Crossing the Finish Line — The surprising facts about high school GPAs.

she thinks it is partly that the teachers like girls better

clever lass. IMO, this also explains a lot of the well-known correlation between physical attractiveness and educational achievement – the pleasant-looking kids simply get more education than ugly kids in the same class.

D2, what explains it? “Liking girls better” =/= “preferring attractive people”; unless you are implying something rather shameful about the teaching population… That girls behave better, in the general sense of causing less physical disturbance, we can all agree on.

Let me get this straight then. Higher GPAs tend to skew more female. The proposal is to make GPA a stronger consideration in college admissions. This would have the effect of male under representation in undergraduate studies even more pronounced.

And…everybody’s OK with this?

Harry’s last para is obviously the standard media narrative again (and could have been taken straight out of a David Brooks column).

Personally, I am annoyed by statements like that (Mark Bauerlein uses a similar argument, slyly, I think, in The Dumbest Generation): if you disagree, you may feel free to consider the possibility that your own work habits may be less than optimal, and come back when you’ve done so. Of course, it’s important to know that there will be people who think and act on that, and in a tough, unfair world and a tanking economy, good work habits may be just what you need, so that may be the point they’re trying to get across.

Henry’s point @2 could be tested empirically by examining whether good work habits are seen more frequently among the graduates of prep schools and other private schools than among public school graduates.

I think it’s also obvious that encouraging your graduates to undermatch has the effect of impressing undergraduate instructors with the rigor of your curriculum.

Adopting policies that favor one gender of students over another, regardless of sign, is something that you just shouldn’t do. And, yes, there is the matter of homework vs. testing, as well as the elephant in the room (diagnosis of ~15% of school-aged boys in the USA as having a personality disorder requiring medication, e.g. attention deficit/hyperactivity etc.)

There is also a pretty significant point related to selection effects in the samples: you can’t use a sample controlled for by test scores + grades and extrapolate to what a sample selected for on the basis of grades alone.

So, in the above, teacher recalcitrance = unwillingness to give a higher grade to a student who is unwilling to work for it. That’s a pretty strong anti-gaming measure.

When I was in middle school and high school (grad. high school 2000), the collective wisdom seemed to be that girls were innately smarter and better organized and more hard-working, as a sort of genetic counterbalance to men being stronger physically. This was definitely borne out in all the honors lists. Some boys and even some girls thought of this as a situation that left boys with a disadvantage in our modern world where physical dominance did not appear to help people earn money.

Adopting policies that favor one gender of students over another, regardless of sign, is something that you just shouldn’t do.

Amen.

And, yes, there is the matter of homework vs. testing, as well as the elephant in the room (diagnosis of ~15% of school-aged boys in the USA as having a personality disorder requiring medication, e.g. attention deficit/hyperactivity etc.)

This too.

Henry — they anticipate the problem, and don’t have a solution to it, but use it as a caution against assuming that the obvious policy implication of their findings is to give GPAs more weight. They say we should explore using, and giving more weight to, more content-based evaluations (where the evaluation is not done by the classroom teacher). But, in general, they are very cautious about issuing prescriptions.

Bianca — you mean the para I quote, right? I have two reactions. One is that to some extent teachers should try to encourage the kinds of traits that they have good reason to expect will be rewarded in the society that the children will enter, because to do otherwise rather cruelly mis-shapes expectations. My other reaction may seem somewhat self-serving because in school I was exactly the kind of kid that Brooks likes, getting consistent B’s (and one or two well-deserved C’s and A’s, depending on the subject) only by working pretty much as hard as I could, trusting that there was value in the work that I found boring, and assuming that I could overcome seemingly insuperable barriers because otherwise the teachers wouldn’t have put them there. But for the vast majority of us, for whom effortless brilliance and thinking outside the box etc is not going to yield results in pretty much any social environment, many of the traits that they identify really are needed, not only because the particular environment rewards them, but because they actually help us learn and develop skills.

Chuchundra — we already practice significant affirmative action for boys, and it will no doubt deepen as girls continue to take over the world. Most students don’t seem to be aware of it yet, which may be a mercy.

dsquared — she is alarmingly on the ball. She’s got me completely figured out already, and isn’t yet 13.

Some jobs need one, some the other.

True, though if we’re evaluating academic work (which is supposed to be what teachers are primarily concerned about, not their students’ future work environments), privileging a willingness to plow through often chickenshit homework assignments over demonstration of actual competence on exams (assuming the latter are well designed) seems somewhat perverse. Ironically given the way gender entered this discussion, my daughter hates wasting time on chickenshit and earlier in her school career (until she was mature enough to accept that sometimes you just have to play the game to get what you want- luckily that happened by 10th grade when the grades really start to count) she had some disappointing grades as a result.

Our elementary school setup- expecting small children to sit passively for hours on end- is insane for both sexes, though probably even harder on boys.

Tying funding to testing:

The nation’s public school teachers are feeling the squeeze from all sides these days, and some of the heat is coming from unlikely sources: minorities and longtime Democratic allies.

One of them is President Barack Obama, who is irking teachers by suggesting that student test scores be used to judge the success of educators.

The pressure is particularly intense in California, where U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the state has “lost its way” with public schools.

In an attempt to improve California’s schools, the Obama administration is threatening to withhold federal stimulus money if the Golden State does not rescind a state law that prevents the state from tying test scores to teacher performance.

Harry,

you mean the para I quote, right?

Yes.

teachers should try to encourage the kinds of traits that they have good reason to expect will be rewarded in the society that the children will enter

Okay. But as a response to criticism of a particular program, what this means is that you believe the program promoted by your interlocutor is or should be unrewarded.

Some schools, I think, focus more effort than others on preparation for a life. I’ve seen, however, people for whom this worked for five years, maybe ten or twenty years. They discovered that the people they were now associating with didn’t meet their teachers’ expectations, or even that members of the opposite sex in the same community didn’t. They discovered that they could hold down a job but others were being promoted over them. Maybe they would have been better off going into health care and avoiding the profit motive altogether, but not everybody is able to: most people have to earn a living in the economy we have.

I don’t think Brooks is worried about you or your daughter, so much as he’s concerned about the education of the poor and working class kids who aren’t yet integrated into the national economy.

Harry, I don’t understand what you mean about broad humanistic principles, etc., in the context of graduating on time from a four-year program in a state university.

Yes, that’s all I meant (I think; I was inundated by children when writing that and they’re still around). What did you mean by the italicised sentence in 27? (Don’t worry if you don’t have time, I’m just trying to think about what you’re saying).

Or, if it’s just that graduating from a four-year program requires traits that are also useful in life, that makes sense.

I think that goes without saying. Why else would so many jobs require a degree when the job requirements are utterly unrelated to skills acquired at university. The degree is simply a signal that you exhibit the sort of conscientiousness that is required by most employers.

Likewise the same is true of GPA, write small.

Tests are the “hours of boredom and moments of terror” style, and homework the “hours of attention” style.

Some jobs need one, some the other.

Agreed, except the number of jobs that require handling ‘moments of terror’ is fairly small, and growing smaller every day.

On the gender front, has anyone here written about Ireland’s “fun with gender and medical education” episode this summer. For the first time, entry to undergraduate medical school was based on an aptitude test (in addition to state exam results, where the cutoff threatened to reach the ceiling of six A1 grades). While the aptitude test was obliged to be “gender neutral” it seems to have compensated to some degree for superior female performance in state exams, and shifted the gender mix substantially male-wards. There were some really nice fireworks when someone in the medical establishment commented that this was a desirable outcome. Everything from “old boys network rigging the system” to “medicine needs 80hr weeks, if you want part-time work become a primary school teacher”, plus a little thought about justice (who deserves a place in med school? aptitude or diligence) or what society needs in its medical staff.

Schools are as well set-up for boys as they are for girls. What has changed is societal expectations for girls and boys… Could it be that boys and girls are merely reflecting the values that popular culture tells them they should have?

As to the first statement, I think the “boys will be boys” mentality has been “around” since at least the time of Joyce and Dickens and I don’t have any reason to believe we tolerate any greater antics or restlessness nowadays than did the headmasters of a hundred years ago. As for the second, it’s true: there will always be factors outside a school’s purview that have a differential effect on performance; one task for those of us inside the educational system is to intentionally and effectively mitigate those effects.

I would appreciate the chance to hear more details from folks who have identified boys as poorly served by our current system — for example, is it possible to isolate which needs are going unmet and describe them (or some of them)?

I find the point about gender-based discrepancy in conscientiousness plausible, at least as a rough first approximation. So, do we need to

* teach boys to be more conscientious, or

* restructure our evaluation system to place less emphasis on conscientiousness, or

* …is the isolation of “conscientiousness” as the principal difference inapt/inappropriate?

Western Dave wins the thread, as far as I’m concerned. I really really hope he’s a he, too.

I, too, blame the patriarchy. My specific theory is “substractive masculinity”: our culture has constructed masculinity such that masculine virtues *must be* qualities that women do not exhibit. Any behavior or quality exhibited by women is “girly”, or at least is not “manly”.

So when women weren’t allowed to go to be learned or go to college or get advanced degrees or practice medicine, those activities were perfectly manly and masculine. But now girls sometimes do these things, so it gives a boy no manliness credits or cookies or whatever you males use to measure these things. Any girls doing it = girl cooties all over, or something.

All that’s left is war, football, and fathering children, and even war isn’t as single-sex as it used to be. So boys of course concentrate on sports, where they never have to fear the dread contamination of losing to a girl, and we see a lot of the kind of behavior I call “the only way to prove you have a dick is to act like one”.

The only way I can see for the definition of masculinity to change is for you men to change it. Step one, of course, is admitting that it needs to be changed. Step two is apparently to clone Western Dave — I’ll get my minions right on that.

Look, all kids, not just boys, benefit from having recess. At the K-12 girls’ school I teach at, my first grade daughter has recess every day, plus gym, plus environmental ed in the woods twice a week (weather permitting, which means anything short of a hurricane) plus a new physics play lab, plus a new video production studio. Boys wouldn’t benefit from these things? All that would be good for boys. Sitting still and doing nothing but drill and kill is bad for girls and boys. And if boys can’t do group work, then why were they traditionally better at science labs than girls, continue to dominate in many tech fields and continue to excel in team sports, the ultimate group work milieu? And if they can’t sit still and concentrate, why can they play video games for hours? True boys are overmedicated, but girls meidcation numbers are creeping up as well.

When we looked at how girls learn, we discovered (shock) there is no girl learning profile. There is no boy learning profile. There are kids and they all learn slightly differently. The more you consciously try to reach different kinds of learners, the more success you have as a teacher. The more you consciously try to teach skills, the more success you have as a teacher. But why is it that the teenage girls I know all want to be doctors and biomedical engineers and the boys “want to do something in music production?” That isn’t because teachers hate boys, it’s because boys are getting the message, “it’s ok, you’re just a boy, we don’t expect that much from you.”

When I did my post-graduate studies at SOAS I noticed that most of the students, especially undergraduates were women. Currently I teach at AUCA in Kyrgyzstan and I notice that the gender ratio of having more women undergraduates to men is even more pronounced. For some nationalities it is particularly blatant. This year I have no male students from Afghanistan, but I have a lot of Afghan women students. It may be that the skills necessary to secure acceptance at a western style university are ones that tend in most societies to be exhibited to a greater deal by females.

I also wonder if there is something to the idea that the new prevalence of group work has something to do with it.

This is purely anecdotal, but almost every male honors student I was friends with hated group work, thought it was pointless, and usually took it as an opportunity to goof around (I was definitely guilty of this, but I will say that I do think that most high school and middle school group projects are a complete waste of everyone’s time). My female honors student friends, on the other hand, almost always excelled and built really nice pyramids or some other thing.

If you have seen an honors curriculum at a normal high school, especially in the humanities, ill-thought out group work is exceedingly common. And I do wonder whether this has gendered effects.

There’s another elephant in the room here which hasn’t been adequately – to build on what Doctor Science said: yes, we have to expect more from boys in that they need to accept female adults’ authority. A lot of the whining in the media about the “feminisation” of teaching and schools is feeding, and reflects, community perceptions that if a bunch of women are in a profession, then you don’t have to pay them or that profession any respect. And that is a stinky little idea which should be whacked with metaphorical baseball bats wherever it rears its ugly head.

There was a push a few years ago to get more men into school teaching because of this perceived “feminisation” and the assumed deleterious effect on boys. Teaching boys to treat women as fully human and display some of the “gender neutrality” that everyone reckons we have these days, was not an option, apparently.

There’s something very _a priori_ about some of the comments above!

My late father-in-law went to Central High in Philadelphia in the 1950s. It was a honors high school for boys and produced quite a number of extremely successful young men, including Noam Chomsky. You should all hear the tales of how these boys were educated. One teacheralways lectured from the back of the room, while the students were forced to face the front. In English, they were required to recite long passages from literary works from memory. They were expected to behave perfectly and so they did.

I teach at a university populated mainly by students with middling GPAs from the Philadelphia public school system. They are capable of much more than they can produce. In my judgment the main thing keeping them from academic success is their unwillingness to do any work, i.e., their lack of discipline. If they would simply put some work into their work…

Wait wait. Plenty of workplaces are still prejudiced against women (hiring practices, harassment, unequal pay). Why is it a bad thing that girls are doing better than boys?

Why is it a bad thing that boys are doing worse than girls?

* Because we want to serve every subpopulation / maximize our society’s “human capital”

* The problems holding boys back might also be holding girls back, just less so

* If the discrepancy is due to gender norms and not biology, as is almost certainly the case, then girls who “act boyish” may be underserved

* Solving this problem might reasonably result in a greater proportion of boys who are less sexist and more compassionate

* Part of the point of education is social indoctrination (teaching values like conscientiousness, compassion/sensitivity, rigor) and if boys are disengaged/underserved, they are not receiving that indoctrination (which should especially worry Dr. Science and Western Dave, because that means the indoctrination the boys will receive comes exclusively from Rambonian sources)

Copy-paste fail: “a greater proportion of boys who are less sexist and more compassionate” should say “a greater proportion of boys who are less sexist and more conscientious” (though, of course, there’s nothing wrong with developing greater compassion in our population either).

I’m not too sure there’s any crying need for the (American) educational system to promote conformism any more vigorously than it already does. Looking around me I see a lot more evidence for a deficit of basic competence in our society than a deficit of conformism.

Looking around me I see a lot more evidence for a deficit of basic competence in our society than a deficit of conformism.

Eh, I see plenty of evidence of lack of pleasantness, failure to cooperate with reasonable demands made by others, and lack of interest in how other people think and why… and I suspect you see this too ;-) It’s all in how we precisely define the word.

I think Salient and Harry make very good points. However, I have a question about the concept of Masculinity. Is it assumed here that the concept is entirely socially determined (as seems to be implied by Helen et al)? And if so, why not simply work to redefine masculinity to be essentially conformant to the needs of modern society given most of the traditional masculine traits are either nearly useless or can be replaced with conscientiousness (at least until the next war).

they need to accept female adults’ authority

My recollection from my school days was not that there was a rejection of female authority by the more ‘masculine’ boys, but there was a rejection of authority by anyone who couldn’t “command” authority, either by the implied threat of beating the hell out of the miscreants or by simple command presence (which the successful female teachers used).

I think Helen’s phrase would be more accurately replaced with “they need to be deferential to authority”, which may sound bad, but is absolutely required for conventional success in society.

They were expected to behave perfectly and so they did.

I’ll be damned. All of ’em?

Conformity != behaving ethically.

Conformity != behaving ethically.

It (mostly) does if the norms are ethical behaviour. And since that’s what I see around me, I’m rather suspicious of the automatic virtues of non-conformity. Again, probably a product of my Canadian middle-class urban liberal background.

No, actually I encounter a lot more pleasant but incompetent people than surly but competent ones. Perhaps I live / work in the wrong environment. ;)

No no no, indeed, you live in the better environment of the two!

It (mostly) does if the norms are ethical behaviour.

That’s merely a tautology. And if you take conformity as defining ethical behavior you’ll be left with no way to say that people are behaving ethically when they REFUSE to conform in an unethical milieu. Your ideas on this seem to need a little more work.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant if the norms that one is being pressured to conform to are ethical. Not that anything that is a norm is ethical.

Or to rephrase entirely, in my experience, the behaviour to which schools and society are attempting to get us to conform is for the most part ethical. My experience (in the academic world, anyway) has been that in the large majority of confrontations between authority and the non-conformist, the authority is the one taking the ethical position.

Obviously this is not always the case as multiple examples such as your own can attest, but I do think that a push to conformism in our modern society results in greater amounts of ethical behaviour than a rebellion against authority.

Obviously reasoning for oneself from (ethical) principles is to be encouraged, but again my experience has been that the those most likely to rebel against conforming to school/social expectations were often the ones least likely to use reasoning to come to ethical conclusions. (The ethical lone wolf seems quite outnumbered by the hoodlums.)

Children (at least in our neighbourhood) seem to have become infinitely more civilized on the playground. I suspect that much of it is not due to the ethical awakening of those children who would 40 years ago have been slinging racial slurs so much as their relatively mindless conformity to ethical social standards. (There is certainly an astonishing amount of ethical awareness among a number of the children, but not, I think, among those who would have been the bullies of 40 years ago.)

Maybe they should start thinking of taking medical coding classes. If you can get a job in a medical office early and know that skillset, you can be a valuable asset.

Tom: what? People 40 years ago conformed (mostly) to the racist norms of the time. Now they conform (more often) to the anti-racist ones. Why would that be an argument in favour of ‘conformity’ in general? That doesn’t make any sense, dude.

I do think that a push to conformism in our modern society results in greater amounts of ethical behaviour than a rebellion against authority.

How did you measure this?

How did you measure this?

Personal observation, especially comparing my schooling with my children, which were geographically and socially similar, and yet light-years apart.

Tom, it seems like in general you have a picture of people as having natural tendencies towards bad behaviour, which are kept in check by internalised standards of behaviour deriving from external authority. As the power of this authority increases so their behaviour improves. Perhaps that’s plausible for some kinds of behaviour (eg. aggression) but it seems extremely tendentious in the case of racism.

The comments above on homosexuality are striking. For those who are praising the moral benefits of conformity progress has come through the generation of new moral norms proscribing expressions of homophobia. But surely for most people the more salient progressive development has been the destruction of moral norms condemning homosexuality.

I would be interested to see how people think this is related to the fact that, despite comparable progress made at lower income levels, men still drastically dominate the high-end of the wage scale. It could be because of the “old-boys network”. Or, it could be because women, having learned how to dominate an educational environment where their own success was directly related to the success of their superiors, have developed a skill set that inhibits them when they enter an environment where their own advancement puts them in direct conflict with their higher-ups. In addition, success as a high-level entrepreneur often depends on the ability to tell everyone “You’re doing it wrong”.

Tom, I personally think that you have your principles reversed. As you say, teaching unqualified conformity is only a positive in an environment where the social norms are “right”. However, I think it would be far more valuable to teach logically consistent ethics, and the value of doing what’s best for the group, as it relates to an individual’s well-being. A generation well-schooled in these concepts would be more likely to naturally conform, as they would see the value of holding themselves to the same standards to which they hold everyone else. This would also make them better equipped to identify situations where conformity was less beneficial, so as to know when best to make use of their individuality. Like anything else, we shouldn’t be teaching children how to do it, without teaching them why they should (and shouldn’t).

Regarding masculinity, I agree that it should be changed. I agree with Doctor Science that the concepts of “masculine” and “femine”, at least in current society, share a binary relationship, and because of that, I feel that one of the largest miscalculations of the feminist movement, to date, was to underestimate the necessity of shifting the male identity in order to achieve the equality they desire (not that I would know how to have “done it right”, but a certain path was chosen, and this is where it faltered). However, as any working mother who feels guilty for not putting her children first will tell you, changing the essence of gender identity is easier said than done.

Tom – One could say that there’s a difference between conformity suppressing racism, and conformity suppressing the open expression of racism. Far from being valuable, the latter can be quite dangerous without the former.

Evil is probably a strong word, but you’re right in that the criticism of boys tends to be more that they are unwilling to cooperate, as opposed to the old criticism that girls were incapable. It likely plays a large role in the fact that people seem far less eager to do something about this problem.

It also bears noting that, from what we’ve all been discussing, any change in the system implimented to cater to the tendencies of young boys (being energetic, competetive and confrontational) would likely end up being a lot of work for teachers, so it’s not surprising that the education system wouldn’t be jumping all over this one.

Two comments: In Germany, the GPA equivalent (“Abi Schnitt” – a weighted average of the final two years of highschool as well as final examinations (think A levels)) has long been the only measure for access to competitive university programs. That’s slowly changing, because it was perceived as unjust and is being substituted by a diverse set of application processes. My sense is that these are very ad-hoc, administered by people who have no clue of the literature on educational testing and the like (i.e. usually assistant professors of the resepctive department). It’s interesting that this is generally assumed to be fairer than the old system.

Two, on boys: I thought the better average performance by girls was largely explained by the fact the low performing boys perform a lot worse than low performing girls – is that not true? It would kind of fly in the face of “boys are different” type of theories. I’m also not sure that teachers really punish non-conformity of the Chris Bertram type (OK – in his son’s case they did – but generally I doubt that) – and I would say that there are few places in life were the type of disruptive behavior typically displayed by lower performing boys is going to be super helpful. In my experience, you were most likely to see the type of “standing up to the teacher” behavior from students in the top 20%.

My impression (from talking to various researchers, not any systematic study) is that Sebastian’s take on the lower average performance of boys is not quite right. What it is similarly good performance near the top, then systematically worse performance by boys than girls all the way down.

I’d bet that Sebastian is right about the “standing up to teacher” behaviour though, and that’s part of what I was getting at with the comment about wanting to produce effective challenging of authority.

My vote’s in favour of more conformity. All I see in London is non-conformity, not doing what others expect of you, even on basic levels like not throwing your rubbish away. It just makes life so hard for everyone. People arguing over trivialities, kicking against nothing in particular, and the continual hassles that arise from it. In school it mostly means boys disrupting class while the rest of us try to study; or getting beaten up or insulted or left out because you enjoy studying or just want to study so you can do something worthwhile.

Funnily I never kicked out against the sportspeople, who were constantly disrupting my studious little life. Why did they bother? More conformity and less toxic male roles would go a long way to making the world a better place.

Also, hasn’t teaching always been a mostly female profession? Has it really been “feminised”?

sg – The thing is, I see the instances you cite as a sign of conformity. It’s just that they’re conforming to each other, and to society’s expectations for them. Conformity doesn’t mean “doing what’s right”. If you want them to do what’s right, teach them why it’s right, and teach them how to figure out right from wrong on their own.

Unless, by conformity, you mean “what I want them to do”, which isn’t really conformity at all.

That sounds like a nice kind of conformity, Mike C!

But every one of these idiot conformists thinks they’re being original. I don’t believe for a moment that people who yell “You can’t tell me what to do” at other people have got together with each other and told each other to yell this. When the arsehole on my street corner leaves their dog poo for me to step in every day [1] they aren’t doing it because they agreed with a bunch of other arseholes to be non-conformist. They’re doing it off their own back because their “society” (I use this term loosely about the bottom dwellers in Finsbury Park) has told them that there is no consequence to behaving like a filthy pig.

I see lots of hints hereabouts of a society which values/tolerates/rewards non-conformity, not through a coherent project of setting out the areas of rebellion (e.g. dog poo, running over cyclists, stabbing people) but through a lacksadaisical project of telling people that their individual opinion of what is in the public good either matters or can be tolerated or (worst of all) can’t be confronted. When it should be persecuted. Or prosecuted. Or something.
—
[1] I mean they do it every day – I don’t step it in every day

sg – What you call non-conformity, I think would be better termed “self-centeredness”. I think we would both agree that everyone would benefit from a greater understanding of how the health of society enhances individual well-being, and thus how self-centered attitudes are actually detrimental to personal goals. Also, I think we would agree that the golden rule – treat others as you would like to be treated – has fallen by the wayside, to say the least.

Phil – I entirely agree. The issue with these people isn’t that they’re non-conformist, but that they haven’t been taught how to advocate for themselves effectively, how to properly create and achieve long-term goals, and the value of making the best out of less-than-ideal situations instead of fully rejecting them.

(Also: how do you “expect more” out of an uncooperative 17-year-old, if you have no coercive leverage? What does this mean, and how do you accomplish it?)

Also also: I need a better word than “sociopathic” for “taking pleasure in causing others pain” but don’t know of one. My apologies for the use of a term denoting psychological disability judgmentally and/or in cases where that disability has not been verified, and I would be grateful for a suggested alternative word.

Boys are strongly under-represented in the USA in the cohort with the highest GPAs; the statistics at the top of Harry’s post are fairly typical. All of the 10 highest GPAs in my daughter’s graduating classs were girls, to add another data point. So it isn’t a small group of underperforming boys – if you used grades alone as your metric very few boys would be admitted to highly selective colleges.

I think people are mixing up “taught to respect other people” with “subject to arbitrary rules” and “expected to perform rote assignments cheerfully.” Pedagogy in many K-12 US systems is heavily geared towards standardized test scores now, with the attendant repetitive drills, which is a major change from past practice. Art, music, and physical education classes have been drastically trimmed back to devote more time to getting good scores. Students with disabilities get special test score dispensations, driving a significant correlation between the rate of ADHD diagnosis and the existence of high-stakes testing in school districts.

I also don’t think that folks outside the USA may realize just how far around the bend things like zero tolerance rules are; in many systems there is absolutely no discretion on the part of administrators when it comes to punishment. Sullen obedience to arbitrary rules can be enforced, but the virtues of that approach elude me.

But why else would I comment here?

To make me happy, obviously. You should consider the idea that in not posting enough you are doing nothing to oppose the tyranny of my working environment. Can you live with that on your conscience?

well Mike C, I think maybe one person’s non-conformity is another person’s self-centredness. What’s the difference between refusing to pick up your dog’s poo because of your “rights” or because “it’s something the council should do” or “you should just walk around it” and “I can’t be bothered”? It all seems much of a muchness to me. Similarly talking loudly on a phone in a public place (“but it’s public! why should you tell me what to do?”). Or my favourite, when I asked a guy to move one seat over in the cinema so my friends could sit in a line together and he refused. Why? Because (as he took great delight in informing me) “you can’t tell me what to do”.

These are the same people who were going out of their way to disrupt my study, or to make my quiet attempt to hang out with my friends in the playground difficult. Why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone? Self-centredness doesn’t seem a sufficient explanation.

@52
When I look at comments from folks like Dave and Helen I see a devaluation of boys as a group and a blanket dismissal of their issues.

Oh Bollocks. Pointing out a problem with the attitude to men and boys to women in authority (the “girl cooties” factor” is not tantamount to devaluing them. That is a pathetic and (to use an adjective that’s more often used against women) oversensitive misinterpretation.

I think that there is a real issue with teachers needing to respect boys more and be more sensitive to what works for them….the gap between boys and girls is both larger and growing more rapidly…

Yes, you have a point there; we MUST address this imbalance because the tendency of women to earn more income and occupy the top jobs is getting quite out of hand. Oh, wait…

@62

One of my proudest moments as a parent was when one of my sons confronted a teacher…etc…I’m afraid the enthusiasm from Helen and Tom for “deference to authority” leaves me cold.

This reading is so off kilter I find it hard to believe it comes from one of the CT writers. Of course I didn’t mean “defer to authoritah at all times”, I meant “accept women in positions of authority, bosses, teachers, or whatever, the same say they would accept men in the same positions.” With the possibility, of course, that you would challenge a boss of either gender if the circumstances were right. Do you always expect every commenter to cover every possible edge case in their necessarily short comments? I’m sure most people understood what I was getting at. Chris your comment represented a heroic attempt to put the ugliest spin possible on a comment.

And Tom West @ Leederick @93 – My comment, that we need to expect more from boys in accepting women as authority figures through teaching them to see women as fully human, equals saying they are evil (with a qualifying maybe, as he’s presumably got an inkling of how silly that is, but he pressed the submit button regardless) – Oh please. Has Crooked Timber been taken over by Hello! magazine overnight?

Western Dave @ 109 miserably misdirecting norms about masculinity pervade our culture and shape boys in ways that are bad not only for their capacity to achieve in school but also to enjoy the intimate and meaningful relationships that are at the core of a life worth living.

Thanks WD, you have articulated pretty well where I was coming from. “Masculinity” does NOT equal boys, any more than “femininity” equals women.

Helen,
I think a lot of what you say is well taken, but this:
“Yes, you have a point there; we MUST address this imbalance because the tendency of women to earn more income and occupy the top jobs is getting quite out of hand. Oh, wait…”
Is a stupid, canned argument that misses the point. No one (here) denies that gender relations are anything but just and that women get the raw deal in a lot of ways.

But man are also about 10 times more likely to go to prison, more likely to be killed in a violent crime, more likely to kill themselves… etc. And obviously, women usually aren’t the “winners” in these scenarios either, but show up as victims, widows, involuntary single moms etc. This isn’t a competition on who’s worst off!

So addressing the poor performance of boys – and the imbalance between boys and girls – would seem like quite a good idea for anyone involve. And part of that should definitely include a redefinition of “masculinity” – e.g. I think the idea (popular with some of the “boys pedagogy crowd) that boys need to physically fight to be real boys is a bit bizarre. But it also needs to include taking boys specific gender needs seriously. And just as, for example, I think it’s important for girls to have powerful female role-models (school principals for example, which still afaik under-represent women), boys need male role-models (ideally role-models that identify a more positive masculinity): The scarcity of male primary school teachers is a real problem.

@marc (104)
“I also don’t think that folks outside the USA may realize just how far around the bend things like zero tolerance rules are”
That may be true (I went to highschool in Germany, my US highschool experience was at Berkeley High…). And if I abstract from what I believe are the effects of “teaching to the test” among the students I teach at a top 20 private university I’m very inclined to believe that the whole testing obsession does a lot of damage across the board.

To interrupt the discussion for a moment – thank you to Salient for a patient and thoughtful reply (#53) to my not-so-thoughtful, shoot-from-the-hip comment way above.

I need a better word than “sociopathic” for “taking pleasure in causing others pain” but don’t know of one.

I suggest “cruel”. It’s emotionally loaded because what it describes is a characteristic people have strong emotional reactions to, but I think it means precisely what you want to say.

There have been many places and times in history when cruel people could and did express their cruelty in a way that conformed to the norms and expectations of society (surely I don’t need to list them), so I don’t think this issue is really related to the conformism one.

(Also, I second the idea that conformism is frequently unethical, and is not in itself a virtue, although it may be a survival trait. Whether we should therefore attempt to inculcate it for the latter reason, or refrain for the former, goes to deep issues about the role of education.)

Is a stupid, canned argument

It’s a SOTBO

What’s your moral evaluation of people who don’t view women as fully human? Do you (a) think this a noble and morally praiseworthy position to take? Do you (b) think this is a morally neutral matter of taste, and reflects no more badly on someone than, say, not liking mushrooms. Or maybe© you think it’s a bad thing and downright morally objectionable.

Boys don’t make eevul plans in their own heads to view males as the default human and women somehow lesser. It’s there in the million and one instances of social attitudes which they encounter from parents, peers, the media and society at large which feed into the kind of situation where a preponderance of women teachers is viewed as a Problem. (Oh noes! Feminisation!) To paraphrase Madge in the old Palmolive ad, “they’re soaking in it”.

I do have to say though, that firmly challenging their attitudes towards women in authority and trying to re-educate them away from the view that women are sub-human is possibly not going to be the most effective way of helping developmentally delayed six year olds. If I had a child in that position, I’d be thinking that remedial maths and literacy lessons might be slightly better bet…

Remedial literacy is going to be hard work if such boys have already formed the view that reading is a boring things that only girls do. By six, children already know what count as ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ things to do in society (even if like my daughter they don’t agree with these ideas). If boys have been brought up in a home where the men they see around them never look at a book, if they get told that they ought to be outside kicking a football rather than reading, if they are in cultures where it is mothers who get them to do things they don’t want to do and fathers who encourage them to break rules, then they are likely to go to school and see teachers who want them to learn to read as repressive and arbitrary and remedial lessons as simply more of the same torment.

There are issues of developmental delays and the tendency to start school ever younger (as in the UK) doesn’t help boys in particular. But pretending there aren’t cultural problems as well does nobody any favours.

Eh, it’s easier to understand if you take the form “liking X better” and substitute in “attractive persons” for “girls”—treat the statements as independent. Those who are better liked (for whatever reason) get better grades.

I make no apologies for preferring female students. And this is why:

Adopting policies that favor one gender of students over another, regardless of sign, is something that you just shouldn’t do. And, yes, there is the matter of homework vs. testing, as well as the elephant in the room (diagnosis of ~15% of school-aged boys in the USA as having a personality disorder requiring medication, e.g. attention deficit/hyperactivity etc.)

Along with my other duties, I usually end up teaching two sections of remedial math in the fall semester to incoming freshmen. And it is my overwhelming experience that the girls are simply better students than the boys. They are more likely to do the assigned homework, more likely to attempt more problems, less likely to be absent, and more likely to actually use the resources – such as office hours – available to them. Iow, trying to even up the playing field as it were, is discriminating against the qualities that make a good student, the qualities that classes like mine are intended to inculcate along with maybe a little knowledge. Sorry, that’s just the way things fall out at this age. In my other math classes, say differential equations, the boys seem be as motivated and perform as well as the girls. It’s not just a selection effect, imho, but also the fact that someone taking diff eq is on average two years older than an incoming freshman, and for boys of that age that’s a huge difference in their level of maturity.

To such folks, for example, it’s downright fun to make people angry (in the same way that it might be fun, to some of them, to poke a small animal with a sharp object until it squeals), and in general it really is fun to be negligent (less work).

Just about anybody, in their lesser moments, takes pleasure in showing their ability to put down others. For most people, it involves using a particular skill or area of knowlege that they’ve honed to a higher level than most people (fashion sense, musical accumen, ability to memorize the words to every movie they’ve ever seen). However, when children aren’t taught the value of their own abilities, and thus don’t develop them, they can only exert their natural human desire to put other people down in the most basic ways, like getting in the way.

Also, the way I interpret this statement implies that 1. these impulses can’t be mitigated and 2. “good” people are nice to others because they have innate instincts to treat people around them nicely. I don’t agree with either statement. My personal belief is that everyone behaves the way they do because it is what contributes best to accomplishing their personal goals, and upholding their sense of self. People with poorly conceived goals and personal identities tend to act in an illogical and unpredictable because they either don’t know what they’re trying to do, or don’t know how to do it. Quite plainly, they don’t understand why it might not be good for them, in the long run, to antagonize the people around them.

“Good” people, on the other hand, are nice to other people because they understand that if they ever need anything from these people in the future, whether it be a tangiable service or just companionship, being nice is the best way to accomplish it. This is why all babies need to learn how to share. If being “good” wasn’t learned, wouldn’t “good” babies already know how to do that?

Also, the way I interpret this statement implies that 1. these impulses can’t be mitigated and 2. “good” people are nice to others because they have innate instincts to treat people around them nicely. I don’t agree with either statement.

Neither do I, but I do think people feel different degrees of guilt if they discover they have hurt someone. Some folks tend to feel elation instead of guilt when they discover that their behavior has resulted in lasting or deep pain.

Quite plainly, they don’t understand why it might not be good for them, in the long run, to antagonize the people around them.

To be clear: It is good for them. They frankly stand to gain absolutely nothing they would want by being less antagonistic, and they enjoy the pleasure of antagonism. There is, I emphasize, categorically nothing desirable they could or would gain from being less antagonistic. They do not desire that which could or would be gained from benevolence. This is not a question of these individuals’ ignorance: it’s a question of what these individuals value and desire. I’ve learned the hard way that telling such students “you could get X if you did Y” is ineffective when they have no desire for Y and there exists no reason for them to desire Y.

“Good” people, on the other hand, are nice to other people because they understand that if they ever need anything from these people in the future, whether it be a tangible service or just companionship, being nice is the best way to accomplish it.

No, I disagree. Perhaps sometimes, but not always, not even predominantly.

Nice people, in the main, are nice because it feels natural to them; they find being nice feels pleasant. (That is learned, yes.) Obconreversely, not nice people, in the main, are not nice because it feels natural to them.

> Approximately what percentage of the population are you talking
> about here? Are you suggesting that a statistically significant
> number of people desire nothing but the pain of those around them?

You are headed directly for the nature/nurture debate, but at least 2-3%, perhaps 5 in some places times and societies. It is not (necessarily, directly) pain that they desire to inflict but embarrassment, discomfiture, humiliation, generalized abuse, leading to emotional, physical, and social submission. In the state of nature the tormentors would eventually kill any males they are tormenting, or shun them to the point that they starved to death, but that doesn’t usually happen in modern society.

If you seriously do not think that there are a substantial number of human beings with these impulses then you have never been part of a community organization in a decaying neighborhood, attended/taught in a slum high school, worked as a supervisor in a factory in heavy industry, etc. There are more people than we care to think of for whom a glass window is nothing but an invitation to throw a rock.

Cranky

Cranky,

There are more people than we care to think of for whom a glass window is nothing but an invitation to throw a rock.
Many of my classmates from grades K-12 fit this description, even though I grew up in “lily-white (northern European descent)” small town in a “lily-white (northern European descent)” state.

So I would hesitate to say that “lily-white (northern European descent)” = not likely to resist authority.

Also: what Cranky said, more or less, though like virago I don’t think it’s at all restricted to outside the lily-white-o-sphere.

> Many of my classmates from grades K-12 fit this description,
> even though I grew up in “lily-white (northern European descent)” small
> town in a “lily-white (northern European descent)” state.
>
> So I would hesitate to say that “lily-white (northern European descent)” = not
> likely to resist authority.

Thank you for that amplification. I won’t claim that #129 and #130 are the most coherent posts I have ever written , and on re-reading I did not make it clear that I was referring to only one set of cultural examples. Albeit ones fairly common in the United States.

Cranky