My son’s elementary school honor section is 80% girls. Articles tell me this early success leads to girls taking tougher advanced courses, higher GPAs, overwhelming majority of top 10% of their graduating class, far more likely to complete undergrad on time (boys take 5 and 6 years, if they finish), 60/40 girls/boys earning bachelors, masters, professional degrees.
Chatted with pals who are teachers in strong middle and upper middle class districts. They told me most boys are obsessed with video games and slacking culture. Fortnite and Barstool Sports blog came up a lot. Boys refuse to read for leisure. Disengaged, just “floating,” aren’t focused on future or career.
They (or their parents?) are not adapting to the demands of modern competitive landscape. Outside of video games, teachers told me most parents allow boys to prioritize travel sports over academics. Article I just found said youth travel sport spending has grown +55% since 2007.
I will worry about a “gender gap” in favor of women being a problem when the vast majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, top executives, elected leaders, firm partners, venture capitalists and top dogs are women. Until then, I’m not too worried that the women are taking over.
As for individual kids - yes, there are individual kids who are in trouble or who have parents that prioritize sports over academics. I worry about them whether they are boys or girls.
@milee30 “I will worry about a “gender gap” in favor of women being a problem when the vast majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, top executives, elected leaders, firm partners, venture capitalists and top dogs are women. Until then, I’m not too worried that the women are taking over.”
This is faulty reasoning. You’re cherry-picking baby boomer outliers to “confirm” your views. Focus on generations Y and Z, look at the median – girls are kicking boys’ butts, period.
These are just statistics. On average people are average.
If you delicately approach it, I think you can help your son be above average.
If you and your wife love reading for leisure, chances are that your son will too. If your son is involved in serious music, they will have serious friends.
If you love learning for it’s own sake and can generate excitement about philosophy, literature, art, music and other intellectual pursuits, your son will likely also. If you and your wife view math as “elegant” and fun, it will be more likely to be viewed positively by your offspring.
By teen years, they all rebel anyway, so it’s best to facilitate genuine love of these things, rather than treating them as an extension of school.
For example, every summer, we would take our 2 Ds to free Shakespeare on the Boston Common. They we both serious musicians.
Boys do mature later – it would be sad if tracking in elementary school is closing off boys’ options for high school and college.
It is also still the case that these boys’ fathers have benefited from (and I wish there were a better term here) male privilege. Parents who grew up in a world where women had to be twice as good to get the same job or salary as a man may be pushing their daughters harder and worrying about their sons less.
One thing to do would be to raise teachers’ salaries. Men avoid “pink collar” and lower paying fields, depriving young boys of male role models at school. Elementary teachers are the lowest paid and have more gender skew versus high school teachers.
None of this is news. Those studies have indeed been around for decades.
Based purely on my own experiences as a high school math teacher and a mom (of a boy and two girls) , and full of a ton of generalizations:
We’ve got to stop treating boys and girls as though they’re the same. They’re not. By and large-- with lots and lots of exceptions-- boys tend to mature later than girls. So, yes, the girls tend to do better in elementary and middle school. Many tend to take their studies more seriously, to feel bad or guilty when their grades don’t meet the standards set either by themselves of their parents. In the meantime, many of the the boys tend to be antsy-- unable to sit still and pay attention for as long as their female counterparts. Many are interested in sports as opposed to literature and spelling and the humanities.
But somewhere around freshman year, the scales tip. The girls become afraid of appearing nerdy, or weirdly unattractive if they display too much interest in STEM types of studies. Their social life begins to take on the importance that sports used to take on for the guys, and their interest in schoolwork sometimes wanes. The boys, on the other hand, start to place importance on their studies. All those years of playing sports and video games slowly shifts to an interest in academics.
By high school graduation, the scales have tipped in favor of the boys in many cases.
So what can we do? Well, for starters: if we want boys to read, why not give them material to read that they’ll find interesting. Sports illustrated comes to mind, as do books by Stephen King and Allister McClean and a host of other authors who speak to their interests. Find articles about hacking Super Mario Brothers. Find video games that are cool while at the same time educational-- as opposed to Grand Theft Auto and the like.
If we want girls to keep that love for all things academic, we’ve got to find a way to make them appeal to the girls. We’ve got to create and educational climate where it’s OK for girls to be smart. For some, that means attending all girls schools, where there are no boys to “dumb down” for. For others ,it means getting a beloved science teacher-- perhaps even a woman-- to moderate Science Olympiad and Academic Quiz Bowl or the Robotics Club to act as a role model for all those girls who would love to try but simply lack the courage.
There are real problems with our toxic masculinity culture where boys are taught destruction and disengagement. School shootings are an obvious symptom. Still I hate sat bias. I have to interject here.
About the time I graduated from high school, 1968, they changed the sat. Up til then, boys did better on math, girls on reading. After the change, boys did better on both. The readings shifted topics. After some time, girls figured it out and aced reading again.
SAT should not be the topic. We need to understand what the culture is promoting for boy. I hope we can discuss how to help boys navigate the culture without putting down girls.
"Some fascinating gender differences surfaced. Girls were at least as strong in science and math as boys in 60% of the PISA countries, and they were capable of college-level STEM studies nearly everywhere the researchers looked. But when they examined individual students’ strengths more closely, they found that the girls, though successful in STEM, had even higher scores in reading. The boys’ strengths were more likely to be in STEM areas. The skills of the boys, in other words, were more lopsided—a finding that confirms several previous studies.
If boys chose careers based on their own strengths—the approach usually suggested by parents and guidance counselors—they would be most likely to land in a STEM discipline or another field drawing on the same sorts of skills. Girls could choose more widely, based on their own strengths. And both, of course, would pursue their particular interests, as best they could.
…
I asked Wendy Williams, founder and director of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, what she makes of these findings. She wrote that if girls expect they can “live a good life” while working in the arts, health or sciences, then girls choose to pursue what they are best at—which could be STEM, or it could be law or psychology. She added, “However, if the environment offers limited options, and the best ones are in STEM, girls focus there…Stoet’s and Geary’s findings deservedly complicate the simplistic narrative that sex differences in STEM careers are the result of societal gender biases.”
@Twoin18 I heard about these findings as well. I also heard that women are more likely to make well-rounded decisions about their career paths, taking into account salary, family, interests, hours etc, which can lead to lower paying jobs with higher satisfaction.
It’s definitely more complex then the commonly thought “society tells everyone what to do, otherwise boys and girls would make the same choices”. But be careful with those kinds of studies cuz that kind of thinking got James Damore fired from google…
Could it also be that the lowest performing boys have been moved to continuation/reform schools (for either academic or behavioral reasons) or dropped out and therefore are not visible in the general high school population?
In our house we expected both of our kids (D and S) to prioritize academics. We never made excuses such as “boys mature later” or “girls don’t like math and science”. We knew that they were both capable of high academic achievement and they have both been successful to the best of their abilities.
D attended our local HS and did not particularly care what people thought of her being at the top academically. Se had a strong, close knit group of friends, an EC she spent a lot of time on and if anyone didn’t like a smart girl - that was their problem, not hers.
In my observation it is the boys who frequently feel pressured socially to not succeed academically but S attended a math/science/tech magnet school where that pressure didn’t exist. We were very fortunate that way.
Elementary school is a pretty hostile environment for boys these days. More and more they are designed for little girls who tend to mature a little faster, have stronger fine motors and longer attention spans. Boys are often held back for “maturity” routinely without individual consideration for potential academic boredom as they age. They are quick to get labeled and medicated. They face a lot more negativity in school.
There isn’t as much FOR little boys outside of sports. The brave ones can go into the arts but they will pay the price socially. There isn’t much for academic clubs and activities until middle and high school and a lot of boys have tuned out by then… believing they aren’t capable and generally bad.
We didn’t let our kids have a gaming system. I’m not a fan but I’m also not ready to blame the lack of men in college on them.
In the end, our son is going to college because we expected that he would. We did our best to put him in positive learning environments. We encouraged a variety of activities and he socialized with boys who all go to college.
My daughter is very academic - always has been and always will be.
My son loves soccer and in fact plays on a feeder team for our national league.
These kids were raised in the same house, with the same parents, with the same priorities and same interests.
I do believe that the classroom in younger grades is not designed for boy’s success. Reducing PE is terrible for boys. Most behavior expectations are more easily met by girls than boys.
In a well balanced classroom I think you see both boys and girls succeeding. In my son’s school that is certainly the case. While middle school girls do have significantly more maturity, the boys can hold their own and will and do catch up!
Boys and girls have different learning styles and different abilities to self monitor the use of technology especially when choosing to complete assignments instead of gaming. Parenting has become a tech policing job. Students can be working on an online assignment one minute and diverted to gaming the next.
Boys are generally not people pleasers. We need to tap into their ability to mono focus and steer them on a productive path. K-6 teachers as a group are more inclined to be interested in language arts not STEM.
We continue to look at data that tells us to teach project based learning where students read, write, learn geography, history, science and math all at the same time. Administrators get so wrapped up in changing curriculum standards and standardized fill in the bubble testing. Hands on, project based, collaboration, reading, writing, math skills and a love for learning should be the main focus.
In middle and high school, teachers are specialists. They can easily inspire prepared students; boys and girls.
The education system was established to educate boys, and exclusively did so for centuries. Indeed some of the most exclusive prep schools in the world offer programs quite similar to their 19th century offerings. I don’t think boys have become genetically slower to mature in that time period, but perhaps more boys attend school now or there is greater tolerance for diversions like video games or sports than there used to be.