From Townhall.com-
Where Are the Men? by Phyllis Schlafly
…Fewer boys manifest significant interest in academic achievement or aspirations to walk through the doors that a college degree can open.
Even the Wall Street Journal calls this the “boy mystery” that “nobody has solved.” We should respond with the famous line attributed to Sherlock Holmes: It’s “elementary, my dear Watson.”
We can even claim a double entendre for the word elementary. The reason is obvious, and the causes originated in elementary school.
…
Elementary schools are not only ruled by females — they are dominated by feminists who make school unpleasant for boys from the get-go. Fewer than 10 percent of elementary school teachers are men, giving boys the distinct impression that school is not for them.
Elementary school teachers used to understand that boys will be boys, but teachers now look upon boys as just unruly girls. Feminists manifest hostility to males and to masculine traits such as competitiveness and aggressiveness, and instead reward typical female behaviors such as non-assertiveness and group cooperation.
Schools cannot make gender go away by pretending that boys do not have an innate masculinity, or by trying to suppress it with ridiculous zero-tolerance punishments, banning sports such as dodge ball and tag, and allowing only playground games without winners.
Five- and 6-year-old boys are not as able or willing as little girls to sit quietly at a desk and do neat work with pencil and paper. Even worse is the appalling fact that first-grade kids are not taught how to read phonetically, and the assigned stories are mostly about topics of interest to girls, not boys.
Is this a factor in churches and Christian schools, as in, are Christian school facutlies and Sunday Schools staffs filled mostly by women, and do you think this is good, bad, or irrelevant?
Also from this quote, elementary-school boys have always hated school. Augustine, Luther, and Erasmus are all on record saying that early schooling was a miserable experience. Augustine, however, identified the problem as his sin nature rather than feminists. (I am not denying that certain practices can be counter-productive to males learning.)
I don't think the gender bias towards girls is a conscious conspiracy, but schools have evolved over the years in a way that harms both boys and girls.
From http://www.genderdifferences.org/
... In recent years, scientists have discovered that differences between girls and boys are more profound than anybody guessed. Specifically:
The brain develops differently. In girls, the language areas of the brain develop before the areas used for spatial relations and for geometry. In boys, it's the other way around. A curriculum which ignores those differences will produce boys who can't write and girls who think they're "dumb at math."
The brain is wired differently. In girls, emotion is processed in the same area of the brain that processes language. So, it's easy for most girls to talk about their emotions. In boys, the brain regions involved in talking are separate from the regions involved in feeling. The hardest question for many boys to answer is: "Tell me how you feel."
Girls hear better. The typical teenage girl has a sense of hearing seven times more acute than a teenage boy. That's why daughters so often complain that their fathers are shouting at them. Dad doesn't think he's shouting, but Dad doesn't hear his voice the way his daughter does.
Girls and boys respond to stress differently - not just in our species, but in every mammal scientists have studied. Stress enhances learning in males. The same stress impairs learning in females...
Since the mid-1970's, educators have made a virtue of ignoring gender differences. The assumption was that by teaching girls and boys the same subjects in the same way at the same age, gender gaps in achievement would be eradicated. That approach has failed. Gender gaps in some areas have widened in the past three decades. The pro-portion of girls studying subjects such as physics and computer science has dropped in half. Boys are less likely to study subjects such as foreign languages, history, and music than they were three decades ago. The ironic result of three decades of gender blindness has been an intensifying of gender stereotypes.
I believe that the manner in which men and women are hardwired differently is evident in Scripture, and nothing I have read so far that acknowledges gender differences contradicts the Biblical roles of men and women. As a matter of fact, there are no examples of age segregation in the Bible, but quite a few instances of gender segregation- and the plan laid out is for mature men to teach young men, and mature women to teach younger women.
So when it comes to the predominance of women in teaching positions, (who have most likely been taught that there is no real difference between boys and girls, interpret the wiggly boy who can't sit still as misbehaving, and the boys sitting in the back of the class as goof-offs and rebels), I think we should acknowledged that the lack of men in teaching positions does hurt our boys.
Susan R
Blogging at At Home and School and Shelf Discoveries
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