Why schools are failing our boys
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First of all, any organization that has men working with young children will eventually face accusations of pedophilia regardless of the reality. Also men seem less interested in day care and early childhood education so children see nothing but women teachers until high school.
Just like blacks who have nothing but white teachers conclude that education is a "white thing", boys will conclude it is a girl thing.
When I coached Kindergarten soccer (which is a lot of fun; I'll leave large-field soccer to the Europeans, but the game on a small field is exciting) I shaved my beard because I learned that it would scare some kids because they'd never seen anybody with a beard.
There's also the problem that people mistake an obedient child for a "good child". There was this book
http://www.amazon.com/Snapping-Americas-Epidemic-Personality...
which seemed so puzzled that people would "change" quickly when they fall into cults but the real thing is parents thought these kids had it together because they would do what they are told and when you put them in a new environment they do what L. Ron Hubbard tells them to do (i.e. no "change" at all)
My son isn't in the habit of obedient and if somebody isn't pushing on him somewhat he will do nothing at all in a classroom with 20 kids. I talked with my superintendent about this at a PTA meeting and he told me I should sit back and let the experts deal with this. (Just before this he told the mother of a "special" child that he welcomes her as a partner in his education; that's because the state can set a fire under his ass)
That's why my son is homeschooled.
Your post sounds a little...extreme. Schools aren't evil. Bear in mind the effect your values are really having on your son. Keep in mind, too, the great social development he's missing out on.
Keep in mind, too, the great social development he's missing out on.
There are multiple problems with this statement.
First, it assumes that the "social development" kids get in school is somehow "better" than the social development they get outside of school.
Second is a pervasive (and wrong) meme that "home schooling" is some kid sitting at a desk in their house listening while their parent drones on and on about some subject.
My experience home schooling my three girls was that skipping "the middle school experience" was the envy of all their peers in "regular" school. And the social experiences they got with the community of students that were being home schooled were very effective at teaching good social interaction skills.
In California at least you still need to register your child with an appropriate school of record which both reports to the state on educational status "in school" vs "not in school" and provide quarterly report cards for their students. Had it been a traditional middle school it would have been the largest one in the area. This because the Bay Area has a very diverse and effective community of "home schooling" students.
The Bay Area is perhaps asymptomatic in this regard but programs like the Stanford EPGY math system, the Riekes nature studies home school programs, places like the Institute for Excellence in Writing, Etc.
My kids were in social groups through out their home school experience (3rd - 8th for the longest one) Those friendships are at least as strong as any developed "in school."
There are a lot of things you can say about home schooling, but generally "missing out on social development" isn't one of them.
[1] https://giftedandtalented.com/ -- Formerly the Stanford EPGY program.
[2] http://riekes.org/nature-awareness/homeschool-programs/
[3] http://iew.com/
I agree that conventional schooling is not for everyone, and middle school is a particularly brutal time for young girls. Lord knows I'm still scarred from my experiences during that time.
You are your child's parent, and the parent knows best.
Thanks for the citations, too -- I'll read up.
Cheers!
I knew how to read at 3.5 yrs, wrecked my vision, wore glasses, was "different" and had poor social skills. For me going to the public school was a war zone as I became a target for intense bullying. I have suffered from social phobia, anxiety and all sorts of BS from this that I have somewhat overcome. I know I had some role in this happening because these problems followed me around, but I did spend one year in a private school that had a "zero tolerance" for bullying policy and I had a much better time even had friends for the first time in my life.
I was told by adults again and again to "ignore it" and they did not understand that the level of provocation would escalate and escalate. Frankly I don't know if is a matter of victims are people who are below a certain threshold of skills or just people who are in the bottom 10%. I have read the literature on the subject even talked to the people who wrote it and there is no psychosocial intervention for bullies or victims that works. What does work is a "zero tolerance" policy across the organization for this behavior, but public schools won't do this, not until one of them gets sued into bankruptcy and the teachers lose their pensions.
I do know now that I am pretty good at "ignoring it" and I tend to be bombproof in crazy situations.
The reason for this is that the school is what forces the victim into contact with the bullies, and limits the victims strategies for handling them.
They often are. For a great deal of students, it's a place of unhappiness. I'm on the geeky side, and when I ask my friends (girls more often than not) whether they liked school, they universally tell me it wasn't good for them.
So you can't say that. You want that to be true; that is supposed to be true; but it is not.
I know this is anecdotal, but I'll pitch in with another data point: I hated it. High school (and to an extent part of my junior high experience) felt like an absolute waste of time. It was a mix of two negative experiences: 1) avoiding uncomfortable interactions with students who hated those like me because we were too nerdy/pale/learning-focused/etc. or 2) hoping we wouldn't get stuck with one of a half-dozen or so awful teachers [1]. I wish I were exaggerating.
On a positive note, those four years were tempered by the three or four teachers I deeply respected and admired. Sadly, such positive emotions were a rare retreat from the anti-authoritarian and anti-educational atmosphere present in that district.
When I went to college, I discovered that scholastic endeavors needn't be complicated with stupid adolescent politics. It was a completely different experience, not the least because I was treated like a responsible adult for the first time in my life by those who were directed to instruct.
In retrospect, if I should ever have children of my own, I don't think I could bring myself to put them through public school. I realize it depends on the district, but my own experiences were so dramatically negative that it's an option I won't willingly accept.
[1] I had a math teacher my freshman year who regularly complained that her students went on more dates than she did. During the warmer months, she'd often take us outside so she could nap in the sun while we were supposed to work on whatever assignment she'd given us. About halfway through the year, she was reigned in somewhat because this activity was reported by concerned parents when it was discovered that many of the students were leaving early (conveniently, it was also the last period of the day). She didn't come back the following year.
I also had a teacher my senior year who claimed he was a former drill sergeant and treated us in a manner analogous to recruits. He also started us off with negative grades to teach us some absurd lesson about the importance of always improving. Part of his grading regimen included measuring the margins of our papers to ensure we followed instructions, subtracting 50 points for each margin that wasn't exactly 1" from the edge of the paper. And that was before he graded the content.
Jesus fucking christ, how can a teacher get away with that shit.
Either way, from someone who was a student there, I can certainly confess the experience wasn't one I'd like to repeat. It'd almost make for a great comedy were it not something I experienced first hand. ;)
Granted, this was in the late 1990s, so it's possible some things have changed. My faith, however, has since been ruined. ;)
If you visit often enough and listen to what they say, it should become a little easier as you go along.
At least good ones do, and I have freedom (and sense) to not go to bad ones.
Don't worry, we're going to hire a tutor so they know how to properly ostracize the weak and the non-conformists.
Why would I want my kids to take that long detour through dysfunction?
Could you expand on what "great social development" homeschooled kids are deprived of?
Other areas aren't so unfortunate - usually a closely knit group of religiously homeschooled teenagers will end up just like a normal high school class - rebelling against their parents and growing up to be normal people. Larger cities have strong non-religious homeschool communities and the kids there are probably growing up fine (though I don't personally know anyone in one of those groups).
I do know some homeschoolers who really do just sit in their room all day and never meet with other people their age. I was one for a while. Usually in that case there's more at fault than just being homeschooled, like Asperger's or depression that's not properly dealt with.
I've probably digressed from your question a bit but it's hard to keep myself from rambling when I'm almost always the only person in these discussions who has actually been a homeschooler. :P (Edit: After reading more of the thread it looks like I'm not alone here!)
Personally, I hang out with my friends from when I went to public school. It would be dreadful if I only knew the other homeschoolers in my area.
I was homeschooled and also attended both private and public schools so I have some perspective on this point:
1) "Exposure to people who aren't like you" can be achieved in all sorts of ways, and you have to be really intentional about why you want it. In other words, ask "why is it important?" and then formulate a plan from there. Eg., if it's because you want to help the less-fortunate, go volunteer or go on a missions trip. Going to "real" school doesn't count, because
2) schools are the epitome of segregation. Band kids over here. Drama kids over there. Jocks to the left, dorks to the right. Race A in this corner, race B in that corner. Watch any group of kids walking home after school and note the homogeneity. Part of that is because that's how the kids naturally separate, and part of that is because
3) schools are populated by the kids who live in the neighborhoods they serve. Naturally, that population is not usually diverse. In the case that the neighborhood is ethnically diverse, it's probably not economically diverse.
College is better, but people still tend to fall into groups of people who are like them in some way, whether it's clubs, sports, Greek life, etc.
Homeschoolers in my area, if they are religious, are pagans. I know some homeschoolers who live in another state who are seriously Christian (i.e. dad is a prof at a religious school) but not at all right wing.
Maybe they are not all the same. But I worry that they won't try to teach my kids skills, they will try to teach them obedience and fitting in. I don't want that.
I'm in a position where this is an option, but I'm concerned about social interaction? I think it's important for a child to spend substantial periods of time with his peers. How do you deal with this?
There is little doubt that our false-negative rate was very high, but our false-positive rate was also astonishingly low. You play the game long enough and you start to notice some pretty damning "tells".
(This said, the damage doesn't seem to be permanent; after about the second year the game became much harder as people acclimatized to university life.)
Hell, maybe this anecdote supports your point. We all went to traditional schools and we were serious assholes...
One example of such a "tell" is attempting to have a personal discussion with a professor during class. People who were schooled traditionally will have long since realized that should not be done, but somebody fresh out of homeschooling may not have that inhibition.
Some (many? most?) people who were homeschooled do not exhibit this.
This is true, but Paul Graham resolved this:
Children pick on each other. Adults do not - not because they're grown up but because they have other things to do.
So yes, of course you DO want to limit your childrens interaction with "kids from tougher backgrounds" until they learn to say "No", "Go away" and "No, I don't want French Fries with that".
I am very suspicious of this. For the most part, children are not free to associate with whoever they want. Those decisions are generally made for them by adults. It can therefore be very difficult for a child to remove themself from the company of somebody who picks on them.
Adults on the other hand tend to have a great deal of freedom when it comes to determining who they associate with. They will naturally disassociate with people that they don't get along with, minimizing social interaction with people who pick on them.
In the few situations where adults are not as free or able to avoid other adults that they do not like (prisons, lower-paying/status work environments, anything retail, lower income neighborhoods, crowded concerts, etc), adults picking on adults seems to be much more common.
As a group, I have to say they are the most mature, well adjusted high schoolers I've known. Virtually all of them schedule the tutoring sessions themselves. They are self managing and self directed.
I've never heard horror stories of socialization from people who homeschooled. It's always people who haven't homeschooled their kids and quite often people with an axe to grind against them (people employed by public schools).
Most towns have homeschooling groups where kids meet each other for common lessons. They will have greater flexibility in schedule to meet a wide variety of kids and adults outside of a small group of kids their age and the teacher. Most importantly, I've found they have learned to interact with adults as people, where not every adult interaction involves the adult telling them what to do.
Over the years, I've known a lot who have transitioned to public high schools due to the variety and depth of course material being beyond the parents ability. I've known of no problems. These kids are probably better equipped to navigate high school than the average incoming freshman.
I send my kids to a great public school, but if I had the resources, I'd definitely consider homeschooling and wouldn't give socialization a second thought.
Modern education is run with a 'one shoe fits all' approach. We try to cater for boys, girls, those with learning difficulties, those that are gifted, those from impoverished households, those that are affluent, and in general every sector of society that are dumped in our classrooms.
I stand in front of 30 different students, 5 times a day and try my best to educate them all to the best of my ability, and do you know what? Sometimes I don't succeed. It pains me, but some kids slip through the cracks and don't get the education they deserve. I try my best, but there are practicalities that need to be considered.
If you want an education system that caters for all students, regardless of academic ability and socio-economic background then you need to realise that this does not come cheaply. Stick me in a classroom with 10 students instead of 30 and I'll have more time to spend with each one, be better able to take into account their personal education needs, be able to tailor my lessons to individuals rather than focusing on what will suit the majority. Also realise that you'll need to employ three times as many teachers and that the your taxes will need to be substantially increased.
On some level, our modern education system (and previous education systems) fails everyone, to a lesser or greater degree, and few students leave school having reached their full potential. If society wants this to change then the answer is to stop treating schools as a free baby-sitting service, allowing both parents to go out to work and contribute to a nation's GDP, and start treating schools as an investment in a nation's future.
This pervasive myth that it is a "not enough money in the system" does a great disservice to everyone involved and means we never discuss the REAL issue. There is tons of money, but the systematic problems are immune to money -- we could double spending and it wouldn't fix the issues. Parents don't care, teachers are protected by a powerful union so they don't care... student are treated as "must move" assets, standardized testing is held up as the be all, end all of measuring progress.
Instead of continuing to throw money down a blackhole that seems to not generate better outcomes, maybe it is time to rethink our approach... or admit that schools are tiny people prisons and useful filters and have very little to do with educating children, and more to do with segmenting and ranking them (which is useful, but can be done far more cheaply).
There are more substantive sources that have made similar claims, for example this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-WAR-AGAINST-BOYS-Misguided/dp/0684...
The girls in my classroom work harder than the boys. I know this to be true from observation. Maybe boys just like to slack off a little more. Maybe boys don't like competing with girls. Maybe boys are less inclined to seek approval from their teachers. The fact is however, if I had fewer students to teach, I could focus more energy on those boys.
I've also tutored students on a one-to-one basis, and in such situation I see no difference between boys and girls.
I don't think the only possibility here is 1-to-1 education for boys. Many believe that there are other ways of structuring the learning environment and school schedule (e.g. more gross motor breaks) in a way that would help draw out the strengths of boys. In the end, I wonder if this won't steer us more towards separating the genders for at least part of the school day. This would be politically challenging in many public school systems though, in particular because of the historical abuses of "separate but equal" systems.
As you say, smaller classes would probably help, however what would also help is to actually try to understand why your teaching methods are less suited to boys than to girls.
I think society is getting exactly what it wants: free baby-sitting service. I imagine that most teachers chose their profession because they want to educate, inspire and shape young minds. But it seems like the primary expectation is that they keep children safe and occupied during the work day. It seems reasonable that smaller class sizes would allow teachers to connect with more students, but that would involve structural and logistical changes beyond just hiring more teachers. It would be very expensive, but entirely possible for most countries to do. There is a perception that the primary purpose of school is 'education', but people vote with their dollars and effective teaching seems to lose out to baby sitting every time.
This might be because the function of managing children is more beneficial to society than rigorously educating them is. Allowing both parents to work may contribute more to a nation's GDP than giving as many children as possible a very thorough education. I don't know of any studies on this topic in particular, in part because it seems to be a bit taboo to question the value of a traditional education. But it's entirely possible that we should be spending less money on primary and secondary school education and more money on things that will make life easier for parents. It certainly doesn't seem likely that this will ever be seriously considered, but the question of what it means to "fail" our children is one that we should keep bringing up.
She talks about 'Little House on the Prairie' as if she expects all boys to be provided lessons on splitting logs and herding cattle. This is not an education that would suit all boys, just hers.
In my experience, boys are doing fine at school. They tend to underachieve in their early years, where they are less inclined to study in comparison to girls. As they progress through school and get to specialise, they tend to do better.
Do you think that the current childhood education strategy is what is resulting in 1/3 higher college success rate of women?
What do you think would be necessary to get that ratio a more gender neutral 50/50?
Using your child as an anecdote makes it just that - an anecdote. I teach male students who are forced to engage in 2 hours of Physical Education every week, and have to endure failure after failure in the subject.
As I said in my initial comment, if we want boys, or any group, to succeed we need to be tailoring our lessons to those students. Resources are finite however, and this is the real issue.
If that fails, a prominent male teachers could then declare that all schools are sexists, and then go to start a male only school where no female teachers or student are allowed to enter. A place where men can talk with other men, free from disruption of women. This can then be a keynoted talk on conferences as a success story for gender equality.
How many anecdotes do you want? My son? My friends' sons? The dramatic lack (and cutting back) of physical activity at schools is a systemic issue that impacts many.
Personally, I'd love to see more of my nations GDP devoted to educating my kids rather than devoting that money to getting my kids killed in foreign wars after their 18th birthday.
Also, how many people rationally think about/analyze their candidates, follow their promises/arguments etc before voting? Most vote along party lines or conservative/liberal labels etc.
Arguably, at least in the US, party lines and conservative/liberal labels are more reliable predictors of how candidates will behave in office that campaign promises and arguments are, so may be, as decision criteria, more consistent with rationally thinking about candidates than following promises and arguments.
I'd think whatever statement is done, it first needs support from groups with actual economic or social power. What we can wonder about is, why does our most influencial groups in our society value school education so low that it won't be set as a nationwide mission statement ?
What happened? We've lost hope and nothing has changed.
But I still think kids from an early age need the experience of doing something "useful and important" rather than just practice exercises that bore both them and the instructors.
This is what hooks a lot of kids into actually learning, and is rarely done in US educational system.
When you're learning a new language or framework, do you instantly do something 'useful and important'? More likely you do something that you could easily accomplish with your old tools, in order to learn the new ones. This is the nature of learning.
I teach CS and Science. Writing a script that calculates the first 1000 primes is not 'useful or important', but it is educationally valuable. Getting kids to balance chemical equations is no 'useful or important' but it is an important skill if they want to become chemists.
'useful and important' means different things to different people. I have never needed to speak a word of Latin in my life, so the hours I spent learning the language were pointless. The hours I spent practising solving quadratic equations however, were very useful to me, but not so much for my wife who is an English teacher.
To answer your question, I learned enough to be able to do a few small things (Agree... schooling it is at this point) it opened my eyes as to what could be done, and I took off doing some projects.
Soon enough, I started finding the holes in my knowledge, and started filling them in. I have been at this for years, and expect to be doing it indefinitely. There may be a point education begins, I'm not sure there should be a point at which it ends....
I have had to go back and systematically study some things (as one would in school)... but it means so much more when it is for purpose, and the information is retained. And I'm selective. Time is not an infinite resource. I practice lazy loading. I have long since stopped trying to cram my head full of irrelevant facts or skills that don't make the world any better. If there is a framework or language I think offers some advantages, I learn it if I feel cost vs. benefit is there. Otherwise I take brief measure and make a mental note of existence in case I need it later. I have learned a lot like this and don't generally get lost in the weeds...
I believe that this is how _real_ education occurs. Or rather, that this is the method by which knowledge becomes more than theory and a living skill that allows one to produce something. Not knocking classroom education. Some is certainly needed. But I thought this article was spot on.
Next I got interested in Linux and started writing a large assortment of tiny little Unix utilities that were of no use to anyone but me. But they were of use to me and I thought they were important. I put one or two on Freshmeat.
If I had been stuck in a class and told to write the exact same little Unix utility as 30 other people, that it must do x y and z and must not do anything else, that it would be graded and then discarded it would have crushed my soul.
And yeah I did poorly in school in general.
Assuming the school day couldn't be shortened a more progressive education system would maximize ability to self direct study, while using funds on the modern components, facilities, and experts that would best enable students to participate in study relevant to the world stage.
I don't understand this parent. "I let my son play minecraft in the morning before school" - so your son is slacking off in school, but you're still giving him everything he wants? He's your son. He needs to be shown that sometimes, you have to suck it up and work, even when you don't want to. That's a tough lesson to teach an 8 year old, but it's something that parents should enforce early. Eventually, their kid will see that hard work and self control will pay off. Here's a novel idea - don't let your kid play minecraft until he starts doing better in school.
That being said, I do think physical activity should be more common. If it's rainy or cold out, kids should be able to go to their school's gym for an extra PE class - or maybe be able to play minecraft on the school computers. Boys and girls needs to be able to do something like this throughout the day. Article like this will hopefully make schools rethink some things - but until change actually happens, this mom needs to take control instead of just throwing her hands up and telling her son "it's not your fault. now go play minecraft."
This morning, as always, my son was up and dressed before the rest of the household; he likes time to play Minecraft before school starts. But he also cleaned the dirty glass on the woodstove, started the fire and brought wood into the house. Because he wants to.
The whole point is that they let him "slack off" sometimes because they've chosen to let him feel empowered to make his own decisions about how he spends his time generally. And they've seen that it pays off -- sometimes he plays minecraft, but most of the time he's on the ball, helping with chores and such. And (they say) he's doing it because he wants to, not because he's told to.
Here's a novel idea - don't let your kid play minecraft until he starts doing better in school.
Again, you're missing the main point of the article -- it's not that kid is failing school (and needs to be disciplined back into shape); it's that the school is failing the kid.
It's great to raise a child who does some valuable things because they chose to, but it's also important to raise a child who understands duty, responsibility and obligation: because those are also part of life.
Why? What makes life that? Nature? A social construct?
I'm willing to bet is the second thing, and I don't believe questioning such things is bad.
If I did only the things I wanted to do in any given moment, I pretty well guarantee you our lawn would never be mowed, the dishes would go undone, dinner would frequently not get made, etc.
Not to be too snarky, but... that you're questioning that makes me wonder if you've ever actually had to run your own household, or work in a real-life job, or generally operate as an adult, which is practically defined as finding that balance between doing what you want and doing what is needed.
Yes there is: At a very basic level, humans need to eat food to live. If nobody wanted to do the work necessary to procure food, everyone would starve.
Maybe at some point in the near-ish future we will have automated away all unpleasant-but-necessary tasks, but that day is not today, and when it does arrive, it will be a new development for our species.
Until then, being a responsible adult will involve at least some modicum of doing-things-that-one-doesn't-want-to-do and it makes sense to prepare children for that eventuality.
I feel like adults do a great disservice to kids in general by not treating them as intelligent individuals.
Responsibility and obligation might be better learned with something worthwhile to be responsible for. Pleasing teachers isn't.
Right -- but there are ways the child can attain that understanding without its parents perpetually lording over them, deciding how they spend every minute of the day.
I didn't see anyone suggest that helicopter parenting is the "correct" alternative.
Only that it is a mistake to raise a child who is taught that they only need do what they want, and not sometimes what is necessary.
I don't see how you get from playing Minecraft in the morning to her letting her son do "everything he wants". You're assuming that playing Minecraft is frivolous or negative or that shouldn't be allowed in the morning, much less encouraged. And you have little information on what other activities she has encouraged, permitted, or forbidden.
It's tempting to pass judgment on other people's parenting. This temptation should be resisted.
And while you're right that it doesn't give a full picture, I suspect blkhp19 is right based on the entire premise of "it's not his fault" in the article.
And therefore, if school times were moved back would teenagers not just stay up later and still not sleep enough?
> Adolescents are increasingly using stimulants to compensate for sleep loss, and caffeinated and/or sugary drinks are the usual choice. The half-life of caffeine is 5 to 9 hours. So a caffeinated drink late in the day delays sleep at night. Tiredness also increases the likelihood of taking up smoking.
> Collectively, a day of caffeine and nicotine consumption, the biological tendency for delayed sleep and the increased alertness promoted by computer or cellphone use generates what Carskadon calls a "perfect storm" for delayed sleep in teenagers.
Having looked at the full paper about school start times from AAP [1] it cites three papers on this subject [2] [3] [4], I'll come back with another comment if I manage to dive deeper into the rabbit hole on those...
(I'm not saying there isn't a biological cause, just that since my gut instinct is that it would be caused by cultural reasons I'm interested to see the reasoning behind thinking there are biological reasons too.)
[1] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/08/...
[2] Frey S, Balu S, Greusing S, Rothen N, Cajochen C. Consequences of the timing of menarche on female adolescent sleep phase preference. PLoS ONE. 2009;4(4):e5217
[3] Carskadon MA, Acebo C, Seifer R. Extended nights, sleep loss, and recovery sleep in adolescents. Arch Ital Biol. 2001;139(3):301–312
[4] Roenneberg T, Kuehnle T, Pramstaller PP, et al. A marker for the end of adolescence. Curr Biol. 2004;14(24):R1038–R1039
That's a pretty narrow view of how and why their son is doing poorly at school. How do you know he's "slacking off"?
As an adult, one of the most valuable lessons I've learned is to take time for myself. I've watched quite a few of my peers go full tilt into the startup industry and burn out, switching careers, and in one case, having a full mental breakdown. Depression, anxiety, and other mental problems, not to mention physical ailments, are well-documented within the working class. Meanwhile, I work 8 hours a day, and if that doesn't get my work done by the deadline, I miss the deadline. I take all my PTO, and some unpaid time off also. Maybe I'm "slacking off", but I'm a senior developer in charge of people making 6 figures at a profitable company, so I think I'm doing okay.
When I was in high school I went to school 7:30AM to 3:00PM, plus a few hours of homework (AP classes are a bitch). On average I'd say I was working 10 or 11 hours/day. I did very well in school, but I also had very little social life and came out of high school overweight and socially maladapted--problems which only fixed themselves when I had a breakdown in college and sought mental help. I'm actually glad I had my breakdown earlier than some of my peers because that's where I learned to set boundaries on my work/life balance. But I wish I had parents more like the OP, who were sympathetic to the fact that schools are really putting a huge amount of pressure on kids, and teach their kids to take some time to themselves.
Except when you're forced to go through 16+ years of conforming and not being able to say "no" without being labeled a problem-child. That's a long time to be in the creative and free-thinking suppression chamber, and by my estimate most minds don't ever truly recover.
> Personally, I think asian kids achieve more things...
Personally, I think asian kids are brilliant when it comes to rote-memorization and standardized testing but they totally lack in the creativity department. Just look at all of the articles, studies, etc that show that the East has a severe lack of creativity. As an example: [1]. Ill take free-thinkers over number crunchers any day.
If we take your argument to the extreme we could make rules so stifling that NO child would be able to follow them and then it would obviously be the system that's the problem.
Here is a case where the rules are stifling enough that SOME children are having problems continually following them.
Who is to say what level of rules and restrictions is correct? Should they be broken only 0.01% of the time, or 5% of the time, or 50% of the time, or what? What is the standard that children should be held to?
There is a lot of sentiment that schools are failing kids.
https://www.google.com/search?q=schools+are+failing+boys
https://www.google.com/search?q=schools+are+failing+girls
https://www.google.com/search?q=schools+are+failing+children
What do they achieve more of? I keep hearing how the US needs to change education to be more like other countries so they can compete on tests, but why change when you're winning on innovation? Or do we attribute that to something else?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scripps_National_Spelli...
Now, the kids who did really well at the spelling bee, they didn't have time to read. Their moms were making them spend 3 hours a night with the little spelling bee booklet, learning how to spell every possible word that could be asked, and forcing themselves into the rhythm: "'Rote'. May I have the language of origin? 'Rote'. Can you use the word in a sentence? 'Rote'. May I have the definition? 'Rote'. R-O-T-E". (Hilariously, I once watched a girl do the whole routine over the word "talons", even getting "the eagle had sharp talons" as the sentence, then spelling T-A-L-E-N-T-S. Her mom made a fuss over microphone placement and got her back into the round)
Is this a worthwhile thing to do? What useful things does this method teach? Spelling is extremely good, but like I said I'm pretty good at spelling because I read a lot. Maybe I could have been the Spelling Bee Champion if instead of reading, I'd memorized the entire word list. Then I would be extremely good at spelling "prestidigitation", that's for sure.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/08...
http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ednext20064_68....
Pay teachers better and aim for 50% male teachers and consider going back to all boys schools and all girls schools with plenty of rules to ensure that both are treated fairly.
Naturally the ACLU would rather fight to ban the practice outright than risk additional research possibly showing that this is a productive approach, at the expense of the preferred gender politics narrative.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/sometimes-it-only-ta...
I am all about gender equally but that seems crazy to me. As long as girls and boys receive the same standard of education then why should it matter? Seems like PC taken too far.
> He hasn’t been allowed outside at school all week
That never happened. We went outside, we played, we were able to expend our childhood energy. They are children, they do need somewhere and somehow to expend their energy.
If schools have changed in the last 25 years such that none of that out-of-classroom enrichment occurs, then yeah, we're failing out kids.
>Statistically speaking, boys now lag behind girls on every single academic measure; they also get in trouble and drop out of school much more frequently than girls. There are fewer boys in college than girls, and far more lost 20-something boys than 20-something girls.
It certainly seems like schools are failing boys but I'm not sure that this particular failure has anything to do with it.
> The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.
As an asian, I can't muster a lot of sympathy for this line of reasoning. Nobody would accuse asian countries of catering to girls rather than boys, but the schooling over there is even more "sit down, shut up, and do your work" than it is here in the U.S.
On one hand, I agree with the idea that forcing kids to be quiet and do their work will be unhealthy for some of them. (Certainly I know people who were unable to deal with the system and left as soon as they could.)
On the other hand, I also know plenty of people who grew up in very high-pressure situations (some from stereotypical first-generation asian families, some not) whose souls turned out just fine, thank you. I hate the pervasive notion that such families were somehow crushing their children's "true self" or whatever.
My guess is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Smart parents and ideally-designed school systems will adapt to kids' needs: allow the hard workers to grind boundlessly, let the meanderers meander without (while still trying to challenge them and spark their curiosities).
> The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.
I think you can say that regardless of where the same style of schooling is practiced and regardless of the gender.
Rules are fine. They teach discipline. Rules that are created to make large groups of children manageable are not fine. Children aren't cattle and require personal attention and a rule set that matches their character.
That can only happen at home. Catering to needs of every child individually at school is not easily doable. One child's need may be disruptive to another or the entire class. Expecting teachers to pander to such needs is plain wrong. In a class, the teacher should focus on teaching basic skills. enforcing some rules that makes this easier is fine in my books. If your child needs special attention, hire a private tutor, home school or send them to piano/fencing class or whatever it is that interests him/her.
Anyway, I don't buy that discipline is inherently harmful to boys. Men have traditionally been involved with military/paramilitary type situations, which demand discipline. It's profoundly gender essentialist to assert that boys have to move around more. Also, dumb (c.f. History). It's profoundly valuable to learn how to sit down, be still, and concentrate on a subject matter you don't like.
The real concern is the authoritarian attitudes and regurgitation for the sake of pleasing the power figures. It can break someone's mind to be turned into a perfectly molded authority-pleaser.
Japan: 62.7% (primary), 54.8% (secondary) female teachers.
USA: 87% female teachers.
I think you're right, the order doesn't matter so much as where the order comes from.
I always tried to downplay this stuff -- race-blind-and-gender-blind and all that to treat all people equally -- but I have a son and three daughters now and in spite of us never really making it a Thing, gender is a Thing for them. My kids were curious about video games but my daughter got turned off by a lot of them because "how come so many of the characters are boys." No matter what I said, she couldn't get past that. She felt like video games weren't for her. Is it crazy that boys might subconsciously feel the same about school? "If it's for boys how come all the teachers are women?"
I see people on HN writing this all the time, but as the parent of a middle schooler and a high school student who just left middle school:
There's a 50/50 split between men and women in my kids' middle school, and nobody is weird about guys teaching.
There were plenty of guys teaching at their elementary school as well. My daughter had a male teacher in 2nd and 5th grade.
I went to Jesuit high school, and more of my teachers were men than women. Again: no weirdness at all.
Is it true that "most male teachers of children" (or even many male teachers of children) are viewed as "weird", or is this just a meme on message boards?
Before high school I think I may have had two male teachers. One was fired for making "inappropriate comments", the other was considered weird because he patted kids on the back and said good job. It is not just a meme, it's a reality.
it's a system that's been hijacked by do-gooders doing anything but good.
My daughter complains that the 'boys are stinky and loud' and that's why she doesn't go into computer lab more often. She says that the majority of the boys in the lab are 'playing games' and are 'obnoxious'. If you've ever been in a computer lab with a bunch of middle schoolers, you will undoubtedly agree with her statements.
Simple solution? Build a partition down the middle of the computer lab and make one side for the girls and one for the boys.
Computers aren't expensive. Buy one for your daughter.
And then you go on about waiting in line for a restroom. Last time I checked, men are faster at peeing because we have different plumbing. Your argument is vague and not helpful when applied to the classroom environment.
> Computers aren't expensive. Buy one for your daughter.
Stop rendering bad advice based on assumptions about me. She has last year's 13" Air, a Nexus 4, my old iPad2 and an Amazon Fire. We weren't on the front page of the NYT for nothing.
Because the schedule plainly indicated how important adults thought those courses were relative to others, those courses were considered jokes by me and my peers.
Regular and frequent scheduling would probably be required, but even as a professional developer I think that wouldn't be the best use of student time. Students would probably benefit more from math, english, and history courses. (Particularly english and history, since there is a lot that is broken with how we currently teach children mathematics.)
And on the hygiene topic you sound a bit clueless. Parents, for the most part, aren't sending their boys to school smelly and grubby. They get that way while at school.
Every male I know went through a 'firebug' phase as a kid. A young boy playing with fire is imho as natural as a dog wanting to chase squirrels. There was a time when those of us who understood fire survived while other froze. Those who could start and maintain a fire in adverse conditions were once respected individuals, even professionals. Today they are misbehaving young boys, a small percentage of which are even declared dangerous.
Not allowing young boys to play with fire is akin to not allowing them to exercise. A boy waking up early to tend the communal fire is expressing an evolved behaviour that probably predates language itself.
There is reason to consider the gender gap in education but this article, with "Little House on the Prairie" as its sole reference, fails to bring anything of value for that argument. There is also reason to question why some education systems devalue labor... but attaching this to a "boys" thing? <face_palm>
This is not the first time I read this, so it must be true, but it's the craziest idea ever. Not allowing kids to play outside (not making them go outside, regardless of the weather) is criminal.
I'm not sure this has anything to do with boys vs. girls though; I have 3 kids, two boys and a girl, and while the three of them love to play outside the one who likes it the most is the girl.
She's 6 and will very happily spend a whole afternoon jumping on a trampoline under light rain, as she did yesterday with no harm to herself or her health.
(Over here, the rule's that it's mandatory to go out for breaks, except if temperature is below -15C (+5F). Everyone has proper attire.)
I think that's probably a big component of the policy, I regularly see kids on the train or out walking to school without proper attire to be outside in the bitter cold.
This is a pattern I have seen more, and I think is part of Common Core more generally. It makes some sense, but it also feels like they are aping good education. Yes, it is important that students have more than one way to approach a problem, that they understand the truth of the answer and not just the mechanism to produce it, and it is good if a child can work at articulating their thought processes. But, acknowledging that, the Common Core response is: add some more questions requiring the student to do those things. It's not supportive.
Now, back to boys and girls. These vague requirements, these attempts to induce "critical thinking", are not well defined, and the only demonstrable result is whether you can please the teacher. (IMHO in a better approach a student would use multi-step thinking, construct and answer their own problems, and ultimately produce a result that could be externally and objectively validated, ideally supporting iterative development and adding complexity.) Boys are not very good at pleasing teachers, certainly not nearly as good as girls are. A boy would be less likely to amend his answer to satisfy the absurd question, less likely to try to read the teacher's mind to figure out what output the teacher was trying to get. A boy is less likely to match the girl on language skills at some of those ages, and then can't even excel at something that isn't language based, like math. Everything becomes an essay question, and if you aren't good at essays not only won't you be graded well, you may not enjoy the work itself. And the harder you are pushed towards performing the more you will be pushed towards your weakness (the flaw that is keeping you from being graded well); this may improve your grades at that moment, but at the cost of long term learning.
Kids have a lot of time to learn what they need to know. So much time... when people talk about lengthening school days and years, it makes me think about expecting people to work late to increase output. It's not smart. But worse it reveals a lack of value being placed on the time already spent. But if you let a child learn what is right for them to learn, when it is right to learn it, there's so much time for them to become eventually well rounded.
It sucks for girls too. They cope better, they are better equipped to conform. They are also cursed with that ability to conform. The bad results for boys often involve obvious external measures, like failing, disciplinary measures, testing poorly, struggling after school. The bad results for girls are often more internal, a fragile identity, not nurturing their own autonomy, feeding on external rather than internal validation.
This is why as a parent I opt out of public education.
And I'm not sure if that what I just said is fiction or has happened often enough. If I were a teacher, I'd just stick the kids in a classroom to limit my liability.
I was happy to have enjoyed a childhood in which playing outside was normal. I'm not sure if I'd let my kid outside if I had one. Not in a climate where my 8-year-or-whatever-young old son might get a sex offender entry for the rest of his life because he played doctor games with a little girl in kindergarten or whatever. Too many incidents of this sort happened, and I don't want to have a kid in this legal climate.