The War on Boys

[legion]

I've often thought that with the advent of political correctness and the fact that educators (at least K-12) are mostly female, there is a strong anti-boy bias in our current education system.

While teachers past might have let boys "get the energy out", anymore it seems that they try to suppress their natural tendencies and when that doesn't work, recommend a prescription of Prozac. In other words, teachers want a classroom full of well-behaved girls.

Further, it is my opinion that teachers prefer to teach in ways that cater to how girls learn. Once upon a time, there was considered to be an education gap where girls were further behind. The whole "break through the glass ceiling" mentality meant that more women had to take jobs traditionally reserved for men, and this would require better education for women. So educators became fixated in teaching in ways that would allow girls to "catch up". What they didn't realize was at the same time, they began neglecting teaching in ways that worked for boys, and they started falling behind.

And here's where the bias comes in. When girls under-perform at education, there must be a problem with the system. When boys under-perform at education, it must be because they are bad little boys. Teachers often seem to believe that it is impossible for the education system to fail boys because of some mystic "privilege" they enjoy. Well no, they enjoy no privilege in the education system and are in fact being shoehorned into a system not designed for them.

Battling the Boys: Educators Grapple with Violent Play - Yahoo! News

In her 30 years as a kindergarten teacher in Illinois and Massachusetts, Jane Katch has watched graham crackers, a pretzel, celery, tree bark and fingers all become transformed into imaginary guns and other weapons. And she has learned to work with, rather than against, the violent boyhood fantasies that accompany these transformations.

"When you try to ignore it, it doesn't go away. And when you try to oppress it, it comes out in sneaky ways," Katch said.

Not every teacher agrees. Schools have become battlegrounds between the adults who are repelled by the play violence they see and the children - primarily boys - who are obsessed with pretending to fight, capture, rescue and kill.

While some educators prohibit this behavior, other educators and researchers claim that banishing violent play from classrooms can be harmful to boys. It's a debate entangled in gender issues, since nearly all early-childhood educators are women, and they may be less comfortable than their male counterparts with boys' impulses.

While this behavior has been around far longer than toy guns and superhero movies - boys appear to be hard-wired for more active and aggressive pursuits than girls - many adults see this aggressive play being fueled by the violence portrayed or reported in the media.
...
Four-year-old boys play superhero or enact mock fights much more frequently than girls, who seem to favor house or family themes for playtime, according to a survey of 98 female teachers who worked with these kids. Meanwhile, games involving chasing, protecting and rescuing are played about as frequently by girls as by boys, according to the teachers.

There is, however, a marked difference in how the teachers respond to these games. Almost half the surveyed teachers reported stopping or redirecting boys' play several times a week or every day. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of teachers reported interfering with girls' more sedate play on a weekly basis, according to the research conducted by Mary Ellin Logue, of the University of Maine, and Hattie Harvey, of the University of Denver, published in the education journal The Constructivist.

Logue cited multiple reasons for female teachers' resistance to boys' aggressive play.

"We don't want to condone violence, we don't want to risk it getting out of control, and we don't want to deal with parents' wrath," Logue said.

When Logue and other teachers decided to allow play involving the imaginary "bad guys," the adversaries in boys' aggressive narratives, into their preschool program in Maine, one family left, some were anxious, but others were relieved, she said.

According to Thompson, this reaction often arises from mothers and female teachers who did not grow up playing the way boys play.

"They have a belief - call it an urban myth - that if boys play this way it will desensitize them to violence and they will grow up to be more violent. But it is a misunderstanding of what makes adults violent," Thompson said.

For example, he said, how often are a convicted murderer's actions explained by too many games of "cops and robbers" on the playground? There's no link between the two, according to Thompson.
...
British researcher Penny Holland, author of the book "We Don't Play With Guns Here: War Weapon and Superhero Play in the Early Years" (Open University Press, 2003), draws a parallel between the zero-tolerance policy once prevalent in playgrounds and nurseries in England and the focus by feminists during the women's liberation movement of the 1970s and early '80s on male-instigated violence, both individual and institutional.

"Perceived sexist patterns in children's play clearly presented themselves as an area in which women could take some control," she writes. England's zero-tolerance policy, which was later lifted, reflected the spirit of that earlier era, according to Holland.
...
Studies have linked play to both social and cognitive development. Through sophisticated play (including games like cops and robbers), children learn to delay gratification, prioritize, consider the perspectives of others, represent things symbolically, and control impulses, Leong and Bodrova wrote in the magazine Early Childhood Today in 2005.

Although it is difficult to make a direct connection between academics and play, there is also concern about a new gender gap as boys lag behind girls in many aspects of school all the way up to college enrollment. Evidence suggests this gap begins as soon as children enter classrooms.

A 2005 study by Walter Gilliam of the Yale University Child Study Center found that preschool boys were expelled more than 4.5 times as frequently as girls. The study suggests that challenging behavior is responsible, but does not offer additional insight.
...
"The media has provided boys with particular superheroes to believe in and to attach their fantasies to, but the impulse to be a superhero is innate," Thompson said. "Boys are innately wired for dominance and that is going to affect the kinds of stories they like and the kind of games they play."

The heroic themes of boy play have been around for a while, "at least since Homer," Thompson said. "So I just see boy play as mythic battling."
...
At the University of Maine's Katherine M. Durst Child Development Learning Center in Orono, Logue and her colleagues launched a program in which they incorporated activities that involved imaginary "bad guys."

"Day after day, the bad guys appeared. We redirected the play and it would always temporarily subside, but soon to reappear having been transformed into a new theme or new character names," Logue and her colleagues wrote in a 2008 article published in the journal The Constructivist.

But after conversations and a letter-writing exercise intended to permanently banish these fictitious bad guys, the teachers reconsidered.

"We decided that having banished the bad guys diminished the running and noise level but, also, the pretend play and energy within the classroom. No more extravagant stories were being told and the group of boys who so passionately desired the bad guys were having more difficulty sustaining long periods of play," they wrote.

So, the teachers decided to have students resume writing letters daily to these imaginary figures. Then teachers noticed something else: When the children's play allowed for demonstrations of courage, power and high levels of activity, the children did not enact narratives involving fighting the imaginary bad guys.

The bad guys serve a purpose for the children, Logue said.

"They are also working on impulse control, they are trying really hard to be good, but it's really hard to be good," she said. "These bad guys give them a way to externalize that part of them that they are trying to conquer."

[Tobra]

Huh, I thought this was common sense.


Mom tells me that if I were born 30 years later they would havebput me on Ritalin, instead of just trying to do something like that. As it was, she told them to forget it, and they just told me to go play outside.

[widebody911]

Simpsons did it.

[The Gaijin]

Originally Posted by legion

I've often thought that with the advent of political correctness and the fact that educators (at least K-12) are mostly female, there is a strong anti-boy bias in our current education system.

Yes. My nephew got in trouble for making a "gun" with his index finger and thumb.

And what about the boys born in the later months of the year that makes up a class - more likely to be diagnosed with behavior problems and learning disabilities.

Nobody thought to allow for the fact they they are almost a year younger than some of their peers..

[jyl]

From actual personal experience here. I have kids, a boy and a girl, and almost all of my friends have kids too. So I've watched plenty of little boys - and little girls - grow up in the educational system.

At the pre-school level, like ages 3-5 y/o, the little boys tend to do more construction/building games and the little girls tend to do more role-playing and play figure games; both seem to be equally drawn to drawing/art stuff and to running around/chasing games. The pre-schools don’t usually let kids whack on each other with sticks or play other fighting games, and I can certainly see why, considering how outraged I've seen parents get over minor (trivial) playground injuries. The kids I know can do play-fight at home all they want – wood or foam swords, nerf pistols, etc – but I didn’t actually see whacking being a favorite pastime. Sure, my daughter liked to pummel her little brother occasionally, but it got old fast for both of them.

I observe that once grade school starts, the boys tend to struggle more often with being slow learners and/or poor concentration/easily distracted, while the girls tend to struggle more often with lack of confidence, being too quiet and getting overlooked/outshouted. At the grade school level, the “playtime” seems to be more balls, sports, climbing, swinging for both – I don’t see 3rd and 4th grade boys playing much “superhero” nor do I see 3rd and 4th grade girls playing “house”, they’ve kind of outgrown that.

I don’t know any little boys who were actually put on ADHD drugs, although it was briefly suggested for my son (I refused, which turned out to be the correct decision) and I did know a couple of kids who I would’ve liked to see drugged (or better yet, kicked out) and admittedly they were all boys. I know an equal number of boys and girls who suffer from dyslexia or ADHD to the extent that they’re in actual behavioural (non-drug) therapy for it. Some of the therapies actually seem work well, in that the kid actually learns how to better focus his/her attention, to organize, and to concentrate on reading/listening.

Overall, my feeling is that, as far as the education system goes, the main difference between young boys and girls is that young boys often tend to be slower to pick up the early years of reading and writing, while little girls often tend to be self-effacing and not loud/assertive enough. I would want a teacher to be alert to this and, if the kid needs it, to give the individual boy or girl extra help. My kids’ teachers have usually been good to excellent, with a few unfortunate exceptions. This is in a couple of private schools where the teacher only has 20 kids per class and none of them are hard-core problem kids, though some come with hard-core problem parents (pushy, overbearing, BMW-flaunting, self-important types).

[legion]

John, I'd respectfully argue that if your kids go to private schools, they are not in the "system" I'm complaining about, though you too seem to have brushed up against some of these tendencies.

Another facet of this issue (and linked in with the whole feminist movement in teaching) is the tendency to make sex offenders out of children, usually the boys.

I've heard of everything from little boys being arrested and charged with sex crimes for kissing little girls (remember when we used to think this kind of behavior was cute, not criminal?) to teenage boys being charged with child porn possession because their teenage girlfriend sent them naughty pictures. So we have everything from naiveness to bad judgment becoming criminal in a way that haunts the poor kid for the rest of their life.

[Crowbob]

The feminization of education is not new. I contend that the feminization of education, especially early education, is having a profoundly negative effect on our culture. If an evil genius were to create a method to break the male spirit, she would have developed our current educational and legal systems. I have yet to hear a cogent rebuttal against my allegation that the law and education as we now recognize them are deliberately and blatently biased against males. Even now, the numbers used to justify affirmative action in all areas of our culture have reversed. Yet, there is not one major push to equalize those numbers. Almost without exception, state and federal bureaucracies are dominated by women. Every union publication is awash iwith the terms "equal opportunity", "affirmative action", "equal pay for equal work". They are all bogus. The antidote for such gender bias is having boys grow up with their fathers in the home. Naturally, nearly all aspects of our society do whatever is necessary to diminsh the likelihood of that happening.

[pwd72s]

The government schools are open sewers that children and money are tossed into. Do diligent research on the NEA (national education assn.)

[nostatic]

Chris, do you have kids in "the system"?

Not sure how "feminization" of schools is a recent phenomenon - women have been school teachers for a long time. It is a broader societal issue around "accepted" behavior and expectations. It is mostly driven by insane parents, lack of personal responsibility, and the 24-hour new cycle creating FUD in the population. imho.

[jyl]

Chris, your comment to me is partly true I suppose - my kids are in prviate school. But they went to the typical pre-school like everyone else and then in the French immersion grade school system (gee, that's a mouthful) the teachers still tend to be more female than male, and the tendency to "political correctness" in such a school - in Berkeley CA and Portland OR no less - is pretty darn strong, you better believe it.

My main point is that there is a difference between what is actually being experienced by the bulk of parents and kids in the real world, and the occasional ridiculous/outrageous incidents that get blown out of proportion on the internet.

Out of 1,000 grade-school kids, how many do you think are actually getting labeled as "sex offenders"? In the real world, not the internet world? In all the grades in all the years during all the schools my kids have gone to - which would cover a few thousand kids - I can't actually recall any. We're very active in our schools, on the Board and so on, and would hear of this sort of thing if it happened. The closest was a 7th grade boy who was asking the girls in his (private school) class for blowjobs. He didn't get kicked out, although he got counseled rather intensively. Well, I also knew a 5th grade boy who brought a loaded pistol to school and accidentally fired it while showing off to his friends. He got himself a permanent expulsion from that (public) school district. Not sure I agree w/ that response, but I believe the district's rules on students' possession of deadly weapons might not have left the principal a whole lot of choice. So the kid finished up in private school and grew up just fine.

When you become a parent, I suspect you'll find that over-reaching political correctness isn't real high on your list of actual school concerns. You will probably be more concerned about whether the teacher works with your son to overcome his reading struggles, or draws your daughter into asserting herself in class, or whatever actual educational challenges your kids face, than on whether she let your kid play with a toy gun.

[TechnoViking]

Yea, I'm just not seeing a "feminist movement in teaching" at least in my experience with the school system so far. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for it though

[Tobra]

John, if he has a son and the boy is a victim of "over-reaching political correctness" would be at the top of his list of actual school concerns.

This is a big deal and if your kids are in private school, you probably don't have adequate information to make an informed comment.

[jyl]

He doesn't, and when he does, his son is more likely to benefit more from good attentive teaching of reading, writing, and 'rithmatic than from being allowed to play with pretend guns.

School is for learning to read, to write, math, geography, science, etc. Whether kids are allowed to bring toy weapons or dress like soldiers is just not important. Yet from the posts on this board, you'd think exactly the opposite, because people here seem a lot more interested in whether the teachers are politically overcorrect feminists than whether they teach your kids to read and multiply.

And some of those posts are by people who don't have any kids in any school system at all, so how "qualified" are they to comment?

Really, most parents should worry more about if Johnny is learning to read, than about if Johnny's teacher is a feminist. Who cares. If my kid has a great teacher, she can be a Marxist feminist vegan lesbian for all I care.

John, if he has a son and the boy is a victim of "over-reaching political correctness" would be at the top of his list of actual school concerns.



This is a big deal and if your kids are in private school, you probably don't have adequate information to make an informed comment.

[legion]

We are discussing general trends here. Some people will still have excellent teachers, some will still have bad ones. What I'm seeing (and I may be wrong) is a systemic neglect of how boys learn and suppression of how boys play in grade schools.

John, I have no doubt that you have good experiences. You are also of course right that the most important thing is that a child learns. But boys tend to be more "high energy" than girls and more and more, that energy is being treated like a problem that must be suppressed, instead of worked with for a positive outcome. I think this leads to many boys having a bad taste for school, which leads to underachievement.

I can't help but wonder if extreme political correctness and anti-boy teachers are partially responsible for the high male drop out rates in big city schools?

As for taking toy guns to school and dressing up, I never did that as a kid, but I did make a gun out of my fingers at recess and I wasn't punished for it. I also pretended to be Luke Skywalker, and Darth Vader when the Empire and Rebellion had epic battles on the jungle gym. And yes, we pretended to shoot each other and you had to lay down and pretend to be dead until the next round started. I also returned to class tired and ready to sit and listen for awhile. Many teachers simply put a firm stop to any such "violent" play today.

[jyl]

Don't most kids, who drop out of school, do so in high school? By which time the innocent "boy-energy" that we're talking about is not so much an issue? I would think the causes of high school drop outs are more screwed up families, uninspiring teachers, fearful school conditions, etc? I doubt a lot of kids are "dropping out" of school in 2nd grade.

[wcc]

My son has been in trouble for light saber fighting, playing war, making a gun with his hands, playing rough, etc and the school calls every single time. I just tell them boys are boys and they say that isn't appropriate behavior on school grounds. I always tell them I'll talk with him about it but rarely do because he's a good kid. Last year he was the top of his class academically, plays sports, etc and actually enjoys going to school so I told them that if they keep punishing him for being a boy he won't want to go and his education could suffer. They didn't care about that one bit.

[nostatic]

Originally Posted by legion

We are discussing general trends here. Some people will still have excellent teachers, some will still have bad ones. What I'm seeing (and I may be wrong) is a systemic neglect of how boys learn and suppression of how boys play in grade schools.

So you're seeing this as a parent with kids in public schools?

[VINMAN]

Originally Posted by legion

I've heard of everything from little boys being arrested and charged with sex crimes for kissing little girls (remember when we used to think this kind of behavior was cute, not criminal?) to teenage boys being charged with child porn possession because their teenage girlfriend sent them naughty pictures. So we have everything from naiveness to bad judgment becoming criminal in a way that haunts the poor kid for the rest of their life.

Chris, my wifes an elementary school teacher. I have nightmares over some of the stories she comes home and tells me. I'm so happy my kids are older and are not going through this current pathetic system. ( although they just started to catch the beginning of it)

[Tobra]

John, aside from you, nobody is talking about this:

"School is for learning to read, to write, math, geography, science, etc. Whether kids are allowed to bring toy weapons or dress like soldiers is just not important."

The rest of us are talking about disturbing trends we see. If Chris does not have children yet, is it more prudent to consider this issue before or after there is a problem and the kid is branded forever as a "troublemaker"

After years of getting crap over nothing, young males begin seeing school as a stupid waste of time, or that is what every single drop out I have asked has told me.

Originally Posted by nostatic

So you're seeing this as a parent with kids in public schools?

I did when my kids were in school.

My best friend's wife is a teacher in a Kalifornia public school and she sees this as a major problem.

[john70t]

Young boy's eyes often glaze over in class because all they understand is they have to sit in a chair while someone talks at them. The more talking, the thicker the glaze.
If they were taught instead that it takes lots of scientists, mathmaticians, and mechanics to build and operate a Death Star, they might pay better attention.