Also, most teachers are women. I haven't checked, but I'd assume most school administrators are women. It seems natural that they'd construct a system that's more suited for females than males.
Maybe it's something that female administrators and teachers fail to understand.
It would also explain the current epidemic of ADHD and especially ADHD medication prescribed to young boys.
--
[0] - I say "most likely" because I didn't investigate the claims that MRI can pick up on the difference. But from my initial difference, the effect is still hereditary, in at least large part genetic.
The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD is to improve school performance.
The effect of amphetamines on kids without ADHD but who've been diagnosed with ADHD because they're not getting enough exercise is... to improve school performance.
The "young unruly boys without enough PE" is a well-known trope, and modern school is very much kid torture - but I'm not willing to say yet that we're medicating children too much, when the world is only slowly waking up to the fact that we've been underdiagnosing ADHD by at least factor of 2 - this stereotype of unruly boys means the Primarily Inattentive subtype of ADHD is being frequently ignored (vs. the Primarily Hyperactive that creates all the stereotypes), that girls suffering from ADHD are not being diagnosed, not to mention adults.
Either 1. we are medicate children too much and schooling is very screwed up or 2. 20% of boys defective to extent that they require amphetamines. I am not see third option. I am not believe 20% of boys defective to such extent. So I believe we are medicate children too much.
[0]: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the...
How about 3: schooling is increasingly good at exacerbating symptoms of a problem that's considered to be strongly genetic[0] (a point curiously omitted in the article you linked) and widespread in the population. And the numbers seem less surprising if you consider that adult life is also good at making the symptoms apparent - except we brush them away with labels like "lazy", "unorganized", "chronic procrastinator", "rude", etc. and let people figure out coping mechanisms on their own, which often include substance abuse, or on the lighter end, self-medicating with coffee and cigarettes.
--
[0] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3245028/#__sec1... points to "strong genetic influence on ADHD with estimated heritability ranging from 75% to 91%".
Almost 40% of boys that age need vision correction.[2]
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15374416.2017.1...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6644a12.htm?s_cid=m...
> 84% of total world wide ADHD meds are eaten in the USA.
That's of course because US is ahead of the curve in medicine.
> Just like in Europe the medical consensus is that people have to learn to live with pain rather eating oxy's.
This isn't a medical consensus. We just don't push opioids for everything so early. We start with paracetamol and ibuprofen, upgrade to ketoprofen and other NSAIDs in more specialized or severe cases, and continue as needed. But living with pain is not an acceptable answer here either.
Stimulant meds work very well on ADHD and are very safe, both short and long-term; it's a much better story than say SSRIs and depression. The main problem here is the combination of stigma (oh no, amphetamines!) and fears of abuse by people not suffering from ADHD (oh yes, amphetamines!) - both of which are in large part fueled by the US War on Drugs, the unending source of pathologies and suffering worldwide.
It seems crazy that we've made it this far as a species without medication; so why should it be required now? Maybe the issue isn't the children, but the environment they are in?
- teachers had a lot more options when it came to disciplining kids
- many left school for work at age 15 - 16
Do you want the good old times back?
(Another thing is many countries have changed the curriculum to be even more heavy on theory than it used to be. That I would like to change, both for the kids and for future employers: broad practical experience probably increases someones chances in engineering and probably other disciplines as well.)
The United States most definitely has a unique illness. It’s convinced the masses freedom is being tethered to corporatism.
We need a less militaristic and autocratic 1984
“40 hours a week for deflated earnings is freedom. Quarterly gains for the aristocracy is how we beat ‘them’.”
I was under the impression that this "it works differently on people with ADHD" thing was essentially a pleasant myth. If you've got solid citations that stimulants do somehow work differently on people with ADHD I'd be interested in reading them. My understanding was that the effect is broadly similar, with the only meaningful distinction being that ADHD-diagnosed individuals have been judged as needing those effects, and others have not.
For those who need it it makes mind-numbingly boring stuff such as homework (as opposed to reading history books or creating elaborate formulas etc etc) less painful.
I don't know about you but I personally have seen some examples that have gotten significantly improved lives because of it.
If you don't know this stuff first hand, please refrain from making broad statements about it.
BTW, I'll give you this: one of the most interesting explanations I saw was that ADHD is very overdiagnosed - and at the same time underdiagnosed.
Some people get ADHD meds that shouldn't have, others struggle for years because some people have irrational fear against stimulats.
Can we try to avoid moving that needle and instead try to lower the errors on both sides?
Unless all the kids illegally buying ADHD meds to do better in school when they have not been diagnosed with ADHD (and adults doing the same, for that matter, to do better at work) are doing that for no reason, I'm pretty sure I'm correct that amphetamines improve performance for most everyone, and that distinguishing between ADHD-and-improved-on-meds and not-ADHD-and-improved-on-meds is not trivial.
I was replying to a post that read:
> If they're on stims in particular, and the meds actually improve their behavior, then the cause most likely isn't insufficient PE time.
I object to that being proof of much other than amphetamines making most people perform better in school, without commenting on whether ADHD is a "real" thing (I'm not even sure what it would even mean for it not to be "real", given the state of our understanding and diagnosis of mental disorders). "We gave the kid amphetamines and they improved, must have had ADHD" is dangerously misguided.
In a darker vision, the future society will be more heavily dependent on drugs, regardless of age.
> In a darker vision, the future society will be more heavily dependent on drugs, regardless of age.
It's kind of a given, until we transition to post-drug era, where we inject our bodies with nanobots that fix what wasn't already fixed by genetic engineering of the gametes.
Until then, I think it's worth re-evaluating this view while replacing "ADHD" with "diabetes" or "hypertension" or "rheumatism" or "asthma" or... insert any persistent and disruptive condition a person may suffer from regardless of the shape in which they keep their body. We should apply drugs where they help more than they harm, until we have better alternatives.
Yes, exercise definitely helps. But it doesn't make one's mind less noisy internally. Buddhists talk of monkey minds. ADHD is like having a zoo of minds.
This anti-medication bias is causing a lot of stigma in society for children who actually need them.
This is all distinct from people who actually really have ADHD and in which case medications can be appropriate.
You are completely right.
What I meant is that I have a feeling that often ADHD is diagnosed out of convenience rather than a real illness. I certainly didn't mean that all ADHD diagnosis are a scam.
We’ve had risings rates of mental illness for years. And these method of diagnose and prescribe is only making it worse.
There’s obviously benefits to medicine but we’ve gone insane with how we’re describing the mass amount of personal mental variance in the world as illness and trying to eliminate it.
These medications have lasting long term effects that are unknown. If kids that are the brightest are struggling to succeed change the rules not the kids. I learned more when I dropped out and studied what I love instead of following curriculum. We've got to have more varied paths towards success.
A lot of the complaints and stigma I've seen are from people who took medication growing up. They saw the need and value, but loathe the side effects.
Signed her up for gymnastics and ballet and she calmed down a whole lot and did better in the classroom as well.
There is a certain condescending sympathy that we afford to people just because they lived in the past. It comes from a misplaced desire to avoid anachronism, but ends up committing anachronism anyway.
We are such barbarians that I assume that tech will not exist to future generations.
It's a common trope, but AFAIK ADHD has a big hereditary component and currently is deemed to be extremely underdiagnosed in girls and adults in general, so I think this cliche isn't holding water. I will agree that modern schooling is extremely good at surfacing the symptoms (but then so is adult life in general, if you know what to look for).
This does not seem like the right conclusion. More like "needs running around time and free play".
Cf. e.g. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/discipline-problem-solutio... https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/beyond-discipline-article/
My parents did it. Sent to us to Catholic schools instead for many years. And we grew up on welfare.
Unfortunately this is effectively impossible to achieve for 2-3 months every year, with school in session and short Winter days. They're in lower elementary school but I think their total recess time per day is only about 30-40 minutes, and much of the time they don't even get that because it's raining or too cold (pft, whatever, wear coats) or something else, and they have them watch a movie more often than not in those cases (nb. this is a "good" school district)
We have one other kid—a girl—who doesn't seem to need this to not "act wild".
The other trigger for "crazy" behavior seems to be when they're presented with unpleasant social situations and don't know how to deal with them. Like, say, being forced to be around kids who are mean to them. Gee, I wonder where that happens a whole bunch.
On the whole I've been fortunate in life, but it's not an exaggeration to say my life would be dramatically different if I'd learned what was going on as a kid. Instead it was interpreted as a character flaw: that I just wasn't applying myself. Even though I know that's wrong now intellectually, emotionally I still had that message beat into me for years as a kid, and that doesn't just go away sadly. I'd be particularly vigilant about teachers creating that dynamic, as sometimes they do it with good intentions but fail to understand doubling down on a "tough love" approach will utterly backfire here.
The same amount of PE, along with became optional through junior high school and high school.
In elementary school, recess/lunch were required to be spent outside (unless it's -30C or so)
You could spend up to 15min at a time inside to warm up, dry off your mittens, and maybe grab a hot chocolate but after that you were kicked back outside
They crave (and physically need) hours every day spent running and climbing and swinging and rolling around, chasing each-other, etc.
Furthermore, many of them are quite self-directed and stubborn. They get some idea in their head about something to try, and then want to carry the plan through and can get extremely frustrated if thwarted (whether by the plan's intrinsic problems, or by interference from other people). Sometimes the plans are problematic (e.g. «I wonder if I can get adult attention if I take every toy my younger sibling wants to play with, until they start sobbing»), but often the goals/plans are perfectly innocuous, but adults step in and block action for poor reasons or no reason at all, or because the adult wants the kid to be focusing on something different. After being thwarted at a few different projects in a row, kids can become very agitated and defiant, or even melt down completely.
Once the kid has accomplished their immediate goal or given up on it, they sometimes instantly switch to some completely different idea, and don't want to switch back.
It is incredibly difficult to convince a big group of young kids (and especially boys it seems, though many girls are also very active) to sit still and focus on some specific close work without conflicts, especially when they have pent up energy. Trying to force them ends up creating a confrontation, and plenty of kids are looking around for ways to push boundaries and get attention. This is entirely normal age-appropriate behavior, and should not be pathologized. Letting the kids choose their own activities and decide when to switch from one to another goes a long way toward avoiding unnecessary bad feelings.
At least in the United States, this isn’t at all true. A disproportionate number of administrators (especially when adjusted for the normal male/female teacher breakdown) are male.
There have also been many studies that show that teachers call on boys more, praised them more (they acknowledge girls, praise boys), and talk with them more.
So your assumptions are completely at odds with decades of data.
[1]: https://time.com/3705454/teachers-biases-girls-education/ — has good links to various research from across the world.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
Boys and girls experience different gendered teaching practices, but the net result is girls being given higher grades than boys on average.
Surprised to hear this. This is opposite of my experience working for Chicago public schools(CPS).
> At least in the United States, this isn’t at all true.
54% female, 46% male
Too many assumptions or allegations, plus the perception that guys can't be nurturing.
Most of the men still in education were older and were able to migrate away from day-to-day teaching into admin roles. In 20 years those guys will be gone and there won't be any male teachers to replace them.
Sounds like very hostile and sexist environment. I wonder what efforts the school systems take to ensure gender diversity among its employees.
There was a bank that bragged some years ago about being the most diverse bank, since they had 65% or whatever women on the board. 50% was explicitly less diverse than 65%.
It's only high school where the teachers were about balanced, and idk about the non-teachers
Close to 68 percent of elementary school principals are women, while men make up 67.3% of high school principals and 60% of middle school principals.
Teachers are more lenient in their marking of girls' schoolwork, according to an international study.
An OECD report on gender in education, across more than 60 countries, found that girls receive higher marks compared with boys of the same ability.
When it comes to teachers' marking, the study says there is a consistent pattern of girls' work being "marked up".
20 female teachers. 1 male.
No males on the senior staff.
LAUSD: ~4.5:1 in elementary school, ~1:1 in secondary, ~4:1 in special ed[1]
Across all CA public schools: ~2.5:1 [2]
Across the US: 3:1 [3]
So, more women? Yes. 20:1? Wild outlier.
So, what about the claim that it's more women, somehow building a system more friendly to girls? Turns out the data says "not so much" there, too. Principals are roughly 1:1[4]
[1] https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/doma... [2] https://www.ed-data.org/state/CA [3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp [4] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cls.asp#:~:text=I....
Plugging these numbers into R shows that it's not exactly a surprising result:
> prop.test(1,21,p=11/100)
1-sample proportions test with continuity correction
data: 1 out of 21, null probability 11/100
X-squared = 0.31913, df = 1, p-value = 0.5721
alternative hypothesis: true p is not equal to 0.11This makes the "principals are 1:1" data even more interesting. It also lends a good chunk more weight to the idea that at least elementary schools are an environment with outsizedly more female role models.
I still think the "build a system" argument doesn't hold - see the 1:1 data - but I'm certainly more convinced on "the effects of the system-as-is result in this", even without the conscious build step.
Mmm, that's interesting, I have the same observation. I'm not in the US, if that holds any value.
I grew in Europe and, until I was about 10 years old, I firmly believed that the girls must be much smarter than the boys, precisely because they always received much better grades at school.
Alas, eventually I was disappointed and I lost this belief, when I understood that the good grades received by the girls were determined only partially by their knowledge of the subjects on which they were graded and that a large part of the grades was caused exactly as throwaway53086 said, because the girls were "much more likely to obey rules and instructions".
Looking back to the previous years, it became obvious for me that every time when a girl and a boy proved to have identical knowledge about mathematics or biology or whatever else was tested, the disciplined girl received a high grade, while the naughty boy received a low grade.
The girls always did whatever the teacher asked, while the boys failed to do homework, did not pay attention to what the teacher taught and so on.
At that time I was reading a huge amount of books, so even when I was nine-year old there were some fields, e.g. biology, about which I knew far more than my teacher.
Obviously, pointing to errors in what the teacher taught was also a recipe for low grades, in comparison to those who did not question her wisdom.
In primary school, everybody that I knew had the same experience, with the grades that were influenced by the discipline and obedience demonstrated, which favored a lot the girls.
In high school and university, I have no longer seen such cases, the grades received by everybody were mostly correct, but the girls continued to be on average much more disciplined and obedient, which resulted in good grades across the curriculum.
On the other hand, many boys liked only some subjects at which they obtained good grades, while neglecting the others, at which they obtained low grades, resulting in a low average.
In high school and university there was also the same problem that I had first encountered in the primary school, that with the exception of the best teachers, the teachers who were not so good themselves gave good grades only to the mediocre students, while both the bad students and the very good students (who knew more than the teacher about what was taught) received low grades.
The girls were usually not affected by this, because even when they knew that the teacher was wrong, they would not confront him or her about the errors.
Lots of socialization going on.
If your school had a pretty even mix of male and female teachers then your school was the exception.
That was definitely the case for me until university.
However: if it were the other way around, would that ever be an acceptable answer nowadays?
Changes in public sensibility regarding sex and gender are not a good basis to reject GP' claim.
Of course, "girls develop earlier then boys" itself may have other, underlying, causes.
Being an adult is sometimes finding some occupancy that with minimum amount of time will give us the psychological comfort to do the maximum amount of paid work through the rest of the week (or day). Why don't we teach kids that being mature is caring for our needs too, instead of pushing them into the square hole of just duties that are demanded of them by everyone else.
Is this OK, or not? I thought it wasn't OK, so I tend to avoid it, even if I think some of it may be true, but isn't stereotyping anyone based on attributes something we are trying NOT to do?
I'd have to see hard data, not anecdotes. My daughter is a wild child, actively flouts damn near every rule I create, refuses to follow instructions, and has a lot of trouble in school because she thinks it's stupid.
My son is far more compliant. Like night & day different from his sister. And they've been like this since they were old enough to start showing real personality.
I couldn't improve my handwriting for the life of me when i was in school and got really poor grades from teachers not being able to read what i was writing.
My own experience was that learning to type, thanks to getting interested in programming, was game changing. All I can say is that I could write lengthy essays and reports in a jiffy. Still can.
Not for math, at least not for my kids. I was helping my son with his high school physics homework a few days ago, and IMO his poor handwriting was a genuine impediment to his mathematical problem-solving.
Same goes for 4's. A lot of people don't make the top into a closed triangle shape. Instead they write it like an unfinished or upside-down h.
Even though I'm mostly typing now, it helped me in university and it helps me sometimes when solving problems on paper is easier than with computers.
That being said, handwritten long-form text seems like a rarity in the age of computers, though I still feel that I express things differently in handwriting.
what do you mean by this ?
In the context of the school it would mean the administration, the school board, and if its a private school the owners or trustees.
"don't be so loud, that's not lady-like" "don't play in the dirt, you'll ruin your dress" "it's uncomfortable, I know, but you have to look pretty" "girls don't like sports, here, sit down and play with your dolls"
It's subtle things, but a million of them may make a difference. There's a lot more rules for girls than boys, they are used to spend their time in quieter activities, etc.
Probably true for half a century now. And yet.
Public School Education in the US is not a hotbed of innovation – we are largely riding on the coattails of a system constructed by men, no? Women may have filled these positions, but the system was largely constructed circa the Industrial revolution (and the tertiary education system with its initial origins in monasteries).
This hypothesis fails when applied to militaries. Throughout history men have near 100% representation in militaries and wars. Where discipline and following rules is more seriously enforced.
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means, because it's the naturalistic fallacy or the appeal to intuition
> girls are much more likely to obey rules and instructions
So is that difference a problem, then? Or not? Or neither? You can't force people to take a risk they aren't comfortable with, and if boys (for whatever reason) are a little less risk-averse, what is there to do? Punish boys for taking risks as we praise girls for doing the same?
Everything you've stated (following rules and instructions, etc.) also applies in the workplace, so if you were correct you would the same sort of discrepancy in the workforce.
* Fine motor skills like good handwriting are rewarded, often explicitly as part of the grade.
* Verbal skills are often explicitly rewarded, even if they don't have much to do with a subject. My local school asks students to write and make a presentation about their math answer. It doesn't matter if they get the right answer as long as the presentation is professional and impressive.
In school, the rules that students are rewarded for following are "softer" and harder to justify directly. eg. You must submit a project with a cover with beautifully handwritten title of this specific size, or you lose marks (This is real guidance that was provided for my school and college projects.)
At work, while these kind of rules exist, it's typically okay to break them, and performance is mostly rated on actual impact, not pointless rule-following.
https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long_Ma...
Additionally, pointing out most professors are men does not counter the argument. Merely the transition of going from a highly cooperation- and rule-following-favored environment to an extremely competitive environment should give some indication as to how multifaceted this problem can truly be.
Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
Your claimed "women are wonderful" effect seems to stop conveniently at the career stage of life.
As other comments have pointed out, the reason can easily be explained by a paradigm shift. One which shifts from a cooperation-favored environment, to a competition-favored environment. Though there is an absence of evidence, the absence of evidence doesn't prove the opposite, it merely puts into question the hypothesis.
> Also the grandparent claimed that females made rules that benefitted the same gender. In other words in a school setting a same sex relationship between teacher and student is such that the student benefits. However this clearly isn't the case per my college performance citation.
The GP stated this goes for women. Clearly, that doesn't claim the same goes for men. In fact, this is entirely in-line with the "women are wonderful" phenomenon, though I would personally believe other factors are at play beyond this.
How do you reconcile this with discrimination towards women?
Also the whole trope that women somehow cannot compete and can only collaborate, as if the two things are at odds, is also exhausting.
Frankly, this "discrimination towards women" may as well be turned around with one simple trick. Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their ambition and achievements? Last time I checked, women are a lot more judgmental of their partner's ambition, earning capabilities, career, and similar traits than men are, frequently to the point of wanting a guy who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to all those things, which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine men respond by being more competitive.
Now imagine your worth isn't as tied to this, you have all these men with a very clear incentive to compete keep trying to one-up another. It isn't a secret people give up easier when the challenge is too difficult compared to the reward, and assuming above, women clearly have less of a reward at the end of this.
Convenient excuses? Probably. Frankly, the entire "oppression" narrative is awfully convenient when put under the right angle. So instead of knee-jerking towards all this, let's stop this "trope" as well and address the problem for the multifaceted issue it truly is.
Edit: as replying to the below is no longer an option and apparently my "competition" claim is "unsubstantiated", it seems I have to point out the obvious. Women still largely go for men outearning them rather than equals, let alone lower.(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jomf.12372) Additionally, money helps men more than women when it comes to cushioning traits of lower value (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...) Though I guess one peer-reviewed study tracking diaries says more than entire countries filled with anecdotal data of women more willing to work part time even when not caring for kids.
Your entire comment basically is based off your own bias. Research can and already has been done on this issue, showing that you're probably wrong. I implore you to read this paper which already puts to rest your outdated notions that men are somehow more competitive than women. I'd like to emphasize the following with respect to competition and finances:
> The same line of reasoning might lead to the
expectation that men should compete more about financial
success than women do, since this would make them more
attractive to women. The data, however, do not support
this: there was no sex difference in the strength of
competitive feeling about attaining financial success,
nor were there consistent differences in the fraction of
diary entries concerned with things that might be
thought to lead to financial success, such as success at
school; in fact, in Study 1 women had a
larger fraction of diary entries about success at work
than men did.
No worries though, I'll just believe your baseless conjecture instead of a peer-reviewed paper.
Which of the two sexes is more likely to have their worth as partner be judged based on their [looks, and maybe second emotional support]? Last time I checked, [men] are a lot more judgmental of their partner's [looks] than [women] are, frequently to the point of wanting a [gal] who is relatively "better" than themselves. You think that has no influence on competitiveness? When your worth as a romantic partner gets tied heavily to [this one primary thing, and then the emotional support bit], which can be found in a field emphasizing competitiveness, surely you can imagine [women] respond by ... well, what am I supposed to fill in here? But if you think carefully about this, being agreeable (what's optimized for in this school stuff) is other than appearance probably the single most important currency a woman has.
As far as I know, whether the difference has biological or cultural reasons is not equally well established. But it seems somewhat stable across cultures, which seems to me to suggest that it’s indeed biological, see e.g. Costa et al (2001), Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11825676_Gender_Dif...
“In brief, gender differences are modest in magnitude, consistent with gender stereotypes, and replicable across cultures. Substantively, most of the gender differences we found can be grouped in four categories: Women tend to be higher in negative affect, submissiveness, and nurturance, and more concerned with feelings than with ideas.“
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....
> How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
In particular, the differences aren't "stable accross cultures" but more pronounced in more gender-equal societies, so the difference are either (likely) biological, or else caused by society but in a counter-intuitive way.
Sit in any classroom or ask any teacher who their problem children are, and they're almost always boys. They're louder, more violent, more likely to disobey, and have a harder time sitting still.
Are all boys a problem? No, of course not. I imagine a lot has to do with home balance, the involvement of two parents, etc. Are all girls good? No, of course not. But statistically there is a difference. This is true until they settle down in their mid to late twenties...just look at insurance rates.
Maybe it's not biological and is cultural, but it's true from a very young age through young adult that boys are less able to sit still, be quiet, and listen. And school is structured in a way that punishes those traits, and we as a culture medicate boys to make them calm down.
Honestly though...I think one of the biggest factors is that success in school does not predict success in a job. The traits rewarded in school do not correlate to the traits rewarded in high-competition jobs. Being quiet, listening, doing your work on time, not challenging the status quo, parroting things that teachers want you to, not challenging others...none of those things are traits you think of when you think of CEOs. Not that I think that aggressiveness necessarily SHOULD be what we're rewarding as a culture, but when the only goal is profits...it's hard to think that those things make a top company.
I'll probably get down-voted for mentioning him (and that's fine, I don't care), but Jordan Peterson has some really fascinating talks about personality traits between men and women and why personality traits in men lend toward more aggressiveness which is rewarded in competitive business.
Men get the "benefit" of bimodal outcomes, in that they're disproportionately represented in the highest-paying jobs and in prison. Women get the steady middle, doing what needs to be done but less big risk/big reward. I'm dissatisfied with it on both sides. A system in which 'overactive' boys (or kids more generally) are not served well is not good, and a system that optimizes for the wrong outcome for 'good' girls is not good. It's clearly not doing that well for America given our susceptibility to mis- and disinformation and our need to import skills rather than effectively developing talent here.
And it should be noted -- it's not the boys that are the problem it is the schools.
Raise young boys in a way that is completely stifling and unnatural compared to how boys were raised for tens of thousands years based on our evolution, and then diagnose these boys as having a mental problem. No, it is society that has the mental problem.
I want them to challenge, think, be introduced to the complexity and darkness of history, be able to creatively write and imagine, and to not fall in line with whatever the societal expectations and agendas are for the week.
Exactly this. Doing something simply because "it's a rule" and doing something where you see actual impact/results is world of a difference.
That might be true if you ignored development, but we're talking about children here. A 12 year old boy is not the same as a 23 year old man.
https://theop.princeton.edu/reports/wp/ANNALS_Conger,Long_Ma...
I have no real opinion on it, just that my memory of school was a really strict place compared to real life and work. There are plenty of plan B options, alternatives, ways to think outside the box in real life, but not in school. You could only use your brain on the task but not to get out of the task or complete it in a different way than your teacher had intended you to.
As if I had left a traumatic situation, I vividly remember enjoying a lot finally having time for myself after work the first few years after I dropped out of high school. I had to put real effort 8 hours a day, then nothing else was expected of me.
Same. I slacked a lot in high school (in hindsight, I'd have gone actually-nuts otherwise) but it was still by far the hardest consistent work I've ever done, largely due to the sheer amount of time it took and the constant, overlapping, usually-very-short ("due tomorrow") deadlines. College was a vacation. Work is easy.
High school did little to prepare me for "how the real world works" (always the excuse for deadlines and requirements and such in school) but did harm me psychologically in ways that took more than a decade to get over—and I wasn't even bullied or anything like that, it was mostly just the strict schedule, extreme lack of freedom (asking to go to the bathroom, stuff like that), and crazy workload.
In my working life every time I brazenly break the rules and ignore instructions I end up getting a raise, or promotion. This is across 5 or 6 jobs stretched out over 23 years in small businesses, and fortune 100 companies. This is because I always back it up with results
In school, any deviation, regardless of intention or outcome, was perceived by my teachers as being disrepectful to their authority, and was quickly punished. To be fair, I went to catholic school in the 80s/early 90s, so following rules was probably a bigger emphasis than most people's experiences.
I mean, good for you I guess?
In a school setting, someone who listens, follows the rules, and does not challenge the structure of the institution is highly likely to receive excellent grades. In a business setting, this person may be an employee who contributes to the team by doing their job, and doing it accurately and consistently.
A disrupter may work in the same job, and challenge the way things are done - they may fail in doing so, and be repremanded or fired, or they may succeed in their disruption, and allow for a change in the process or job, resulting in greater efficiency.
This is the trade off in my humble opinion.