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  • Writer's pictureJoanne Jacobs

Boy trouble



Boys are struggling in school around the world, not just in the United States, points out

Kay Hymowitz in City Journal.

Boys have lower grades than girls throughout their primary and secondary school years. They have more behavior problems. Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder; to wind up in special-education classes; and to be held back, be suspended, or drop out. Hence, they’re less likely to graduate from high school.
. . . Boys’ lagging school outcomes show up everywhere, from the enlightened Nordics to the hidebound Gulf States. . . . Boys get lower grades and attend university less often than girls across the developed world — and increasingly in developing countries, too: one 2019 survey cited studies confirming a gap in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, Qatar, and Oman, among other places.

Girls outperform boys in reading around the world, international surveys show.

Girls benefit from stronger self-regulatory skills, such as the ability to sit still and pay attention, writes Hymowitz. Superior self-control helps them all the way through school. "Once again, it’s not just American boys; the OECD discovered a self-regulation gap in girls’ favor in 36 countries."

In math, boys are more likely to earn very high and very low scores. "During the 1980s, girls narrowed the historical math gap at the highest levels from a ratio of 13 to 1 to roughly 2.8 to 1; since 1990, that ratio has stayed more or less stable," writes Hymowitz. But girls "outperform boys on state accountability tests" and "earn higher grades in math class — not just in the United States but in a cross-section of 30 countries."

It's clear that "boys mature more slowly than girls and are thus less suited to early academic training," she writes. One option is delaying school entry for younger or less mature boys and providing more time for recess for elementary school.

She also questions whether pushing first-grade curricula into kindergarten was a mistake. I worry about that too.

Researchers comparing kindergartens in 1998 and 2010 found that teachers in our century “have far higher academic expectations for children both prior to kindergarten entry and during the kindergarten year.” Children unready for worksheets and prolonged desk work at five get a dispiriting, perhaps damaging, glimpse of the next 12 years of their lives. In the many American schools failing to teach phonics, those same children may find themselves struggling to read in the early grades and beyond.
And those children will mostly be boys.

Kindergarten was invented in 1837 by a German educational theorist who wanted children too young for schoolwork to learn through"creative, imaginative and spontaneous play." The day "was supposed to start with songs and then continue with play."


Now we've got pre-kindergarten to get kids ready for the rigors of kindergarten, which is at least as challenging as first grade used to be.


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9 Comments


Guest
Nov 01, 2022

I have an academically advanced, well behaved kid...and we did elementary school with kid standing at a kitchen cart for most of it instead of sitting down at a desk. Kid was able to get the work done while having a bit more freedom of movement, and it seemed to help kid stay focused. Of course, we also had a much shorter day - 10 minutes of handwriting, 30 minutes of math, 15 minutes of phonics or spelling, 30 minutes of either a science or history unit, and reading, or being read to, using poetry or kid lit. That was it for the early grades, with vocab and grammar and writing added over the years, usually one one of th…

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Guest
Oct 31, 2022

We shouldn't underestimate the influence of culture (at least in the US) either. How many TV shows, for example, show men as incompetent, lazy, bums who can't do anything right except watch sports on TV (and TV commercials are even worse)? How many programs in schools are offered just for girls (eg, coding schools)? How many YA books show male teens in strong roles? (I just looked at the top-selling YA books on Amazon and found that a stunning 7 out of 8 featured female protagonists) There are many other examples, no need to call them out.


We certainly used to have a male-dominated culture and that was a dumb waste of female potential. However, in trying to fix tha…


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Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
Oct 31, 2022

This is one of my favourite blogs, yet an annoying tendency around here is to assume that things were "better in the old days"; an even cursory study of educational history (Graham, Ravitch) focused on the United States reveals that this is not even close to being true: every metric indicates that an American educated by the beginning of the 21st century was better educated than one in the 20th, although the pace of improvement may have slowed near the end of the 20th and may have stopped in the 21st (the pandemic's recent drops are already being partially reversed, although who knows if they will ever be entirely erased for a few birth years' worth of unlucky kids, who…

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Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
Nov 01, 2022
Replying to

In the early 20th century, only about ten per cent of youth attended high school; the average teen of that era never saw that exam, and was already employed after a grade school education, whereas the average American teen today will study into their early 20s, even if they will be unable to answer questions harder than those of today's high school exit exams.

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Guest
Oct 30, 2022

As a society, we give more worship to athletes/entertainers than we do academics...


Quitting seems to be trend for most anything these days, and those people will have

a very bleak future ahead of them

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Guest
Oct 29, 2022

"Girls benefit from stronger self-regulatory skills, such as the ability to sit still and pay attention, writes Hymowitz."


That could also be written as girls are more easily broken to the classroom, more readily seek the approval of authoritarian figures through passive compliance and quicker to adapt the incentives of schooling to get good grades rather than real learning.


The ability to sit still and pay attention is valued for the complaint worker in a bureaucratic society, but not for a society, as was America's a century ago, with the pioneering spirit where the young seek to make their mark by innovation and creation


But it is quite a different thing under the rising tide of bureaucratization. Government jobs offer…

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Guest
Oct 30, 2022
Replying to

In a knowledge based economy, the ability to read, listen, analyze, and assess data grows in importance. Being able to BS as a big man while not caring if one is wrong or right decreases in value. How many boys bother to read anything these days or are capable of imaging something with out being shown a picture.

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