Girls are Smarter than Boys.
More Diapers | March 6I was listening to NPR today (Yes, I’m one of those people) on the way to work, and there was a story about a dramatic trend in education of girls doing better in school and being more likely to go to college than boys. Funny thing is, I was brought up thinking girls where smarter than boys. When we’d ask my dad why my mom was younger than him, he’d explain to us that she was smarter, so they made up the difference in intelligence with age. Made sense, even if that age difference now seems absurd: 1.5 years.
The commentator on NPR said much of the reason for this can be attributed to a push in the early 90’s to increase test scores in math and science among girls. Parents put on a push to remedy this, and curricula changed to accommodate their wants.
He then said something that set off a light bulb in my head: boys like competition. As we all know, boys and girls learn differently. Boys like competition. Girls like, well, I don’t know, flowers I guess. Ok, that was a joke. They do better when feelings are taken into account. Interesting thing is, about this time, much of the competition was taken out of the curriculum for fear that it was hampering the development of some students (among them many girls).
We became afraid to let a child fail. As if this was somehow making them less of a person. Perhaps we didn’t want to have to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of seeing our kids trying and failing while watching others succeed at the same task. As a result, our kids were fed this “you’re all great” mentality. Problem is, it seems now to be just as much to blame for the failures in our education system as our recent successes.
So, let’s get the boys back up there with the girls. Add a bit of competition back into the curriculum. It’s ok to fail. Let’s teach our kids to fail with dignity. It’s great to win, but let’s teach our kids that it’s not the only thing. We owe it to our kids to provide them the best up-bringing possible. To me, the possibility of losing is a win-win situation.
[…] I wonder whether this is healthy to teach children to want to do their best, to win, to beat everybody? I am afraid sometimes that we preach winning and perfection more often than losing and failure. Today over at Blogfathers, Eric from More Diapers discusses the fact of how our schools tend to teach the egalitarian attitude of nobody wins or loses. I agree with his statement that: We became afraid to let a child fail. As if this was somehow making them less of a person. Perhaps we didn’t want to have to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of seeing our kids trying and failing while watching others succeed at the same task. As a result, our kids were fed this “you’re all great” mentality. Problem is, it seems now to be just as much to blame for the failures in our education system as our recent successes. […]
I’m not sure it’s all about the competition or lack of it. And girls do compete, just not over the things that boys compete over.) I think a lot of it is the physical differences between boys and girls at elementary age. Girls have a greater ability to sit still and focus for longer periods of time, as well as better fine-motor skills, when compared to boys at the same age. So what happens is that girls get the positive feedback, but boys are labeled troublemakers because they can’t sit still.
I think the solution is to either make all elementary-age education single sex, so boys’ behavior is normalized (because they won’t be compared to girls) or to change the way school works so that all kids spend much more time up and moving around instead of sitting still and being asked to focus for 6 hours at a time (which most adults can’t even do). The physical differences wouldn’t be such a big factor, then. I’m betting you’d also see diagnoses of AD(H)D going down if moving around was part of the regular curriculum.
Don’t believe the hype. Newsweek etc. get all of this stuff wrong and most of it is ahistorical. Most of the things that were put in place that were supposed to help girls (such as more class discussions) were thought to help boys fifty years ago and were taken out to favor girls who were thought to desire structure. Almost the whole difference in the gender acheivement gap is among studetns of color from poor neighborhoods where girls are expected to do well in school because it is their only way out whereas boys can still turn to skilled trades for a short term income boost with relatively low entry costs. Also high incarceration rates play a factor here too.
Moving in the curriculum benefits boys and girls. Spend some time with my daughter if she hasn’t had the chance to be outside if you doubt me. Basically what you are arguing is that the bar needs to be lowered for boys not raised. This is precisely the wrong idea. We need to expect more from boys not less.
Oops. I didn’t mean to make it sound like I’m discounting the competition aspect of schooling (and child-rearing) these days. I just think lack of competition isn’t the *main* force behind boys’ school problems. I think the whole over-praising and lack of competition thing is causing problems for both sexes and is a related but different problem than the boys’ school performance problem.
Dave, are you addressing my comments or the original post? It’s not clear to me.
Since I am a girl myself, I’m well aware of the fact that moving benefits girls as well as boys. It benefits all kids, which is why the NCLB requirements that have forced recess out of too many elementary schools are criminal. But you also can’t discount the vast differences in abilities present in boys and girls at young elementary ages, which have been researched and documented for decades, as well as reported on by any teacher who’s spent time in a room full of 6-year-olds.
And how is single-sex education or asking for movement in schools “lowering the bar” for boys? I’m a mother of two boys. I have very high standards. But I’m also realistic about what they can physically do, and what factors help them learn and what factors prevent them from learning.
I’m interested in your information about the achievement gap being primarily in low-income/low-resource demographics. Do you have any links to research that I could read to find out more?
To lose and be gracious about it is the heart of spotsmanship. My kids have not yet made it into the “mainstream” But I hope they learn the joy of victory and the agony of defeat. It deal with both gracefully.
I heard the same piece on NPR and here’s what I was thinking about it: My take on the ‘we’re all good enough just the way we are’ movement is that it’s been cooking for a long time before the early nineties. It’s always seemed to me to have its roots in the ’sixties-era home social engineering, my truth is just as good as your truth’ phenomenon. OK, I’m a little prejudiced against anything with even a hint of hippy taint, ever since I suffered through a non-competitive hippy childhood. But yes, I’ll agree that we need to get back to having clear winners and losers; This is America, and we’ll be doing our kids a disservice if we don’t prepare them for the free market.
I am with Moxie - single-sex classes are more beneficial to students, in my opinion. And I’d even go further and extend that to junior high and high school.
Did anyone see the John Stossel 20/20 special from about a month ago on schools? The main point of it was that there is no competition among schools, so the status quo becomes lower. In other countries (Denmark being the one they profiled), parents can choose which public school they want their child to attend, which forces schools to hire the best and make their curriculum tops. In contrast, in this country the unions have control over teacher pay and contracts (meaning that it makes it horribly difficult, if not virtually impossible, to fire a teacher even for a criminal offence), and we keep hearing the demand of “we need more money” all the time. One superintendant in North Carolina was asked “how much money is enough?” and his reply was “How much have you got?” There is got to be a better way (I am personally all for making the federal/state/local dollars follow the child, and making the schools compete for the kids).
I firmly believe that there is a bias in the system against boys. Girls have the ability to stay still and quiet for longer periods of time, and the majority of discipline problems in classrooms are boys. Given that, I think teachers prefer to have girls as students rather than boys. This isn’t to say that there aren’t exceptions to the rule, but that this is how it generally is. I know that competition has been outlawed to make sure that “no one feels bad” (they’re even trying to ban TAG in some schools!), but when American students are slipping in academic achievement, and we keep moving the standards to make sure that it doesn’t look so bad, we fail the kids in so many ways.
My kids aren’t school-age yet, but when that time comes, I’m going to be exploring all of our options, even if it means we are stretching ourselves financially for a private school.
“As we all know, boys and girls learn differently. Boys like competition.” We do? Oh, sorry, no one ever told me when I was a boy. You know, I can’t stand generalizations like this. The truth is that *some* kids like competition, and some don’t. Whether boys or girls.
Figures, and of course this is the first time in like 2 weeks I decided to entirely skip listening to Diane Reem in favor of music on my drive into work today.
BTW, logoboy, I was about the least competive kid alive, and as a result, I learned to be a good loser, since I lost A LOT. But, if you’d have paid attention while in school — or had an ultra competitive brother who was good at everything, like me — you may have noticed that the boys were more likely to participate in activities of a competitve nature than girls.
The truth is that some girls are competitive, some boys are competive, but if you’re going to group them and design curricula around them — which is how it’s done — it’s certainly fair to say boys are competitive. Just as it’s fair to say your wife would like flowers. I bet she would. If my wife brought me flowers, though, I’d be like, “WTF? What do I do with these?” If I brought them for her, I’d have a really nice night.
There is a difference between boys and girls. It’s genetic — and well proven.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I think comepition is good for EVERYONE, but completely removing competition unfairly effects boys more than girls. Either way, I sorry you’re so sensitive to generalization.
I spent yesterday afternoon at our school districts “Academic Olympics”. My daughter competed in storytelling. There were 13 girls and 2 boys. Spelling was also dominated by girls.
But math and the “scholar quiz” events were overwhelmingly male dominated.
I don’t know where I was going… maybe somewhere that says I don’t see that boys are floundering all that much? To me, things seem to stay more the same than to change (thinking back to my own school days and all that).
But, I have to say (and perhaps this is me, the female and mother of five daughters speaking), until women are able to have equal opportunities and make equal pay for equal work, I just can’t make myself feel TOO sorry for boys. There is some privileged they have simply by virtue of being male. Women (and minorities) just don’t.
Stepping off that soapbox, I do think schools should try to accommodate the PREVALANT learning styles (and so your point is valid here) but there is no way a school can be all things to all people. Still, in an effort to protect every little ego (and who of us parents does NOT want their child’s ego protected??) we have removed a lot of competitive spirit.
Sorry for the delay in relplying. My comments referred to the original post. Laura at 11D (an excellent blog, btw) linked to some great posts that had the hard data a few weeks ago. A close reading of the Newsweek article indicated the same. College admissions at the most elite schools are basically gender equal and these admissions also correlate to high parent income. The skewed sex ratios accelerate as you move down the spectrum and are greatest at open admissions schools which also correlate to low parent income.
I teach at a single-sex K-12 (girls) and have for 5 years. I completely see the value of single sex education but my favoritism for this has little to do with different behaviors. Statements like “boys are more competitive than girls” are simply wrong. They may be competitive in different ways, and schools may challenge them differently in the classroom to promote different behaviors. In a mixed classroom boys are more likely to be praised, even when wrong. Boys are also more likely to be chastised, but not necessarily disciplined for bad behavior (boys will be boys).
I like teaching in a single-sex school because my students are primarily focussed on their work and I can focus on reaching the different styles of learners in my classroom (and they run the gamut).
In general, I think our society is sending very mixed messages to men (and boys that hope to be them) that lower our expectations for boys in their behavior, ethics, morals, etc.. Masculinity is no longer based on restraint, intellect,literacy, art which until the early twentieth century were gendered male. Now we code those female and code passion, physicallness,violence as male which were generally coded neutral or female (esp. passion and violence). The result is we have lowered the bar for what we expect from boys and men and are raising a generation of “slacker-playas.” Incidentally, I have observed that boys who go to single sex schools are more likely to participate in the arts and have less negative attitudes towards them. I am aware of studies that are now tracking this but are not yet published.
I am asking you not to confuse the considerable literature onlearning to styles with the sex brain studies. Brain science, especially in regards to gender, is still in its infancy and some of the things being published look a lot like the now discredited brain-race studies from a half-century ago. I would find more of this data convincing if samples conciously included kids from single sex schools to account for socialization.
My mom is a teacher, a lot of her friends are teachers, my best friends are teachers, and I have a degree in child development. Coming from this angle, it is interesting to me to hear/read these conversations. Non-teachers want to blame the teachers. Teachers want to blame the parents. Everyone wants to blame the school system. Well, what I have seen happen is that if you are a parent who is commited to the idea that your child will excell to the best of his/her abilities at school, it will happen. If you want your child to go to college, you will work w/ child to make it happen. I honestly used to be interested in this type of “news,” but having a view from behind the scenes for my entire life, I just cant be anymore. It’s not news; it’s something else that gets published to distract and worry people. I live w/in the city limits which means our neighboorhood kids go to city schools (shudder). Guess what? So did my husband and many of our friends. Those whose parents did not allow them to slack off succeeded, and those who were allowed to slack did. If my kid has to sit still for 6 hours, I will not be thrilled, but he can run around when he gets home. Oh, AND bachelors degrees are becoming so common that employers are starting to require masters degrees, so *someone* is still getting into college.
Thank you, Western Dave, for adding some perspective to these comments. Coming from a family with three boys and three girls, I can tell you that there is no lack of competitive spirit in girls. Just ask Mama Bradstein, who was a national Tae Kwon Do champion in her teens. Twice.
When people start claiming that biology is the basis for behaviors, I start squirming. How much have you looked into the scientific, verifiable basis for what you’re saying, and how much are you just reporting “common sense,” old wives tales, and rumors? If you take your case to the logical extreme, are you willing to say that women aren’t capable of certain tasks? Or that men aren’t capable of certain tasks?
For example, if women really don’t respond well in competitive environments, can you explain the U.S women’s soccer team? How about all of the female Olympic athletes, for that matter? You think that Tonya Harding had Nancy Kerrigan’s kneecap smashed as a way of inviting her over to play with dolls?
In any classroom, there are wide ranges of behaviors, skills, personalities, abilities, cultures, and languages that a teacher must deal with. Rather than taking a simple “this vs. that” approach, it’s a greater service to the children to develop a differentiated approach–a way of teaching that provides competition for those who need it, provides a team environment for those who need it, provides solo projects for those who need it, and so on. It doesn’t sound easy, does it? I’m sure that it’s not, especially given that most teachers only know their students for 6-7 hours a day for one year of their lives.
Parents, on the other hand, have a much longer term relationship with their children and are well suited to provide learning that is tailored to their child’s strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps, rather than always pointing the finger at teachers and schools, parents should take some of the responsibility for the success or failure of students.