Why Gender Matters

This week at the Mountain Plains Adult Education Association conference, Julie Coates talked about gender and learning in an overflow session, then attended another great session on the topic by Jeb Schenck of Thermopolis, Wyoming.

She also has finished reading the new book by Jonathan Sax, Why Gender Matters.  As more and more books, speeches, press coverage (see for example) and voices are being heard, the issue of boys in school is starting to get some attention. Yeah!

A few facts:
* Female teachers (85% of teachers) do not speak loadly enough for many boys to hear them. Boys do not hear as well as girls.
* Because their synapses are hooked up until their twenties, boys are not able to describe their feelings in papers and essays in middle and high school.
* Girls (and female teachers) like to work face to face.  Boys learn much better when the teacher sits side by side.
* There are 300 genes exclusive to males; 100 genes exclusive to females.
* At 9 months, boys choose trucks over dolls by a large majority. Girls choose more trucks than boys choose dolls. This is genetic: boy and girl chimps show the same pattern.
* Infant boys, when given a choice between looking at a mobile in motion and a face, look at the mobile in motion.  Infant girls, given the same choice, look at the face.

During the breaks at the conference, both mom and dad educators told the same stories about their boys and how bad school is for them.

Comments

[LERN Tammy]

I wanted to share an excerpt on the subject of education and personal growth from a book by Dr. Leo Buscaglia.

“Great Hope lies in education. Through education a boy is offered his first possible exceptional and exciting attitudes and definitions of life and love. Be he’s soon disillusioned. In place of freeing him to pursue his own world, he is now in a new environment often even less flexible than his home. Charles Reich makes this point dramatically in The Greening of America: ‘While the school’s authority is lawless, school is nevertheless an experience made compulsory by the full power of the law, including criminal penalties. School has no prison bars, or locked doors like and insane asylum, but the student is no more free to leave it than a prisoner is free to leave the penitentiary.’

With the child thus imprisoned, formal education assumes as its major task the process of passing on the “accumulated knowledge of the past,’ usually at the expense of the present and the future. It is a “feeding in” rather than a “leading out.” Everything is taught but seemingly what is necessary for the growing individual’s knowledge of self, of the relationship of his self to others. He finds many of his teachers lifeless individuals, devoid of enthusiasm, hope and joy. Teachers are too busy “managing” to be “creating.” As Albert Einstein said, “It is nothing short of a miracle that instruction today has not strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”

So the boy, now fully grown, leaves our schools confused, lonely, alienated, lost, angry, but with a mind full of isolated, meaningless facts which together are laughingly called an education. He knows neither who he is, where he is or how he got there. He has no concept of where he’s going, how to arrive there nor what he’ll do when he gets there. He has no idea what he has, what he wants, nor how to develop it. In essence, he’s a type of robot – old before his time, living in the past, confused by the present, frightened by the future, much like the teachers who made him.”