11 ms·

US education fails boys significantly starting all the way back in elementary school. I knew multiple teachers in high school who talked about how the system fa

• watwut 5y ago
  The actual split is 54% to 46%, which is something that I would not qualified as significant. It is a difference, but hardly shows that men are disengaged masses.
  • maxk42 5y ago
    That's more than a 17% difference. Seems significant to me.
    • whatshisface 5y ago
      Significant for what? Understanding our society? For that, any statistically significant result is significant. For forecasting the life course of a person? Not as significant.
      • marcellus23 5y ago
        > For forecasting the life course of a person Where did this come from? When did the discussion apparently become about this?
        • whatshisface 5y ago
          There have always been two closely related discussions going on whenever demographics come up. The first is a discussion about what course our society will take, and the second is a discussion about what an individual can expect to see as they make their way through life.
    • Blikkentrekker 5y ago
      Significance of numbers has little to do with the difference. 0.00000001% can be significant so long as the sample size be large enough. It simply means it's unlikely that the numbers are caused by a statistical fluke and expected to show up again in a reproductive attempt. Of course significant numbers are very often not reproduced, both due to that the publishing industry selects upon creating this result and because the mathematical principles that compute significance are simply abused, both willfully, and due to lack of understanding of the assumptions behind it.
      • benchaney 5y ago
        You are confusing statistical significance with practical significance. A difference of 0.00000001% can be statistically significant with enough data, but it will never be practically significant.
        • mensetmanusman 5y ago
          Except in physics where the charge of an electron couldn’t be different by even less than that or else there could be no life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant
        • Blikkentrekker 5y ago
          And what exactly would be the meaning of the word “practical significance” then? what exactly would it signify? Because honestly; I feel this secondary meaning is a buzzword transferred from the first meaning which actually has meaning, but in the secondary case it's simply used to use an expensive word without understanding it.
          • Jensson 5y ago
            Significance was a word before statistics used it to define one of their concepts. Just because a field takes a word people used in everyday contexts and used it to define something doesn't mean that the everyday meaning disappears. Edit: Another example is significant digits. Significant digits is a much older concept than significance in statistics, and maps much better to the original meaning of significance. Basically significant things are things you can't ignore when you do your analysis.
  • syshum 5y ago
    I seem to remember when with split was the other direction it was considered significant.... Seen as another example of Sexism in Higher Education Interesting how things change
    • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      Nobody's clamoring to fix the under-representation of men in teaching and nursing either.
      • Spivak 5y ago
        The reason for this is complicated though. To say that it's just that political climate and that people don't care about men's issue is doing it such a disservice. The reason there's so much media attention on the issues of women and minorities is because generally speaking any issues faced by cisgender heterosexual white men are considered important by default. You usually don't have to fight for them because the people in power will just fix them. So it's fascinating that there are issues faced by this population that aren't moving despite everything being aligned to just make them go away and that you have to fight for them like they were minority issues. And what's crazy is that for these issues the population you need to convince that these issues are important are white men! Specifically for gender representation in nursing and teaching there's three main barriers to have to be broken down to get people to care about them. 1. That the factors that are keeping men out of teaching and nursing are internal -- lack of motivation or ability, rather than external factors like discrimination or access to education. 2. That nursing and teaching are "low status" careers so it doesn't matter if there's a gender gap because nobody is really clamoring to be one. 3. That nursing and teaching are "women's work," which is especially funny since teaching used to be male dominated.
        • Jensson 5y ago
          > any issues faced by cisgender heterosexual white men are considered important by default Any evidence for this? To me it seems like people care much more about homeless women even though most homeless are men, they care more about womens suicides even though men kill themselves more, they care more about when women get murdered even though men get murdered more etc. People care more about white people than black people, yes. People care more about cis than trans, yes. But I have seen no evidence at all that people care more about men than women.
  • Spivak 5y ago
    I do think it's really funny how the weather changes so much on the internet when discussing boys education vs the wage gap but I digress. The thing that makes it hard to write off is that over a large enough population and across time you would expect it to even out. That doesn't mean that year over year there won't natural swings one way or another but the fact that it's always more women says something interesting about higher education that almost surely we'd want to correct. We don't necessarily know what it says without looking but something is making it so that men aren't pursuing, getting excluded from, or having difficulty getting their doctorates.
  • mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Note that there are more men than women in the population though.
    • watwut 5y ago
      There are more women in the population.
      • Jensson 5y ago
        Not at the age people go to college. More men are born but they die quicker so you have more old women and more young men.
    • elliekelly 5y ago
      Maybe women are just more interested in learning than men! It could just be a matter of “preferences” and that’s fine, right? Edit: For the sake of clarity, my comment was tongue-in-cheek as it's the justification I repeatedly see whenever gender imbalance/inequality is mentioned on HN. I think it's patently ridiculous to say that one gender is for some reason more interested in learning than another.
      • mensetmanusman 5y ago
        I think this is the case. Men preferring to work with their hands over books is observed over many cultures. The university system expanding mostly in the direction of brain-work leaves out these men. Ideally we would have a Germany-like system that better guides training for these populations and professions to help create a more robust working class.
        • Jensson 5y ago
          > Men preferring to work with their hands over books is observed over many cultures If the books are about robots and the manual task is taking care of kids you'd draw the opposite conclusion.
  • avs733 5y ago
    the size of the difference alone does not denote significance. It can only indicate scale.
• gfody 5y ago
  immature students lack proper motivation ala zataomm, and there's what they say about women maturing sooner but maybe that's traditional wisdom and not scientific (zataomm isn't exactly scientific either but I think everyone agrees with pirsig)
  • avs733 5y ago
    I would like to understand what is meant by 'proper motivation' Motivation...just is. It is also highly changeable. The same student might enter a course with a highly intrinsic motivation for a topic, slide towards a more extrinsic motivation as a test or exam approaches, and then migrates back to intrinsic if a well thought out project is given. Course and pedagogy design are highly influential on the types of motivation as are social and emotional factors. Self-regulation of emotion is definitely an area of development and (maturity) but there is no right, the potential for multiple different forms of motivation exists in everyone.
    • gfody 5y ago
      pirsig favored the motivation to actually learn the subject matter (and more generally to actually improve yourself) vs. trying to pass a course because you need the credential etc.
      • avs733 5y ago
        Thats fine. I'm talking about empirical research about motivation rather than platitudes though. It would be wonderful if all of my students were motivated to learn the subject matter I teach, believe me. However, it is more useful to understand their motivation and engage with it. That can include identifying ways to link what would motivate them to learn a subject matter (personal interests) to the class material. Favor shouldn't really enter the equation when linking motivation and education. c.f.: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/ https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/
        • gfody 5y ago
• johnold 5y ago
  I would agree with this assessment. As a long time teacher, our district is always talking about how to engage with hispanic males. They, as a group, underperform and no one knows how to engage with them and help them perform as they should. It is always the same story and nothing seems to change.
  • honkdaddy 5y ago
    Do you have any theories on the root cause, or better yet, any ideas on changes that schools could make to better serve under-peforming boys?
    • ToFundorNot 5y ago
      There are already many effective processes that have been developed, schools however don't want to implement them for varying reasons (blind marking for example). An example from Daniel Kahneman's Noise (I'm paraphrasing) - When university faculty was told of their bias in marking from hunger/mood/normal daily human sways, why didn't the first person marking it write the grade on the back so the second couldn't see it until the end: They responded that they used to do it that way, but it caused arguments.
• dont__panic 5y ago
  Most elementary school teachers I know seem to have a mentality that boys are somehow uncontrollable and unbearable to teach. Are they harder to teach? Possibly, even probably. Does that mean we should just resign ourselves to mediocrity in teaching them based off of sexist stereotyping? Hard no. I suspect that getting more men involved with elementary school teaching would help ease this issue because you'd provide more role models for young boys in elementary school. At the school I went to, there was only one male teacher for all of pre-kindergarten through 6th grade. That absence of male role models can't be a good thing.
  • rayiner 5y ago
    We toured a well regarded all-boys private school. They have a ton of physical breaks. https://www.landon.net/designed-for-boys https://www.landon.net/designed-for-boys
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    I'd be interested to know what the statistics are on teacher gender these days. When I was in school (80s), I had a male teacher for 3rd, 4th, and half of 6th grade. It remained pretty evenly split in secondary school, too. But right now I'd be hard pressed to identify more than one male teacher at my kids' elementary school.
    • da_big_ghey 5y ago
      I dont know if this truly is a core problem, boys have a father for role model and many other places in their community they can get one too: church, boy scouts, friends fathers, others. For a long time teacher was only a job for young unwed women, but we did not have this problem with boys, so I am thinking it's not a sole cause.
      • rootusrootus 5y ago
        > only a job for young unwed women That's interesting, I always kind of assumed it was for bored housewives, because in my direct experience most of my women teachers were married to doctors & lawyers, and it seemed like they were able to pursue a career in teaching because it didn't matter that the job paid next to nothing because they had a husband with significantly more income.
• weregiraffe 5y ago
  >US education fails boys significantly starting all the way back in elementary school. It has absolutely nothing to do with doctoral degrees. Why even bring it up?
  • unethical_ban 5y ago
    Elementary schooling has no bearing on the likelihood of someone making it into a doctoral program?
    • pasquinelli 5y ago
      i'm actually not so sure it does. if elementary school performance had a significant impact, that would imply to me that phds performed better in elementary school than others by a significant margin. i don't know if that's true. another way to put it is that it implies that phds are selected from high performing elementary school students, but i would bet, for some elementary schools, even their highest performing students are much less likely to eventually get a phd than equally performing students at other elementary schools.
  • giantg2 5y ago
    Generally, these lower levels of education are considered pre-reqs for a doctorate, and poor performance may prevent people from being accepted to the program.
• Alex3917 5y ago
  > I think it's a pretty poorly kept open secret There are lots of book about this. E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educators/dp/0307381293 https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ...
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Right, but nothing gets done about it. Bring up issues that affect only boys/men nowadays in a public sphere, and you get reflexively labelled as sexist for even having the fucking audacity for caring. This cancerous mentality shows no signs of abating, and it's going to have disastrous consequences in subsequent decades.
• at_a_remove 5y ago
  There was a recent article "A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’" in the Wall Street Journal. Everyone pretends to be completely puzzled by this. And yet not long ago: "In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men ... This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about." President Barack Obama. It goes back to kindergarten. We have known for over a decade that this occurs. And yet we get these fake baffled faces. Education is currently actively hostile towards boys and young men. Just imagine how fraught trying to date would be if you were a young man in a university now and had heterosexual leanings. And yet that wage gap "factoid" continues to be chanted at every turn.
  • TheCoreh 5y ago
    > Just imagine how fraught trying to date would be if you were a young man in a university now and had heterosexual leanings. Not sure what you mean: - What does the difficulty of dating have to do with the education system? - My understanding is that the abundance of dating apps should have made dating significantly easier nowadays than in the past. Is that not the case? - Why is sexuality relevant for this point? The article is primarily focused on gender
    • collegeburner 5y ago
      No, dating apps are mostly for hookups and that kind of thing. Ive heard a few sucecss stories but almost no long term relationships from them. I think thats more when people get older and not so many are looking for hookups any more that dating apps are more helpful. Though tbh I probably wouldnt want to date someone 5-7 years from now who used to have a lot of hookups, same with a lot of guys I know, so it will be interesting to see what those people do in the future.
      • mattzito 5y ago
        Isn't it possible that women are less interested in long-term relationships in college than they used to be? My parents generation, many women went to college to get their "mrs" - my generation, people dated casually, but most didn't expect to marry someone they dated in college, because they didn't plan to get married for years and years (until they had a career, were established, etc.). Stands to reason if that trend continues, there's even less value in long-term relationships. in college (and my limited anecdata supports that).
• Aerroon 5y ago
  It's not just US education. Europe also has a significantly higher graduation rate for women than men. In 2014 in Estonia almost twice the amount of women graduated from higher education than men. Here's the long Eurostat link (use the Sex dropdown to look at the different sexes): https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMARK_DS-550543_QID_1B2A80F9_UID_-3F171EB0&layout=TIME,C,X,0;GEO,L,Y,0;UNIT,L,Z,0;ISCED11,L,Z,1;ISCEDF13,L,Z,2;SEX,L,Z,3;INDICATORS,C,Z,4;&zSelection=DS-550543INDICATORS,OBS_FLAG;DS-550543ISCEDF13,TOTAL;DS-550543UNIT,NR;DS-550543SEX,M;DS-550543ISCED11,ED5-8;&rankName1=ISCED11_1_2_-1_2&rankName2=UNIT_1_2_-1_2&rankName3=INDICATORS_1_2_-1_2&rankName4=SEX_1_2_-1_2&rankName5=ISCEDF13_1_2_-1_2&rankName6=TIME_1_0_0_0&rankName7=GEO_1_2_0_1&sortC=ASC_-1_FIRST&rStp=&cStp=&rDCh=&cDCh=&rDM=true&cDM=true&footnes=false&empty=false&wai=false&time_mode=NONE&time_most_recent=false&lang=EN&cfo=%23%23%23%2C%23%23%23.%23%23%23 https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKM...
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    This is a case of 'you get what you incentivize' not much else
    • Jommi 5y ago
      What are the incentives here?
      • cblconfederate 5y ago
        I mean a general cultural push to get more women into higher education and the various gender balance quotas in both academic positions and funding and also conferences. Wasn't that the goal here?
  • ravitation 5y ago
    Some very interesting trends here. Overall, Germany seems relatively equitable looking at the 6 year average. Though the relatively large jump between 2018 and 2019 seems odd, I assume there's some additional factor(s) I'm unaware of affecting the totals.