The way boys are treated in K-12 also impacts how they do with regard to college. According to a recent study of male college enrollment, it's not academic performance, but discipline that holds boys back. "Controlling for these non-cognitive behavioral factors can explain virtually the entire female advantage in college attendance for the high school graduating class of 1992, after adjusting for family background, test scores and high school achievement." Boys are disciplined more because teachers -- overwhelmingly female -- find stereotypically male behavior objectionable. Girls are quieter, more orderly, and have better handwriting. The boys get disciplined more, suspended more and are turned off of education earlier.Title IX for boys isn't the answer. Getting women out of the business of educating boys is. We already know from the pathologies of single-mother families that women can't be reasonably expected to successfully raise men. The evidence now indicates that it is nearly as unreasonable to expect women to be able to successfully teach boys.
Female teachers also give boys lower grades, according to research in Britain. Female teachers grade boys more harshly than girls, though, interestingly, male teachers are seen by girls as treating everyone the same regardless of gender. More and more, it's looking like schools are a hostile environment for boys.
One solution, as William Gormley, a professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, has suggested here in the past, is to hire more male teachers. As Gormley notes, Stanford University professor Thomas Dee found that "boys perform better when they have a male teacher, and girls perform better when they have a female teacher." Yet our K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female -- only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers are male and only 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers are.
The problem isn't just the maleducation, but that the lack of exposure to male role models creates increasingly feminized men even when it doesn't leave them largely feral.
29 comments:
It's interesting that this doesn't seem to have been a problem when nuns were doing the teaching in Catholic schools. (For those who don't know it, that's very rare today.) Maybe that's because nuns were more secure in their womanhood, more aware of female foibles, and not out to punish males for anything. You never got a teacher who was in the middle of a frivorce, for instance.
These studies put together explain almost all of the gender gap in school performance:
Research conducted by Kathy Piechura-Couture provides an interesting starting point. She looked at reading scores for Florida fifth-graders. Controlling for various variables, she found that 68% of boys in co-ed classrooms were proficient versus 95% of boys in single-sex classrooms. Girls likewise increased, but less dramatically. Seventy-five percent of female co-eds were proficient while 91% of girls at single-sex classrooms reached that threshold.
Piechura-Couture’s look at 4th grade test scores found the same trend. Boys’ proficiency increased from 37% to 86% and girls’ from 59% to 75% at co-ed and single-sex classrooms respectively. The big caveat here is that these are elementary school classrooms. I tend to think that the distractions for boys reach an apex during their high school years.
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/upfront/debate/index.asp?article=d100509
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmeduski/121/5020702.htm
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/eliminating-feminist-teacher-bias-erases-boys-falling-grades-study-finds
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102759/Why-boys-failing-grade-classroom-Lack-male-teachers-reason-according-new-study.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-against-boys/304659/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11151143
http://www.menweb.org/kleinfed.htm
I went to an all-boys high school, and I was distracted enough just by thoughts of girls, without any around to look at. I wouldn't have gotten anything useful done at all had there been girls around, especially considering what they wear in schools today.
Coed schooling probably wasn't so bad in the old one-room schoolhouse days, where you had different ages mixed together and the older kids helped the younger kids and so on. But once we started putting 20-30 kids of the same age in one room, and then keeping them there until age 18 when many of them should already be working or starting families, that's just a pressure cooker of hormones.
I graduated from the largest producers of teachers in a very large state. The education majors were all women except for a friend of mine (and he left the field) and all of them were intellectually mediocre. Education majors have the lowest IQs of all college majors.
In before obligatory IQ refere- DAMMIT!
Anyway, during my student teaching semester the girls (in the middle-class socioeconomic school)were always the worst; they incessantly chatted, they didn't give a crap about anything intellectual, and they were almost all as dumb as a sack of bricks. They also were the only ones to actually talk back to me or snap at me, even the black ghetto boys didn't treat me like the girls did.
I find it hard to believe that girls are quieter in all of these studies. How are these studies taken, after all? Does an authority go into a classroom and observe? Is it the teacher who is reporting on their class? Are there hidden cameras? Unfortunately, I couldn't check out the study linked from the article because it wasn't linked properly, so I'll never know, but there can't possibly be statistically significant forms of gathering this kind of data. I smell a lot of correlation from that guy's article, yes, it seems to make sense, but it is true? This isn't counter evidence, take it how you will, but I had mostly female teachers growing up and I was stellar at school, and when I truly think about why I was able to pull straight A's all the time, I can't come to any one reason. It never had anything to do with the teachers, I had good grades in classes where the teacher sucked and classes where the teacher was a pro. The only difference between me and kids who did better or worse than me, as far as I could see, was personal work ethic.
The only difference between me and kids who did better or worse than me, as far as I could see, was personal work ethic.
And your intelligence, like it or not. Let's not pretend like the educrats do that every kid who works hard is capable of the same results. As a lazy, high-IQ, straight-A student, I can promise you that most of the B, C, and even D students had a much better work ethic than I did.
I was listening to a couple of high-school girls talk the other day, and "dumb as a box of rocks" fits. Thing is, they're not really that dumb, and they also happen to be pretty, feminine, and family-minded, so I suspect they could make very good wives someday. But they sure can't hold an intelligent conversation about anything. It's hard to imagine that they could seem bright in the classroom, but they get good grades. It must be that expectations are just dumbed way down, and the boys are drugged and demoralized so that they do even a little worse.
How long has the education environment been like this for boys? When I was in elementary school, all my teachers were women, and I never felt like I, or any other boy, was treated unfairly. This was over 50 years ago, hence my opening question.
@ Cail,
I found girls a sufficiently strong motivator in terms of driving me to excel to assert my superiority over other males. I do agree the slutwear these days is over the top. If men/boys are supposed to be mindful of women's sensitivities then it is only natural the reverse be true, but modern feminism is women get what they want and men just deal
@ Bob. I double majored in math and computer science. My math classes were filled with math education majors (lord knows what they need abstract algebra, diffEq, etc for) but it was required for them which was fortunate because it really helped with the curve. They were invariably more focused on making lesson plans than the actual mathematics.
Some of them were exceedingly attractive (8s and 9s). The trick was to not help them study until you were already sleeping with them. The number of science/engineering majors making that mistake were legion. I can't even count the number of 4s that had free tutoring from her beta orbiters. One would hope with the M/F ratio so far out of whack that would have changed but I doubt it.
Rex,
The problem is female teachers on a feminist bender which is the product of a change in the way teachers were produced in the 70s. All the older teachers now having retired and full on feminist now reign. It took decades to create this mess and it will take decades to undo it assuming we even got a chance to try.
Couple that with the loss of fathers in the house and you have a recipe for disaster for young boys who are being taught to hate themselves generally at school, and to hate their father specifically at home.
Rex,
I don't think it was like this 30 years ago either, at least not in the small schools I was familiar with, and there were quite a few women teachers then. Maybe it just hadn't yet reached the tipping point where women came to dominate in both classroom and administration positions. I seem to remember most of the principals being men back then.
I suspect part of the change happened when ADHD medications became widely available and "boyish" behavior began to be seen as something that could be treated rather than controlled or harnessed.
Also, when I think back to my female teachers who weren't nuns, they were all older women, married or widowed with the kids out of the house, or young women who weren't married yet. I can only think of one who was the right age to be a "working mom" with all that often implies -- and sure enough, she was the most erratic and unpleasant teacher we had.
> We already know from the pathologies of
> single-mother families that women can't
> be reasonably expected to successfully
> raise men.
Is there any real support for this?
The relevant question is not whether two parents raise boys better than one parent. Those studies I know about.
But I have never heard of any studies comparing boys raised by a single father to boys raised by a single mother.
Speaking of education, I just stumbled across this vintage reminder of the Feminine Imperative being passed on to the next generation, circa 1960. But at least back then more of the women actually were feminine...
I have never heard of any studies comparing boys raised by a single father to boys raised by a single mother.
Given the way family courts usually rule, I don't know if there are enough single-father cases for a statistically valid sample size.
I do know one personally, though. The kid (now in his 30's) turned out quite well, even though the father is an alcoholic and a drug addict.
I spent two years in a science and biology class listening to the radio because the busty Polish teacher was going through a divorce and couldn't be bothered teaching.
Add to that the constant berating of male students for looking at her ample boobs in a low cut top that she had a penchant for wearing.
If you decide to keep sending your sons to public "schools", teach them two things. First, how to fight in such a way that the school is cut out of the event, and so that they win in a social and moral way (within their peer group). Next, teach them Game. Females are females, and can be gamed like rabbits. If you miss with the club, just wait, they usually run back in a circle. It's... not difficult. Women are suckers, born and breed, and can be played like a piano... for grades, sex, money, housing, whatever...
That is, if you still believe "education", at any level, is still the way. My bet would be to home school, or get them through eighth grade then get them into tech schools, mechanical or wood craft schools, or othersuch. Even engineering isn't worth the hassle anymore. Needed, not wanted, when they can hire a sprocket of Indian or Chinese "engineers" to micro-design product. Quality, even then, has turned even more to shit, but... Who cares as long as the big shots get their bonuses.
If you could find a school with mostly male teachers, would it be better to send your son there, or have him homeschooled by his mother? Is the answer different if his mother is a feminist?
In my opinion? All women are feminists. It's merely a matter of how much access they have to power. In the home? Even Indians, when they divorced, women took the roost. So, a feminist at home is better than an education system BASED on, run by, and created for feminism.
And, male instructors only works if they keep the queers out. They don't, it's more like they, in most places, actively recruit said. Again, just my opinion. And good luck finding even a school with all male, or a majority male, teachers.
(One of my neighbors is a straight teacher, and works with other straight male teachers, but this area is "different".)
"It's interesting that this doesn't seem to have been a problem when nuns were doing the teaching in Catholic schools. (For those who don't know it, that's very rare today.) Maybe that's because nuns were more secure in their womanhood, more aware of female foibles, and not out to punish males for anything. You never got a teacher who was in the middle of a frivorce, for instance."
Cail Corishev
I wonder how true this is - I think that it may be hard to make comparisons based on college achievement since many of their students did not go on to college. Also, teaching orders of nuns is relatively recent, as far as I know, as is Catholic co-education. While teaching nuns may not have directly caused the problems of the Church post-Vatican 2 and before, I do not think they did anything to prevent them from happening and I wonder what sort of impact they really had on developing boys.
I find that girls are generally quiet and "well-behaved" from K - 3rd, maybe 4th. After that, right before the onset of puberty, they become more talkative thought in 5th and maybe 6th they'll still shut up if there are consequences for not doing so.
"If you could find a school with mostly male teachers, would it be better to send your son there, or have him homeschooled by his mother? Is the answer different if his mother is a feminist?"
One needs to separate moral training from teaching. The father should always be in charge of moral training, even if some of it is handed off to the mother. With respect to teaching it seems to me when boys are young it is not so much of a problem if they learn their abcs from their mother. But after a certain age they will probably benefit more from having a male teacher. Even if a woman is skilled in mathematics and Latin, a male can foster the sort of competitive environment and other male-centered teaching strategies with which a woman will probably not be familiar.
On the more "fanatical" side of the Orthodox Jewish world, education is strictly segregated by age 6 (or earlier, depending on the level of "fanaticism"). They even teach different subjects.
I don't have girls, so I don't really know much about girls' schools, but one thing I heard was interesting. The girls' schools are practically 100% administered by women (for the boys' schools, it is 100% by men). I heard that there is a lot of screaming in the girls' schools, because the teachers can't control their charges, which makes perfect sense to me. Teenage and pre-teen girls just won't accept or take seriously disciplinary action by a woman who may be scarcely older than them (teaching is probably the number one profession that women enter, and women marry early in my world). I bet one suitably alpha male roaming the halls could quiet entire classrooms full of hypergamous and boisterous young women in an instant.
"And, male instructors only works if they keep the queers out. They don't, it's more like they, in most places, actively recruit said. Again, just my opinion. And good luck finding even a school with all male, or a majority male, teachers."
Doom, this is definitely a serious problem, even if rare. One queer teacher can destroy dozens or more boys' lives before he's outed. It does happen sometimes, and more effort should be made to filter them out, but the real problem is wanting to pretend it doesn't exist. It's not endemic, but it's certainly not non-existent either. Speaking from my own experience, of course.
You wouldn't want a gay gym teacher, but does it matter if a gay man is teaching your kid English or math or something? (OK, maybe not Greek. . .) You wouldn't want him talking to the kids about his sex life, but you wouldn't want a straight teacher doing that either.
I suspect that docking a student's grades wouldn't be such a popular disciplinary tool if spanking were more widely available.
But we are too refined to inflict pain for any reason now so teachers have to settle for damaging a difficult student's lifetime prospects instead. Because that is so much more compassionate.
Rex,
Actually, if I had to send my kids to public ed? And they were lucky enough to get a straight male teacher? Hell yes I would want him talking about straight things, and given them minor... notions. Gay? Not a fucking chance, and no, I wouldn't want them teaching English, math, or anything. It just oozes out of them, like a slime. They absolutely love children. Their corruption looks for innocence like a vampire seeks blood. Don't buy into the notion that gays aren't almost absolutely prone to pedophilia, they are.
And for fucks sake, don't let your gay neighbor fucking babysit! Christ, you people sometimes.
It's interesting that this doesn't seem to have been a problem when nuns were doing the teaching in Catholic schools.
Female teachers have been around for a long, long time, and they didn't create this sort of problem until recently.
What's different now is that they have female bosses.
@A, Cail Corishev
Modern-day grading scales are thoroughly different.
Prior to the 80's, a student's final grade was based on four things-
50% tests
20% homework
5% special assignments (essays, science projects, etc.)
25% final exam
Because of this, it was quite common for schools to produce perfectly intelligent students who would earn B's-C's in school, then bust out a 3.5 GPA in college (where "busy work"/homework was kept at a minimum.) It's also the source of the "genius slacker" stereotype (the kid who barely passes classes, but goes all out when it "really counts", or the kid who gets promoted to the next grade by scoring multiple 100's for his final exams. My younger uncle graduated from high school at 16, after taking multiple tests from each class to verify that a guy who missed 30 days a semester didn't actually cheat to break the 90% percentile barrier.)
"We already know from the pathologies of single-mother families that women can't be reasonably expected to successfully raise men."
Nor can women successfully raise women. Daddy issues, anyone?
I don't know what school(s) Cail went to, but I went to Catholic schools for 12 years, and the nuns were a lot tougher on boys than on girls. When I got to high school -- with all male teachers -- my grades went up considerably.
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