lions to pay for tuition for an activity for the kids we did it, many days we ran out of hours in a day to make another dollar and we needed all we had to keep the water on. I quit taking my meds because they cost so much, untreated depression is a real treat when things look impossible for real. We never quit giving to the less fortunate every week and serving them through community outreach’s, I believe this is why we somehow made it through. God has been so good to me. Our kids saw all of it, and are better IMO for the witness. It is not smug; it is knowing what can be done when one has to and being blessed to see it working in my kids. (The first generation in memory that are not drug abusers, sexually or physically abused.)

    The right: I agree the schools need to provide as many and diverse opportunities as they can. Also that they are terribly under funded and teachers are not treated with the respect and reverence they deserve. (Mom teaches at an Indian school, both my wife and I taught at University, anything for a buck, so we know this first hand.) Still even if kids go to a very good school it is incumbent on the parents, the family and where these fall down the community to take responsibility for the kids’ educations, it cannot fall only to the school. That is asking far too much of the institution and the teachers; unless it evolves to something of a community effort and not just paying very low taxes and expecting a miracle to happen. I do not see this happening soon though. We cannot get healthcare for 40 million people, education is not as obvious. Opening Smart Centers for kids after school to get help. Volunteering at Church’s in poorer communities to do tutoring etc. Stopping the myth that it is the states responsibility, and teaching parents and young people that it is part of the deal to raise your kids and not leave that for someone else. If you don’t know the math, then hold the kids accountable to the person that does. Why should the state be the defacto parents? It is my job to help my neighbors kids who are in need. Do we really want Bush’s vision of education to be the last word they hear? In my belief, if the Body of Christ behaved as it should, there would be no want, with just the existing Church itself. If the rest got on board with taking one little person under their arms, we would need much less of the government in our lives, and many folks would find peace in a way that is beyond their current grasp. I think the search for all the mitigating factors as to why Bobby is falling behind is because we have lost sight of the main thing. We are looking to fix a problem in academics whose foundation is relational. (Hopeless idealist.) Love your neighbor; it truly is the law of laws. It is true the dog analogy was silly… but I laughed when I pictured it, so there it is. Blessings.

  86. 86
    mythago says:

    Well, if “Freaks and Geeks” is any indication, by 1980

    That would have been news to my high school.

  87. 87
    Lee says:

    Ron F: “Lee, I’d be interested to know what kind of area you live in.”

    I live in a very diverse urban area that is mixed racially, economically, and religiously, but mostly Catholic. My Brownie troop is 30% Asian, 40% black, 10% white, 10% Hispanic, and 10% mixed race (I have a big troop). The parents of girls in my troop are in the military (both enlisted and officers), doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, plumbers, clerks, secretaries, cleaners, the gamut. Some of the girls are first-generation Americans, some are immigrants themselves, some are Mayflower descendants, some are old money, some are new money. The main common denominator I can find is that almost all of the parents have urban roots, and about half of my girls are either only children or the oldest children in their families. Are people generally overprotective of their oldest/only children if they are girls?

    Part of the reason I have a big troop is because most of the families are two-worker families, so I have plenty of adults who able and willing to help but cannot commit to the kind of effort being a leader or a co-leader requires. I find that I cannot predict which parents are the most likely to be involved, because it appears to depend on their job situation. I have one parent, bless her heart, who will come to help if I ask her to, whenever she’s not actually working, even if she hasn’t slept more than 2 hours in the last 24 (she’s a NICU nurse). I have another parent who has made no commitments whatsoever for two years straight but whose daughter attends every meeting without fail and gets picked up on time every single time.

    I agree 200% that successful Scouting depends on the parents. But as Rock and Mythago have been debating about the role of schools in education, I would also mostly agree with Rock that the parents must be involved for the schools to be successful in educating their students. As a sterling example of this, I have a girl in my troop who was in a very chaotic home situation. She had many adults in her life who loved her to bits and gave her presents and made sure she had clothes on her back and food to eat and a bed to sleep in and a house to live in, but NOT ONE SINGLE ONE of those loving adults checked her backpack to see what she was doing in school or helped her with her homework (not to mention even making sure she got it done). After a very frustrating year for her, she was held back. Oh, when the notice went out that she was failing, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, the drama was a sight to behold. At her father’s request, I helped them find a tutor, but it was too little, too late. So over the summer, a widowed aunt moved in with them, and now she’s the one who has taken on the responsibility to make sure homework gets done, pays attention to the flyers and the notices, goes to Back to School night, and all of that other stuff, and the difference in the child is amazing. She is so happy and is feeling so good about herself now, whereas last year she had anger management issues and was sad or sullen a lot of the time.

    Yes, the school is where you send your child to be educated. But the school absolutely cannot do it all – the parents MUST have a role and do their parts, too, or it just plain does not work.

  88. 88
    Greta says:

    This is a fascinating discussion, particularly as I work in higher education. The one experience of my own that I would contribute to illustrate a related point is from high school. I was on my school’s Academic Decathalon team for two years. Both years the nine-member team was composed of four girls and five guys, but both years the girls did consistently better in terms of winning medals than the guys. This was in the highly competitive, timed test arena that the project described in the original post claims to be better for boys. Were we just exceptions to the rule? Maybe, but if so the state of Indiana was full of exceptions because without fail my A-student (highest level of competition) testing room was almost entirely female.

    I would also point out that the fact that all of the children in the project are receiving mostly multiple-choice tests is a problem all by itself as such tests are more and more widely regarded by the education community as poor assessments in terms of measuring actual student learning.

  89. 89
    BritGirlSF says:

    At that age, just how complicated are the “feelings” that the little girls are supposed to be discussing, and how much time do they need to do so? I would have been bored to death in that classroom, and as anyone who has ever observed a classroom will tell you, bored children often become badly behaved, disruptive children. If you want to see a group of little girls slowly going insane, and acting out in very unhealthy ways as they get older, this would be a great way to achieve that.
    Also, what about the boys who are not competative by nature, who hate sports and would be much happier reading a book? Those boys get bullied enough in our current school system, why would any sane person want to make the situation for them even worse?
    All in all this is a bad idea. Why can’t the school system just treat each kid as an individual and tweak the way they do things accordingly?
    The point about emphasising strengths vs compensating for weaknesses is an intersting one. I’d say that schools should be doing a bit of both, with particular emphasis being placed on working to correct those weaknesses that are likely to cause a kid problems later in life.
    Lastly, and I know that this is not a popular view among many on my side of the political fence, I think that streaming on the basis of aptitude is essential. If you don’t do it you end up with classes where the smartest kids are bored and unchallenged and the least intelligent kids fall hopelessly behind. Multiply that effect by 12 years of school, and you end up with a situation where hardly anyone really reaches their full potential. Streaming doesn’t seem “fair” from an egalitarian point of view, but it works. I’ve been in schools both with and without streaming , and the ones with streaming got MUCH better results for students at all levels of ability.

  90. 90
    BritGirlSF says:

    Lazy boy – add me to the experienced with same sex education group. I think that is some ways it can be good (my high school had excellent academic results), but in other ways it can be very bad (my school also had Lord of the Flies-like hazing). I would be VERY concerned about how kids whose entire educational experience was same-sex would turn it – it’s one thing to do it for a few years, quite another to do it for 12+.
    And to the people commenting about lacrosse with the sissy rules – at my school we played it the “guy” way. It’s actually much more fun like that. We did have no-checking field hockey though, which in reality just leads to people being agressive in a sneaky way – people still get hurt. My first sight of checking-allowed ice hockey was a revelation of the “I want to do that!” variety.

  91. 91
    sofakinglazyboy says:

    LAX is LAX…even if you did play by sissy rules, its still people competing with eachother while carrying sticks. And those damn balls hurt when they hit you. Checking was mild when compared to that.

    Jenny K. I agree…the potential for any sort of distributed power system leading towards abuse is inherant. Power corrupts…

    There must be checks and balances.

  92. 92
    jacqui says:

    I am doing a research project in favor of single gender classrooms for math and science. Male and female mindset is of course crucial to understanding what is being taught, but the teachers themselves must understand how to utilize various teaching methods and provide accommodations, based on the class itself. Working in the public school system, I have witnessed gender biases in the classroom, by female teachers, in favor of boys. Especially in math. To assume that female teachers teach the way they learn is presumptuous. Girls ages 11-15 are slipping through the cracks when it comes to math. There is a key social component here that must be addressed in conjunction with different learning styles based on gender. A single gender classroom for math and science can do no harm, and allow each gender to flourish.

  93. 93
    mousehounde says:

    A single gender classroom for math and science can do no harm, and allow each gender to flourish.

    Now I see it different. I can see this “single gender” classroom thing catching on because it sounds good in theory. I can also see it causing problems in future. I can see young women’s grades, no matter how high in the “all girl” classes, being seen as less good than those of young men in the “all boy” classes. A girl makes all “A”s in class. A boy makes all “A”s. The boy will be perceived as doing better because he was competing with other boys. The girl will be perceived as doing less well because her only competition was other girls. Yes, she did well when it was just the “girls”, but she probably wouldn’t have scored so high if she had “real” competition like in the “boy” classes. Separating the genders will just end up being another way that women’s accomplishments are made to seem less than they are.

  94. 94
    Lee says:

    Mousehounde – I agree that if the school is overall co-ed and the gender separation is in only a few academic areas, the perception of ability would be skewed against girls in math, but I think probably would be skewed towards girls in English (if they decided to segregate by gender in that class, too).

  95. 95
    ann duckworth says:

    This is the reversal. Boys given aggressive treatment to make them tough. Boys not given kind social verbal interaction for fear of coddling. Boys not given love respect unless display achievement.
    Now in information age the aggressive neglectful treatment given boys is creating higher average stress that impedes learning and motivation to; also creates higher muscle tension and more activity in working class; boys fall behind in writing due to higher muscle tension from high average stress. Nice Middle/Upper class boys do not have this problem. Girls are reaping windfall of many information age skills. Much protection girls receive from infancy create lower average stress ease of nature and lower muscle tension that makes handwriting more rewarding. Kind stabilizing verbal interaction increase their social verbal academic skills along with a feeling of love and support. Since girls given love respect simply for being girls, they have assurance of good treatment in society through adulthood. This protection allows for much more freedom of expression to vent gain further support and more care. This is why girls mature faster than boys. These differences have been socially created.
    More instability allows valve of aggression on Males to increase but the valve of protection is still in place for girls. Boys have to generate their own feelings of self-worth. Boys not succeeding in the classroom do not receive the essentials of self-worth; so they must generate self-worth through other areas such as sports video games etc. Theory to all on request