Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Some believers in genetic gender differences go even further, suggesting that classrooms, as well as lesson plans, need to be boy-friendly.
A significant concern, says Mortenson, is the fact that 85 percent of elementary school teachers are female. This imbalance, he says, is compounded by the fact that the percentage of children living in single-parent families headed by women is growing, leaving more and more boys without significant male figures in daily life. Mortenson now suggests that little boys may need an entirely different kind of teaching style altogether, one that emphasizes physical activity over traditional sedentary desk learning.
"We need targeted programs for little boys incorporated in the K through 12 system," he says. "We know that boys are, on average, at least a year behind girls in maturity levels. Maybe you have different start dates for kindergarten.
"If I were teaching," says Mortenson, "I would get boys out of the classroom. Take them to a swamp, dig through the muck, look for pollywogs. Then maybe take them back and have them look at pond water through slides and write up a lab report. They need hands-on activities. They get bored and distracted if you ask them to sit down and reading a chapter and writing up a paragraph -- the kind of work that girls excel at."
Michael Gurian takes the idea of single sex learning even further. In his 1998 book "A Fine Young Man," Gurian proposes that we do away with Title IX, the provision that prohibits discrimination in public education based on gender. To support his argument, he maintains that gender differences, unlike racial differences, are so great as to nearly constitute a different species altogether.
"There are no structural brain differences between the physiologies of the races except for the most cosmetic kind," he wrote. "Between males and females, there are at least seven structural brain differences."
Gurian proposes, among other things, that boys and girls be taught in single-sex classrooms for math, science and language arts, then spend afternoons in co-educational classes.
But the move to single-sex education in the United States, especially for boys, is likely to be next to impossible to accomplish politically. Though a handful of public charter schools for boys -- usually poor African-Americans -- have been attempted, most have been vetoed or shut down soon after opening. And witness the protest raised over the Young Women's Leadership Academy, a girls-only public school in East Harlem: Although the school is still in operation, both the ACLU and the National Organization for Women are suing the district on the basis that public funds should not be used to segregate students by gender. Meanwhile, the chancellor of New York City schools has rejected requests to fund a similar school for boys, on the basis that the girls school made up for past gender inequities in education.
Carol Gilligan is not convinced that the educational problems of boys are due to hard-wired biological differences. Instead, she suggests that the gender differences in education are caused by culture and psychology.
"We know there is nothing innately different in children's learning abilities," she says. "We used to say that difficulty in math and science was innate to womanhood. Well, it turns out that it is not. Over the past 10 years, we started paying attention to girls' development in math and sciences, formally and informally, and -- behold! -- the gender gap disappeared."
Gilligan acknowledges that no causal studies have been done to link the girl empowerment movement to the improved academic performance of girls, but points out that the closing of the gender gap in math and science coincided with the years of the feminist movement. And while critics still debate whether these gaps were already closing in 1990, when the girl empowerment movement took off, there is no question that girls' academic performance -- particularly in math, science, and college enrollment -- improved enormously in the years between 1970 and 2001.
While this fact alone may not prove the effectiveness of the gender equity in education movement, it certainly suggests strong support for the argument that historical gender gaps in achievement are not an inevitable product of biology, and therefore, with the proper attention, can be resolved.
In her own research on boys, Gilligan claims to have found that boys, like girls, experience a crisis of self-confidence, though this change comes earlier for boys -- around age 4 to 5, coincidentally the exact moment when children are first introduced to school and reading. Gilligan attributes much of this anxiety to the forced separation of boys from their mothers under patriarchy, which leaves them alienated from their emotions and anything in the culture that is associated with feminity.
In American culture, says Gilligan, children learn to associate math and science with masculinity; knowledge of the human world and emotional lives are associated with femininity. But, she says, "to be fully human, you need to understand both worlds." Gilligan does not believe that boys need their own reading lists; change, she says, does not come from segregation of curricula or teaching style. In fostering the empowerment of girls, she says, "we began by telling girls that math and science are interesting. Now we need to tell boys that reading -- that emotion -- is interesting."
