Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think says
In his latest op/ed Nick Kristof is lamenting the fact that girls are outperforming boys at school. Kristoff is as ardent a defender of women’s rights as anyone in the established media, so he gets a proverbial clitoral ‘hood pass. Yet Kristof seems oblivious to the fact that many self-appointed advocates for boys in the school system are trying to address educational disparities by further institutionalizing male privilege. Instead of demanding more resources to help boys succeed within the system, they want to overhaul the system to cater to male developmental quirks. Boys are just that special.
Kristof handles the most conventional “yes but” explanations, for instance the “yes but” that performance by local-minority children drags down national averages (the declines are mapped across most demographics), but buys into the possibly-correct notion that increased and earlier academic focus plus disciplinary screw-downs tend to disproportionately alienate boys. So that’s all ok.
And while he points at residual privilege as an even more-likely source for boy’s underperformance he earns more gender-neutrality points, at least from me, in his concluding paragraph (emphasis mine)
At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling in schools? Of course it does: our future depends on making the best use of human capital we can, whether it belongs to girls or boys.
It’s true! Making the best use of human capital really is the clearest path towards a brighter future! And so I’m strongly inclined to split the difference between Kristof and Bayerstein. As long as boys and their parents could count on a vast series of structural institutions they could also count on being able to lump along on privilege plus Harry Potter / Ron Weasley style luck, pluck, and “girls suck.” Meanwhile over the last 40 years girls, and their parents, have been rather critically aware that if they were going to get anywhere they were going to have to work their asses off Hermione Granger style. Parents have been taking their daughters to work since the 1980s… a period roughly coinciding with strong movement in the workforce away from the kinds of jobs sons were previously brought lump-along style into.
In other words while for the last couple of generations social intertia has continued raising boys in the traditions of casual, lump-along privilege society has also tended to be expressly intentional a.k.a. affirmative about raising girls.
It’s for this reason that I’m more sanguine about us becoming more intentionally affirmative about how we raise boys — the old techniques of greasing the skids so they can coast (into Congress, CEO offices, or other corridors of power) isn’t just unfair, and isn’t just increasingly ineffective (while Harry and Ron could skate without exerting themselves in the the pseudo-1940 or 1950s universe Rowling created for them, Hermione would become CEO and/or Prime Minister and… would be unlikely to hire either of the boys into positions of responsibility) it’s also gets back to the waste of human capital Kristof mentions. Given affirmative, intentional, non-negligent educations boys can grow up to be as productive as girls. It might not happen overnight (old traditions seem to die very hard) but if we choose to put as much effort into boys as the old status quo forced us to put into girls it might take less than 40 years for boys to catch up.
In reality the so called “boy
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Mon, 2010-03-29 23:28. In reality the so called “boy crisis” is that boys are only a few points behind girls. Also how well boys perform relative to girls:1) Has been pretty constant since the 1980’s.
Truthfully schools would do much better to focus not on gender related paradigms or this unfortunate fad for single sex schools, but rather on2) Varies massively with the demographics (Hint: It’s not the sons of Middle Class Gurian fans who are falling behind, by and large.)
1) Smaller class sizes, better funded schools, better teachers (higher pay is probably one necessary part of this).
2) Treating boys and girls like individuals.
(Actually when I was a kid, I was probably more “male” than 90% of my Y Chromosome possessing classmates according to the theories of Michael Gurian and other boy advocates.)
[I think your recommendation #2 holds the key. I’m a bit in the middle of this at the moment because my 5th-grade daughter caught wind of an all-girls middle- or high-school (can’t remember which) and she’s totally enthusiastic because it won’t have “boys.” Which she perceives as a (literal?) class of people she’d rather not have in her classroom because a number of individual boys (of largely involved, educated, professional, middle-class families committed to public alternative education by the way) are so disruptive. The single-sex education model is particularly useless, by the way, because my 7th-grader continues to be bored out of his skull while his teachers spend large amounts of class time on disruptive individuals… most of whom happen to be boys and therefore most of whom would disrupt my 7th-grader’s education in a single-sex class as well. Unless, I guess, it was some kind of “boot camp” for boys… which would be even more stupid. Point being that you’re right, class-based, well, classes just aren’t the answer. I think there is an answer, and I think in part it involves raising expectations instead of treating boys as a class like unreachable forces of nature, the “good” ones of whom are unusual exceptions. Thanks, Red. —fl]
Actually, Harry was a Defense
Submitted by ozymandias (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-30 12:38.Actually, Harry was a Defense Against the Dark Arts genius— Lupin, their only competent DADA teacher, pretty much explicitly states it. Not to mention that he teaches the Dumbledore’s Army kids things like the Patronus that by rights they’re way too young to learn. And he survives, frex, the Triwizard Tournament (admittedly with a lot of help, but since the other kids were four years ahead of him, it’s amazing he survived at all). You could interpret Harry/Ron/Hermione as Natural Talent vs. Dumb Luck vs. Working Your Ass Off, but that removes the gendered aspects.
Pureblood versus muggleborn works pretty well as a metaphor, though. Ron and Draco are both beneficiaries of privilege who expect to get jobs based on lineage who totally didn’t predict Hermione’s hard work. There’s at least one scene where Lucius Malfoy bashes Draco because “that Mudblood” gets better grades than him…
I’m a little bit of a Harry Potter geek. :)