In my recent blog post Judith Kleinfeld on Boys & Education, I reported on my discussion with psychology professor Judith Kleinfeld of The Boys Project about the boy crisis in education.  Leaving aside the large statistical differences between boys and girls achievement in schools -- differences almost always favoring girls -- I think there is another major element of the boy crisis which is harder to quantify.

I discussed it in my column The 'Boy Parent Dilemma' (Los Angeles Daily News, 9/6/02). I wrote:

As we send our young sons back to school, millions of parents of boys are apprehensive, dreading the pain of the "boy parent dilemma."

Modern schools are not suited to boys' personalities and learning styles. This can be seen from the time boys enter school, when many of them are immediately branded as behavior problems. The line of 10 kids who had to gather every day after school in my son's first grade class for their behavior reports--all boys. The names of kids on the side of the chalkboard who misbehaved and would lose recess--all boys. The kids as young as five or six who must be drugged so they will sit still and "behave"--almost all boys.

By any measure, our schools are failing our sons. Boys at all levels are far more likely than girls to be disciplined, suspended, held back, or expelled. By high school the typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading and writing, and is less likely to graduate high school, go to college, or graduate college than a typical girl.

Success in school is tightly correlated with the ability to sit still, be quiet, and complete work which is presented in a dull, assembly-line fashion. The boy parent dilemma is that as parents we must support the authority of our sons' teachers and schools, while at the same time it is obvious to us that the methods and structure they employ are not suited to our sons' needs.

Boy parents agonize and doubt every step of the way. We punish our sons when they "misbehave" (i.e., act like boys) because we want them to fit in and do well in school. Yet in the back of our minds--as we cajole, demand, offer, threaten, reward, and punish--we wonder, "what is this doing to my little boy?"...

This afternoon, millions of us will pick our little sons up from school and hope to hear that it was a good day. Yet many of our boys will have spent much of the day being scolded and punished, often for doing nothing more than being boys. And with each of these mistreated little boys--waving their arms and running toward us across the yard, happy to be away from that place where everything feels so unnatural and they somehow always seem to be doing something wrong--comes the boy parent dilemma.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under Boys/Boy Crisis in Education/Schools. You can trackback from your own site.