The trouble with boys

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At the risk or stepping into fgoodwin's territory, here are two articles that may be of interest to this forum. The sentence that jumbed out in this article is "According to the Census Bureau, one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents..."

 

As scouting searches for more (and younger) male adult leaders, one-third of younger men are still living at home with their parents. Yikes!

 

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The trouble with boys

Citing an American "boy crisis,'' some researchers argue that too many male children are falling behind in school.

Leonard Sax

I n the romantic comedy "Failure to Launch," Matthew McConaughey plays a young man who is affable, intelligent, good-looking -- and completely unmotivated. He still lives at home and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out with buddies and having sex.

In desperation, his parents hire a professional motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to fall in love with McConaughey's character to motivate him to grow up and get a life.

I was struck by how this theme matches what I see in my office with greater and greater frequency; a son goes off to college for a year or two, wastes thousands of dollars of his parents' money, then gets bored and comes back to live in his old room. Now he's working part time at Kinko's or part time at Starbucks.

It is a phenomenon that is getting a lot of media attention as part of the so-called "boy crisis" and one that cuts across all demographics -- rich, poor, black, white, urban and rural. According to the Census Bureau, one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents -- a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. That is not true of young women. Why?

Before growing into unmotivated young adults, boys are more likely than girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, be in remedial classes and become dropouts. Boys are now significantly less likely than girls to go to college.

Race is certainly a factor; for boys of color the impact is more harsh. An African-American boy is more likely to go to jail than to college and his chances of dropping out of high school are higher. White boys are more likely to graduate from high school, but then many of them attend college for a year or two and never earn a degree. They become the rudderless McConaughey character.

So what's going on? Maybe it has to do with changing school curriculums, environments that are less boy-oriented or a workforce that offers fewer blue-collar jobs. Maybe it's some combination of all of the above, or other factors we haven't yet identified.

Whatever the reason, it is clear that gender gaps are wide and growing. A National Endowment for the Arts study that spanned over 20 years found that girls read for fun far more than boys.

What was once a small difference has grown into a chasm.

Part of the source of that discrepancy lies in the shift in reading curriculum over the past 25 years.

As the authors of the NEA study observe: In 1980, students were commonly assigned books by Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck. Today, students are more likely to be assigned books by Toni Morrison or Julia Alvarez. But "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is a boy-friendly book in a way that "Beloved" is not.

During visits to predominantly African-American public schools around the nation, I've learned that many black boys would rather read "For Whom the Bell Tolls" -- a book without any major black characters -- than anything by Morrison.

In reading, as in almost every other aspect of education, gender runs much deeper than race. Boys have more in common with one another than they do with girls of the same racial or ethnic background in terms of what they like to read, how they like to spend their spare time and how they learn.

And though boys' issues have been the buzz lately, education for girls still needs attention, too. We must address different gender needs without resorting to the victimization game, where "boys' advocates" and "girls' advocates" quarrel about whose group is more oppressed.

One obvious alternative is single-sex classrooms, an approach that has worked in dozens of schools. Boys who were once labeled "learning-disabled" became enthusiastic learners in all-boys classes where they were free to jump up and down, more consistent with their learning styles. At the same time, just separating the sexes can fail when teachers don't properly use the single-sex format. If you still ask boys to read Morrison -- or teach girls physics with stories about colliding football players -- then it probably won't work.

For too long, we've assumed that by ignoring gender differences, we'd eliminate gender gaps. That hasn't worked. Now the challenge is to use our new understanding of boys and girls to broaden educational options, customize learning to individual children and move beyond the gender wars.

Leonard Sax is a Washington, D.C., area physician and psychologist and the author of "Why Gender Matters: What parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences." He is executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

2006 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

 

 

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http://www.startribune.com/562/story/457984.html