<p>I went to catholic school back in the dark ages. We had morning recess. Lunch. Afternoon recess. Gym. After school sports. My kids, by 7th grade didn’t have ANY recess. The girls were fine. Boys developed behavior “problems”. My youngest, a girl who hates to sit still, began to hate school and didn’t get interested again until junior year, when she understood her future depended on it. Just some anectdotal observations. We bemoan our childhood obesity issues and tell our children to sit still for hours on end without a break. I don’t think it’s working</p>
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You are completely right about that. It was shocking and most religious/private schools would have been very unforgiving of such behavior.</p>
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<p>When I attended, we only had one recess after lunch which was around 30-40 minutes long by itself. Part of that may have something to do with the prevailing high crime concerns in NYC of the '80s. </p>
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<p>Agreed on the need for more physical activity/recess. That’s one thing which wasn’t as much of an issue when I was growing up…even given the fact NYC was less safe on average than it is nowadays. However, this issue pertains to all students…not just boys.</p>
<p>We have come a long way from the Catholic schools in the '60s that I attended. My first school was too strict, almost cartoonish strict, where we, the boys, got swats not only for talking in class but for talking to girls during recess (the classes were co-ed but boys were not allowed to socialize with girls). That was too much, but I believe that today many schools have gone too far in the other direction.</p>
<p>One source of physical activity when I was growing up was simply walking back and forth to school. How many kids do that these days if they live more than 2 blocks from school? It’s suddenly become “too dangerous.” I really dislike even driving by a school around the time it lets out these days, due to the congestion of parents in SUVs waiting to pick up their little darlings.</p>
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Where I live, the middle and high schools cover large geographic areas and lack amenities like sidewalks and public transportation, so most kids are on school buses and those who aren’t are often driven.</p>
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<p>Of course I’m not talking about such situations. I live in Chicago and one son needed to take a bus to a magnet school located across town. Mostly where I see congestion is at all the neighborhood grade schools. Unless they are enrolled in a magnet school, families need to enroll in the grade school near them. I doubt if any assigned school is more than a mile away from home max and there are sidewalks everywhere with plenty of stop signs and stop lights. I’m not talking about terrible neighborhoods where one worries about gangs hanging out on street corners. </p>
<p>I don’t know if it’s media-fueled paranoia or just laziness from the video-game-playing generation, but non-official team-related physical activity as a stress-release has been on the decline for decades and I’m sure that is a factor in kids (boys especially) not being able to sit quietly for long hours in a classroom. We need more recess time and less ADHD drug therapy to deal with the problem.</p>
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Or it’s a response to packed schedules that require driving to get from one thing to the next and don’t leave time for a kid to walk home. I know my kids always had STUFF after school.</p>
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<p>You’re making the assumption that the kid’s destination after school is home. For a variety of reasons, this may not be true.</p>
<p>Point taken, Zoosermom and Marian. After school over-scheduling is also a problem, not leaving necessary downtime to unwind. But it’s tough to fight this trend when everyone else is doing it and when it’s expected to get into an advanced program or a top college.</p>
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<p>Sounds like your section of NYC is much more like certain parts of suburban Virginia or the suburbs outside of Seattle where there are no sidewalks or the few which exist are completely cutoff by 4 lane highways. </p>
<p>That is worse than several older NJ suburban towns where they have sidewalks and thus, the town is walkable. However, I did notice a distinct cultural issue with walking as while a native-born NYer like myself won’t think of walking 1-3 miles to go somewhere, many suburbanites over there and other areas seem to feel the need to take the car to go a couple of blocks or in one extreme case…go visit the neighbors just across a small street.</p>
<p>Yes, at the same time I remember a news story a few years ago involving a mom who let her kid walk home from school. He was about nine and the kid had to cross one street and then walk down six houses. By day 3 or so, a police cruiser followed him and told the mom he was “too young” to walk home alone. I think he was about 9. </p>
<p>One of the reasons it was safe to walk home a generation ago was that most moms were SAHM and everyone walked home. So, you usually didn’t walk home by yourself. You were part of a group. Now, some kids stay for after school programs, some kids go to other activities. Now, more kids who do walk home are by themselves.</p>
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<p>There were few SAHPs in my old working class NYC neighborhood and NYC of the '80s was a much more dangerous city than nowadays. Despite that, once we were in first or second grade at the latest…we were expected to walk to/from school by ourselves and no cop back then would dream of telling a parent their 9 year old is “too young” to walk to/from school by him/herself. Especially considering they understood most parents were working 2-3 jobs just to make ends meet. </p>
<p>Moreover, we had afterschool activities and ECs which sometimes extended into the evening hours…especially in middle/high school.</p>
<p>Poetgrl, “Well, then, they ought to fight harder for their rights.”
This statement does an injustice to fathers seeking custody. Do you believe, on any level, that fathers who are deprived of a just custodial arrangement simply don’t try hard enough?
It is clearly systemic, as were many historical injustices. In a extremely hyperbolic comparison, your statement could be seen as akin to a misogynistic explanation of the female wage gap: “they ought to work harder”.</p>
<p>No, my statement could be seen as akin to the fact that women continue to fight for our rights and that we continue to lobby and work and teach our younger women that they have to work twice as hard to have the same opportunities as men. Which, quite frankly, the girls must be taking to heart. Change takes time and fight and men need to fight for their kids. You do realize that the largest percentage of impoverished people in our country are single mothers and their children. If there are men out there who want custody? They just have to work against the odds the way women do every day.</p>
<p>I followed this thread quietly until it degenerated into yet another collection of Men vs. Women petty squabbling. Seriously some of these statements are starting to veer way off topic and intentional or not are starting to come off as thinly veiled sexism.</p>
<p>Putting aside sweeping generalizations about what demographics should or should not work/fight harder for their rights and who is more hard done by in modern society and redirecting the thread to the original topic: Bridging the Male Education Gap: I would suggest that this statistical anomaly is more than purely due a difference in educational styles (Although as an elementary school student I did despise those arts and crafts-y science projects, however I found them just as prevalent in courses taught by male teachers as by female teachers.) because it does not explain why males seem to do as least at well as females when it comes to getting into grad school/medschool/lawschool despite most undergraduate programs being dominated by females. Chances are most if not all of the reasons posted on this thread play at least some type role in the education gap, however it is important to remember we are talking about an extremely large and heterogeneous group of people (Ie. all school age males in the United States) and while at a large scale a seemingly simple trend may occur, at the level of individuals the reasons between the educational paths between two people are likely very different. Therefore a sweeping policy change at the government level towards education or even child custody is likely to be in effective. I would suggest that the best way to ensure that all children (male and female) get an appropriate education is to try and tackle these problems at a regional or if possible an individual level. It is also important to look at targets for change beyond the children themselves. For example, ultimately education starts with the parents and if you want children to appreciate the value of a university (and community college) education, a very good way to start would be to ensure that parents know now that the standards for entering the workforce today have significantly changed in the past decades (anecdotally I had friends whose fathers still thought you could get a good job with little more than a GED)
I would also contend that there are manly well paying non-university degree required professions out there that are traditionally male (e.g plumber) which may explain some of the skew between the discrepancy between the proportion of males vs. females at university vs the wage gap between males and females.
I would also be somewhat skeptical about an initiative that is too targeted to a specific demographic group, since this often merely masks the deeper institutional flaws that produce statistical effects like the male education gap.</p>
<p>Anyway, if anyone is wondering about my background I am a male graduate student in a Science related field at McGill University.</p>
<p>Great comment NamelesStatustic. Thank you!</p>
<p>So NamelessStatistic, you are saying things like paying attention to the right time for an individual child to start school based on readiness, having different options available, and respecting different choices and learning styles could help? </p>
<p>As far as grad school, I agree with your assertions, but I don’t think biology can be discounted. By 22 or so, males have done a lot of maturing and have substantially caught up.</p>
<p>I am saying that I doubt a general demographically targeted intervention (e.g get more male teachers in schools teaching a “male” style would likely produce very minimal changes because of the heterogeneous target population and that ultimately the best approach would be to tackle education issues such as the male education gap (and other demographic related educational discrepancies such as the under representation of certain minority populations in University or the deficit of women in STEM fields) at the level of communities or small groups. However this strategy also has its own drawbacks (organizational complexity and high costs). Ultimately if the solutions to these challenges in the education system were in the form of simple broad changes in teaching approaches, these issues would likely have already been solved.</p>
<p>As to the biological differences between people they are really much more fine grained and subtle than I think is popularly attributed. Indeed between sex neurological differences in development is a area where I have some limited experience through a few neuropsychology courses, however from what I have seen there is very little consensus on the actual structure and more importantly functional differences in brains based on sex (google searches will churn out tons of data on “male vs female brain”, but if you really want to research the topic I suggest websites such as PubMed or Web of Science). Regardless the neurological differences between the genders are quite subtle and multifaceted, especially when you have to control for differences between individuals. Therefore tracing gender specific differences in brain structure to behavior is very tenuous at best and further tracing that to population trends in education just adds greater levels of complexity. </p>
<p>I know it is tempting to attribute individual differences and even population trends due to biological differences (and for the record I am not denying that there are biological differences between boys and girls and that these differences play a role in behavior, just that we can reliably point out a specific anatomical difference and trace it to a particular behavioral or societal effect.</p>
<p>As an aside more and more we are finding that once though of simple biological/genetic based conditions and traits are really a complex interaction of biochemical processes acting at the genetic, a verity of biological levels. A very interesting example of this is recent discoveries in somatic mosaicism in Retts syndrome. (If you are interested here is the link to a very interesting article in Nature which demonstrates the heterogeneity and deep complexity in genetic diseases: [Somatic</a> Mosaicism and Chromosomal Disorders | Learn Science at Scitable](<a href=“http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/somatic-mosaicism-and-chromosomal-disorders-867]Somatic”>http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/somatic-mosaicism-and-chromosomal-disorders-867)</p>
<p>However I feel it is fair to warn you that as a Canadian my knowledge of the US education system is fairly limited, and my experience in education is therefore not necessarily applicable to this situation, so you should take my comments with a grain of salt. </p>
<p>Btw, thank you for Salander for your kind comment.</p>
<p>"l it is fair to warn you that as a Canadian my knowledge of the US education system is fairly limited, and my experience in education is therefore not necessarily applicable to this situation, so you should take my comments with a grain of salt. "</p>
<p>Not only are you intelligent and informative, but gracious as well. Thank you for taking the time.</p>