This Probably Isn’t Helping

by Phil

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the current conventional wisdom that boys don’t like reading. Last week, Steve wrote about how boys are having motivation problems in school and his first-hand experience with the subject. In the long term, these factors are a serious detriment to their success.

The most recent statistics I could find on college graduation rates are from 2004, when 58% of recipients to get their bachelor’s degree were female. While these numbers are now over 6 years old, I doubt they have evened out any in the intervening years. Apparently, these numbers for males have been trending downward since 1982.

In that same article I reference above from Research News out of Ohio State, Claudia Buchmann says, “In the 1960s and 70s, girls were getting better grades, but many young women were not going to college, or they were dropping out of college to get married. Now the benefits of a college education are growing faster for women than they are for men, and women are taking advantage.”

I applaud women for the advances that they have made in education. I can also recognize that there is still work to do in wage parity, since women still earn about 20% less than their male counterparts.

As a man who supports his wife and her career, this really infuriates me. Additionally, as a father to a boy, the continually growing gap in education alarms me.

A paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research, echoes that these have been long standing problems for boys. “Another aspect in the reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, is the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females. Boys often mature more slowly than girls. In grades K-12, boys tend to have a higher incidence of behavioral problems (or lower level of non-cognitive skills) than girls. Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college for the high school graduating class of 1992, the authors figure. It allowed "girls to leapfrog over boys in the race to college." Similarly, teenage boys, both in the early 1980s and late 1990s, had a higher (self-reported) incidence of arrests and school suspensions than teenage girls.”

I think one of the questions becomes, “What do we do?” Steve touched on it in his post,talking about strategies for active learning. But honestly, I don’t know.

One of the things we shouldn’t do is throw up our hands, accept it as an inevitable outcome and then encourage it. I am continually baffled by some of the messages that companies send to boys, particularly in the clothing selection. Here are a few examples-

Anti-school, anti-studying, and anti-homework. All of these examples are from major retailers. How is this an acceptable reinforcement of what we want our boys to be? I’ve never seen these types of messages on t-shirts for girls. Perhaps smaller or fringe retailers have them, but I’ve never seen them. The fact that we are sending this message to boys (that they aren’t good as girls at school, that it is okay and, in fact, what is actually expected of them) is detrimental to their growth and the exact opposite of what they need to be hearing.

I found that last t-shirt in a post over at Achilles Effect, a rather wonderful blog discussing the issues of “boys, masculinity, and gender stereotypes.” Apparently, I’m not the only that dislikes these types of shirts.

Like I said earlier, I don’t know what the answer is for these giant gender issues. I’m just one more person trying to start the conversation about what's expected of our boys when it comes to their studies and their futures. While these types of t-shirts may be harmless fun for some kids, I don’t see how we can justify their existence while we continue to lose generations of boys to educational apathy. As the adults, we should be exercising better judgement and setting a stronger example.