This annoys the crap out of me. Do you have any actual evidence to back this up? You see it all the time, but it never makes sense.
At what point in history did becoming educated and being successful mean getting to indulge in energetic play? Because, from what I know, the answer is never. Study has always been hard, quiet work. School is a place of learning, not a place to act up. Boys and men in the past were capable of sitting still, and if they aren’t anymore, I blame the caregivers. There is nothing inherent to being a boy (especially a pre-pubescent boy, which is what people always seem to reference) that makes it impossible to sit and listen and study quietly. It’s just as hard for girls, but girls are expected to suck it up. Boys need to be taught the same thing.
For what it’s worth, the gap in educational attainment varies greatly by race and class; in fact, among whites and Asians in the upper income quartile, slightly more than half of all college students are male. Whatever is going on, it’s culturally specific, and it affects low-income men disproportionately.
There are physical differences in the makeup of girls’ vs. boys brains. Due to this, girls learn in a different manner than boys. The educational systems often teach in a way that girls “get” and boys "don’t.
For example, the corpus callosum of the average girl is 25% larger that that of a boy. This helps the two hemispheres of the brain to communicate. When boys move around physically, their (smaller) corpus callosum has more activity. This helps them to make a better connection between brain hemispheres and enables them to learn better.
So in fact there well may be is something inherent to being a boy that makes it more difficult to absorb material when they are sitting and listening and studying quietly.
In the past, boys did have to suck it up and sit still. I think that they could still be successful later in life though because they had huge advantages in the work world. This is not so true now though, which is a good thing.
As a teacher, I think few schools actually do a ton of “sitting still and being quiet.” Our education system actually does value learning through discussion, activities, experiments, debate and other “active” learning methods. I think most teachers try to limit lecture time to a certain percent of the lesson.
That said, what are the majority of us on the Dope doing right now, today? We are mostly sitting down, quietly, doing a relatively boring task in front of a computer. Learning how to do this without tearing your hair out is a value in today’s workforce.
As I mentioned before, the distribution of males and females is not uniform. In fact, in the under-24 age group, there are about 105 males for every 100 females.
Now take a look at a right wing rag that dresses up its story to suit its reactionary right wing, upper middle class olde worlde englande agenda
Differant shades all with differant objectives, the academic stuff is too difficult for a simple minded public to absorb, there is a lot of material around at differant levels, just go out and find it.
This is a very important point.
I have a masters degree in engineering and I know for a fact that both my car salesman and plumber neighbors make significantly more than I do, and to be frank, I’m not in any way starving.
There is no evidence that boys learn differently than girls. There a wide variety of pseudoscientific myths about “learning styles” in teaching. These pseudoscientific myths sound great on paper but are not supported by the evidence.
Do you have a cite for this activity-induced improved learning idea? I do not doubt it exists because it sounds exactly like a pseudoscientific teaching myth. Here are the ingredients:
Take one factoid from neuroscience. Don’t worry that the factoid is controversial and not supported by a majority of modern anatomical studies.
Let journalism take the factoid to its furthest speculative extreme: C Gorman (20 January 1992). “Sizing up the sexes”. Time: 36–43.
All human beings learn best by a combination of practicing, listening, modeling, and challenging. It would be great to identify some key set of variables that could be manipulated to give every student instruction tailored to their individual needs but unfortunately we’re more human than individuals and the stuff that has always worked will always work.
Have you ever actually sat down and talked to a man? They’re often not very bright and shockingly violent, hence their domination of the prison system. These traits worked well in the past when they could use their physical strength to subdue women and force them to be broodmares but in the modern era it’s maladaptive. We still need men for engineering, cannon fodder, and sperm, but we’re working on it.
These all seem to come down to school grades and college attendance, but those are only part of the puzzle. Boys develop slower than girls, so it’s no shock that girls do better in school. As for the college part, it ignores any nuance. A women studying film is not on equal footing with a man studying engineering. Nor is a women studying international relations better off than a man studying as an apprentice electrician.
I don’t understand what you don’t get here. There are two different situations. A woman who out competes her male peers has worked harder, or is simply the better person.
In the other situation, she is preferred over male picks of equal value for matters of diversity. She has worked as hard as the males and operates on an equal level.
As to why, I have no idea. It also varies by income, age and race of the person getting educated. Asians are more gender equal, older students are more likely to be female, and students from lower income households are more likely female.
