Comments on: Chauvinism and the “Boy Crisis” In Education

By: Alecto

Alecto — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:29:28 +0000

As to the anecdotal stuff, my boyfriend is both broke and “uneducated”; he was raised in a cult, home-schooled by said cult, and got the hell out of there when he was 18. No diplomas whatsoever.
I, on the other hand, come from a solidly middle-class background and am starting grad school in september.
He is no more stupid than I am. I have very little patience for stupidity, one of my lesser traits, and although we have very different strengths, there is no better and no worse.

By: BeckySharper

BeckySharper — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:14:28 +0000

@bella: So true. I am very good at the kinds of skills our current educational system values—verbal aptitude, attention-paying, standardized testing—and that’s made me very sucessful. But I know of many, many people who are way more brilliant than me who lack some of those skills and have been marginalized by an educational system doesn’t value or nurture their gifts because of it.

By: bellacoker

bellacoker — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:03:44 +0000

This hits pretty close to home for me because I have male friends who struggle with their self-esteem because they aren’t “intelligent” in the way that society has defined intelligence. They don’t read well or remember trivia that they will be tested on, or know how to write papers and study in an academic sense. The same people have the skills and experience to build magnificent creations, or fix broken things with random material which is lying around the house, or convince people to write them a check for marketing services, but because they don’t have that validating piece of paper they feel like failures.

I think that the writer of the piece referenced may have mis-identified the problem, but there is definitely a problem. Our educational system is not preparing men or women to live in the world as it exists now.

By: BeckySharper

BeckySharper — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:42:21 +0000

@baraqiel: Yes, I’m sure that’s true. Unfortunately macho cultures tend to de-emphasize education for boys.

By: baraqiel

baraqiel — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:30:55 +0000

@Becky – “So it’s probably an even greater crisis in those communities, although there are obviously multiple factors that play into that—racism, ESL, frequent moving, poverty—which don’t apply to the white, upper-middle class kids being hand-wrung over in this New York piece.”

Definitely the factors that you mentioned but I’d also add in differing constructions of masculinity and race identity (i.e. I think in some populations the idea of education itself is identified as both “female” and, perhaps more importantly, “white” — the latter not without reason, certainly). Different models of success are presented as accessible and/or desirable to different populations and education doesn’t always play into those models.

@Av0gadro – I cannot believe your husband’s boss did that! Oh my god! Does he have female coworkers that are starting families? If so, I assume they didn’t get the same offer!

By: emilyanne

emilyanne — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:20:47 +0000

also I should add – I never thought i’d married down, he certainly doesn’t think he married up (although he does occasionally jokingly call me his bit of posh) and my husband and I earn roughly the same amount of money.

By: emilyanne

emilyanne — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:17:14 +0000

Someone asked anecdotally if anyone had dated someone less financially/academically successful then themselves and what the experience was – well my husband is considerably less qualified academically than me (and happy to admit it), in that I hold a better undergraduate degree than him and three MAs (I know i just can’t take the step to phd) and although he does have a university degree it’s from a much less prestigious college than mine and he’d be the first to admit that he scraped through it.

He’s financially successful it’s true but from a very different background to mine (he was the first person to go to college in his family) but actually he got the financially successful job which is related to finance after chatting to someone when he was working in a bar (yes, really).

Anyway the point of this long rant is that our difference in academic success and family background has never made a difference to us or our happiness – then again my husband might not care for academia but he loves to read so we’re ultimately not that far apart.

By: BeckySharper

BeckySharper — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:12:58 +0000

@Madaha: There’s some pretty well-documented science about how boys and girls differ in terms of behavioral traits and the timeline for which they acquire certain cognitive skills. But you’re right that it’s nearly impossible to look at the way boys and girls learn/behave in a classroom without factoring in social constructs/prejudices. Which I think is part of the reason we should always be wary when an educational system privileges one type of learning/intelligence over another. It’s almost never JUST about gender.

By: madaha

madaha — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:03:14 +0000

I still don’t think that men and women DO have different cognitive skills!

It’s been shown that there may be some difference in very very early childhood, but even that doesn’t suggest that there’s enough to change how children are taught. I certainly don’t remember all the girls learning to read while the boys did not. Don’t the skills even out by the time the children are no longer toddlers?

If anything, it’s been proven that having different expectations of abilities becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you tell boys that it’s “natural” for them not to sit still, then they have an excuse not to sit still! I suspect these boys now that aren’t measuring up aren’t doing so because they’re being allowed not to do so.

it’d be nice if we could get some common sense back into this.

By: rodriguez

rodriguez — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:35:58 +0000

I’ve never wanted a partner that wasn’t an intellectual equal, and that has little to do with education and nothing to do with money.

Sometimes I have little patience for friends that are not intellectual equals either.

I think education disparities may be a new issue for women but a long standing one for humanity. How the couple deals with it depends on the couple, obvs.