Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School (2013)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
For some reason despite most of western economies heavily de-industrialized, and economy shifted to more creative and free-spirited arrangements, we never reformed education system. Anyone that does not fit the "obedient worker" is penalized by the system, and for decades we are shown plenty of high impact "geniuses" who in their childhood struggled in schools.
Out of time to look for better sources: https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...
Is that the new euphemism for the gig economy?
Let's be honest, while in terms of income the economy has shifted to more so-called creative work, it hasn't done so in terms of open positions.
The contemporary narrative is that the Prussian education system is antiquated, or at least merely served the needs of capitalists.[1] People forget what it was trying to achieve--churn out a mass of men that were literate, punctual, and could take direction, characteristics that men as a class neither then nor now are particularly adept at as compared to women. And have those goals really changed? Unless you're some black turtle neck wearing genius artist with millionaire patrons, you're expected to be more literate, more punctual (at all hours of the day), and more responsive to the needs of others (manager, client, w'ever) than ever before, whether you're a high-salary Silicon Valley programmer or a low-wage service worker. Whatever increased creativity demanded of workers as compared to assembly line workers of yore is literally imaginary. Nobody cares about your creativity building tree forts, at least not to the exclusion of those other requirements. You're still expected to learn how to be on time and in place and ready to take direction. That's what schools needed to inculcate in the 19th century, and it's still what's needed of them; it's just that now we need them to teach additional skills.
[1] It did have a veneer of Protestant Christian ethics, but that was just the sales pitch. The sales pitch isn't the product; not now, not ever. People keep confusing those things when examining history even when they're savvy enough not to make the equivocation in their day-to-day lives.
> That's what schools needed to inculcate in the 19th century, and it's still what's needed of them; it's just that now we need them to teach additional skills.
This really ignores the medical advancement of understanding of human bodies and nature as well as the advancement in the type of work.
No one advocates for physically abusing the kids to instill manners in current times and it's backed by research to be ineffective long term and not sustainable.
We know more about what influences obesity rates and bodily pain issues. We know sitting on your desk for long periods isn't good.
Most people in developed countries and emerging developing countries are increasingly not doing any physically repetitive tasks. Those are automated and for a good reason, eg - RSI.
School architecture needs complete reform. Teaching guidelines significant changes. It may not be for making kids more creative but incorporating what we already have in our daily life outside of school.
Eg - I don't sit on my computer desk continuously for longer than 45 mins without taking a small walk.
Mostly just the fact that most of people are not going to work on a shift in factory. But in a way... yeah... people might need to be a part-time driver, part-time YT broadcaster, part-time online influencer, and contractor. As crappy as it sounds, the times of mass employment in big industrial factories are over, and completely different values and skills are needed.
My family wouldn't allow psychological or psychiatric intervention because they believed it was a conspiracy against children.
25 years later, I've tried the main classes of AD(H)D medications and cannot tolerate them even though I need them to function in society. (On benefits at present, looking to start a 3D printed custom parts business.)
Antidepressants: I wish there one that worked, but I've tried 14 of them; I'm looking at the dissociatives, psychedelics, TMS, medical implants, and surgical options.
Now that I've graduated, I feel pretty worthless because I'm so underdeveloped and look so below my age, nobody would ever promote me to a position of responsibility.
Now for the really scary part: this is happening to apparently 15% of boys in school, despite the highest estimates from the APA being that, at maximum, 5% of children have ADD.
We're creating multiple generations of an extremely high proportion of men who were physically and mentally stunted in growth during their most crucial formative years. It's like all these parents who decided they didn't really want to try very hard with their kids and would medicate them into mediocrity and meekness.
How do you go about an adult diagnosis for that? Do I just ask my doc "Hey have I had ADHD my whole life?"
The recommendations in this article are solid, but apply to all kids.
A working solution would have been, to break the test up into smaller pieces.
Sitting on your desk for hours without taking a walk or stretch is harmful to your body, no matter what gender.
In Indian schools, teachers switch classrooms instead of kids during periods. Often they come early and stand at the door for the current teacher to finish and leave. This doesn't give any time to the students to stand up and cool off. There are also security cameras to punish students who start playing in the classroom between periods if the teacher is late.
Of course, some kids will still end up goofing around and sometimes take the punishment.
This ignores that there are kids with anxiety, disability and other problems which make them less likely to ignore the rules and risk getting punished.
This skews the data and people make incorrect assessment about the impact. There are many factors to consider here. I turn out fine is falling into that trap. You probably just goofed around and ignored the norms.
I wonder how much obesity rates in young people are influenced by the current schools.
Alternatively, if you really feel like this is a problem, then recognize and speak up about the negative impacts that this behavior has on everyone else in the system, particularly girls.
I speak from the perspective of the head coach for multiple elite "travel teams" for both girls and boys in the middle school age range, as the father of many daughters, and as a former boy.
Asking for fixes to systemic issues (e.g. pathologizing young children just because they can't sit still) doesn't negate girls' issues. We can work on both.
Men dominating leadership positions is a problem. Men getting degrees at a much lower rate than women is also a problem.
They have separate causes. It's not like every gendered trend is a tug-of-war with every other issue.
* Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
* Lessons requiring motor activity.
* Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
So, I guess I don't really see these as separate issues.
I think it is also important to state that men don't just dominate leadership positions, we also typically dominate compensation as well and I'm not talking about equal pay in the context of women and men in different jobs. For example, men are the highest paid teachers and professors despite the reduced participation by men in higher ed.
So my opinion remains that men do perfectly well with traditional instruction and we don't need to make adjustments to it to favor them, particularly not the types of adjustments that would disadvantage women.
I agree that it's worse to fix the one disadvantage without the other, which is tempting because it seems like the less-intractable one. Wage and job disparity is deeply ingrained; "women's work" has long been poorly compensated because women are seen as wanting to do that work. We lump a huge amount of effort under "homemaker" and don't pay for it at all. We then heap even more effort on women working outside the home, for which we don't even have a single name -- cleaning, note-taking, emotional labor, etc. -- unpaid and often marking one as less valuable.
I don't have a good answer to this, and resist fixing the "easier" problem that puts girls at a disadvantage.
I'm glad you raised this related issue though as I believe that many of the legions downvoting my opinion feel that somehow I am ok with that strategy. I feel that the systemic need to identify energetic and inattentive students and then solve those issues with medication is a travesty that rises directly as a result of increased classroom sizes resulting from school funding shortfalls. I'm not advocating that at all. What I am advocating is that teaching strategies in my opinion do not need to be altered to accommodate boys contrary to what I perceive the article to actually be about. Changes such as:
* Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
* Lessons requiring motor activity.
* Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
Boys (in general) are already proficient in learning though competition and movement, starkly opposed by middle school girls who (in general) are not, at least not when it comes to physical contests with boys. Boys just don't need lessons that reinforce competitive games and motor activity. If anyone would benefit, it would be girls but that would also likely require a single gender school system.
Boys go on to dominate (almost) every profession so clearly altering middle school teaching strategies to favor and accommodate them at the expense of girls is both unneeded and would likely lead to larger systemic disadvantages to women.
Yes, men dominate leadership of most fields. That's a widely known problem. The stats are glaring and blatant. It's difficult to fix, but we generally know some strategies that work. The challenge is building political will.
This article is about a problem that is not widely known, which is obviously why she chose to write about it.
Forgetting about whether elementary school performance results in leadership positions, first look at the effects of penalizing high-energy children (regardless of gender):
- ADD over-diagnosis
- poor grades due to teacher bias, which the article mentions (academic grades are artificially deflated based on unrelated behavioral issues)
- school-to-prison pipeline (not mentioned in the article, but a huge problem for boys and not at a problem at all for girls)
Maybe a solution would be to have gender-only schools, but that might cause other problems. It seems that most of the problems in education are a result of treating children as a homogeneous group instead of individuals, which is another thing this article points out.
There may not be enough money to have individual lessons for children, but perhaps a more college-like system (where high-energy children can enroll in physical classes while low-energy children can choose to do something else) would work.
For the record, I was extremely high-energy and not athletic at all. The solution for me was not to do competitive, physical classes. It was to do active classes that involved working (even if "working" was just filling out worksheets) instead of sitting still and listening to a lecture.
Most of school is a waste of time, and kids aren't stupid, they value their time just like adults do.
I have raised high talent children (1 boy and 2 girls). My girls thrived in school while my boy did not. They are all equally brilliant and talented in their own way.
My son was on elite traveling basketball teams, all star baseball teams, and earned a podium medal for track at state. He hated school and failed to get his diploma -- one credit short. (He made it up later at a community college.) He excelled as an US Army Ranger in a high-skill combat role with the Rangers (fire support specialist).
He was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, but I didn't believe in such a thing back then. (I believe it now given my late diagnosis and ongoing treatment and struggles.)
I hated school too what a boring nightmare. I still feel guilty about taking my son to school when he was 6 years-old and begging me to let him hang out with me instead.
That memory will always be a record of one of my greatest regrets and failures.
Your son reminds me a bit of me. I hated middle school, I went on in high school to to be a 3 sport varsity player and ultimately got into and through university as a D1 athlete. Post graduation I as a military dog handler. I hated middle school with a passion but that did not seem to hamper my career at all.
Your son sounds great, I was in the Army as well and I know and respect what he had to do to overcome the challenges of the Ranger crucible. Your son has already achieved far more than most could even dare.
If you think hard-handed penalties work, you never received enough education to show that genuine conversation works even better.
ADD/ADHD medication is one of the true success stories of mental health treatment. Unlike depression, bipolar and other conditions if a person suffers from ADHD, in the vast majority of cases, they will improve and improve significantly with medication and the improvement has a rapid onset from the first dose.
I actually choose not to treat it in myself for a long time because I had already suffered thru schooling and it was not until a life event stacked so much responsibility in top of me that I imploded to the point where I could not put one foot in front of the other that I decided to actively treat it. Immediately I look back at all the struggles I had especially in schooling and realized I choose the hard path.
So while I agree that we are over-drugging boys, I agree ADD/ADHD is over diagnosed and I agree that school sucks for all boys even the ones that do not have focus problems. I want to lend my voice to caution about rejecting medicating those that do have a legitimate disorder as looking back I realize I did myself a disservice by rejecting being drugged.