Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more. In general somehow reading has seemed to grow more gendered over time; if you go into the average chain bookstore its apparent that its heavily targeted towards women, and something like Amazon's free Prime reads are often almost entirely women-targeted genre selections.
Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts.
Jon Scieszka, a kids author, noticed this over fifteen years ago and started guys read, a website trying to encourage boys to do so and raise awareness about it. But it seems to have stalled, and I don't hear a lot of talk about the feminization of reading.
I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away. There's always been cultural resistance against "book-larning" but its weird how gendered reading itself has become lately.
One part is that teachers are almost exclusively female in the early grades which sends an unequivocal message that education is a girl thing. Put that together with broken family structures and it means many kids grow up with no male role models which is harmful for boys and girls in different ways.
Unfortunately it will be another 30 years before the 'girls are disadvantaged in education' trope dies, but bad ideas like phlogestion and trickle down economics take a long time to die.
It's a much deeper problem than sending a message. Teachers are systematically sexist: they give girls better test scores than boys and treat them differently. This effect is so strong it's been studied and shows up statistically:
"I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school"
It also shows up in more anecdotal stories like this one, in which a teacher banned boys from playing with Lego whilst letting girls do it:
The problem is one of feminism. It's not that boys have somehow inexplicably got dumber over the past decades, it's that women have become radicalised and collectively concluded that it's OK to express explicit biases towards other women on the basis of gender, because progress.
> I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away.
Have to disagree; the sort of reading discussed in that study isn't conducive to positive educational outcomes, but rather is more of a social activity. (Yeah, I know reading is often thought of as a solitary activity, but reading fictional narratives may be better understood as desynchronized socialization.)
Don't get me wrong, children can enjoy an educational advantage from pleasure-reading early on, as an introduction to how to read. But after that, pleasure-reading is a largely wasteful activity, at least in terms of educational advancement.
Further advancement in reading may come from learning to read expanded English -- including [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), $\mathrm{\TeX}$, `(string)"source code"`, M+A+T+H, technical texts, diagrams, schematics, etc. -- but it's unlikely that reading young-adult narratives provides the reader with any significant advantages. In fact, I suspect that it's likely to correlate with negative educational outcomes.
David Epstein's Range has a great viewpoint on this.
He states that there are Kind Learning Environments. These are places like golf, chess, or classical piano. Here, the feedback is quick, the goals are clear, and relative ranking is knowable. To excel in these environments, it is all about drill-and-kill. Repetition and stick-hours are the name of the game.
This is in contrast to Unkind Learning Environments. These are places like tennis, business, or jazz. In the unkind world feedback is harder to come by, goals are unclear, and relative ranking is often not knowable. To excel in an unkind environment, Epstein states that you have to be an information grazer. Getting as many viewpoints and mental schemas as possible is the best way forward in an uncertain world.
Epstein's book goes much more into depth on this and has many very memorable examples. It's on Bill Gate's best books of 2020 list, despite being published in 2019.
So, I think that having more reading of any sort is then better for unkind environments, as it is a method of information grazing. Even terse dime-novels will often expose you to new ways of thinking, a new word, or a new idea. Though not the best method of information grazing (whatever that may be), it matters what boys replace it with, if anything. If they replace it with the kind learning environments of CoD or WorldofTanks, then that is not as good. If they replace it with foreign films and TV, that may be just as good.
It seems more likely that a third variable is effecting both reading amount and education performance for boys.
A shot in the dark guess could be that the attention industry (and the ad industry in general) is better at targeting boys grabbing them away from both homework and at home reading at a greater scale then the other genders.
I don't agree. You can learn to read complicated schematics and technical texts in a vocational/technical high school; I don't think they are linked to educational achievement as much as people think. Disclosure: I am an ex-voc tech student; most of the people who would go on to higher education beyond it were the ones who were bad at their trades and mismatched, and they were mostly female with some exceptions. (I chose it because i was fiercely bullied in junior high, and wanted to avoid the students who would go on to the college prep high school.)
It is mentioned in the article, but I also have seen this anecdotally.
How often do school libraries have things boys want to read? In high school, even among those who did read, very few of us ever used the library because it mostly had fantasy novels, fiction, etc. My friend group wanted to read about history and economics, topics not really covered.
Supply side is an issue, but I don't think it explains everything. I think also some problems are that boys and men only like to read nonfiction and are too hyperactive to sit still.
Could you imagine if it was said that men only really like to watch documentaries if they watch TV or movies at all? We'd think it absurd right? But for some reason the idea men shun fiction is seemed as a truism. And if people would say "oh boys are too energetic, they can't sit still for a movie" we'd think they are nuts.
I'm not sure how it happened. I wish someone would research how this idea came into dominance
Your school library was mostly fiction? That's bizarre. Our school library probably had more books under the 500 section alone (pure science) than it had fiction. I went to the public library for fiction.
And academic "performance" is often regurgitation.
Remember that "intelligence" is tied to success on standardized tests, at least in the view of educational administration, because that is the alpha and omega of getting funding and keeping your job.
There have been modern kids authors that focus on boys: Darren Shan's vampire series, Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider books, Rick Riordan, the Artemis Fowl series, etc. Jon Scieszka did his Time Warp Trio books for example. Dav Pilkey did Captain Underpants and various other series. There's the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and more.
However, the massive bulk of the market ends up being targeted towards women. It's something where you'd need to actually look on shelves for, as there's a weird dynamic where in female-dominated markets or places, you have male "figurehead" things while the rest of the market is dominated by and caters to women.
I noticed this in Christian fiction ironically. You will see a big author like Ted Dekker doing his spiritual action adventure/fantasy/mild horror for a wide audience, but the huge bulk of the books are historical/amish/mystery romance aimed at women, to the point where no male alternatives exist. Even the small religious science fiction market is female dominated soft romantic sf.
In this case it's milking established demographics, as the religion itself has a mild demographics issue (not enough men.) But go look at a young adult shelf sometime; even superhero books feature women protagonists and are targeted to them now.
When I was in elementary and middle school (early 2010s) his books were very popular. I remember reading Percy Jackson & the Olympians and later The Kane Chronicles and The Heroes of Olympus.
From personal experience, Rick Riordan's series had similar interest levels between girls and boys but later series (Hunger Games, House of Night, Fault in Our Stars) did skew towards girls. My reading also fell off as I got older so I'm sure I wasn't as in touch with what my peers were reading.
The main problem with fiction for children and young adults is that there just isn't enough of the good stuff. Rick Riordan is popular, and he has written many books, but an avid reader can get through everything he's written in one summer.
> A big issue is that boys read less than girls overall.
Disagree. If you love to read fictions, doesn't help you at all to read tech books unless you're in it.
My hunch is, it is related with puberty. Biologically boys hit puberty late while that time girls are already on the way being matured. So it could be more about distractions during puberty. (But I am not expert in this field, need proper data to validate), May be it will be good to increasge age criteria for boys to attend school like marriage.
Another related point is, incentives in puberty. Simple thing like being good in sports make you popular in crowd. So it is more important to have proper incentives for boys for studies.
> Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more
Disagree. Many boys are in comics, manga, sci-fi reading than classic and fictions. In my experience, where academic curriculum is more focused on memorization boys trail behind. But they do good in competative exams where analytical questions play big role.
> Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts
This is somewhat true, specifically in states. One of the reason behind it is, marketing agencies started to target teen-age girl group heavily for whatever reasons recently.
I haven't listened to this yet, but am wondering if the gender gap in teaching could be an issue?
I work in tech where the gender disparity between men and women is discussed very often -- but I don't see these conversations taking place amongst teachers, most especially for earlier primary education which is more female than male.
Maybe there is a bias here or maybe women teachers have teaching styles that resonate with female students more. It definitely needs more attention.
Also there's a recognised gender bias in how teachers grade assignments. Boys messier handwriting results in lower scores than girls tidier handwriting, even controlling for content and legibility.
Women in general tend to be more compliant, which becomes an issue later in life when standing up for oneself in the workplace (e.g. getting promotions and pay raises), but it's an advantage in the classroom. Men need to be shown the value of something before they will learn it. This can be a problem as a lot of school lessons have no immediate practical value.
There was a high school English teacher in our school that was known for sexism. I was in the “honors” version of her class along with a few other guys that apparently weren’t warned. We were all A students normally, but we all regularly got Cs in her class and it tanked my GPA. My favorite example is that we had to make a diorama based on the Iliad, and I did Polyphemus’ cave. I was marked down because it wasn’t colorful enough.
There were girls in the class that clearly weren’t “honors” material that got As. Another teacher’s daughter actually went and complained to the principal on behalf of the boys to no effect.
She finally retired this past year. I do senior photography and she’s been brought up by a lot of former students and they all talked about her sexism.
Yeah, I had women math teachers that sucked. Made it boring. Then I got a math teacher who was a guy with deep voice. Dude talked too much political stuff but he taught too good, it was like he had my attention. I didn't even study for the exam except for the last 10 minutes and aced it, his lectures were enough, I got everything in a single class, no revision. We used to have internationally accredited exams and everyone taught by him used to do well for some reason.
Before him I didn't care about math at all. I only learn when it's a guy teaching me for some reason. I can't focus on a woman if she's teaching, I get bored and started thinking about what to app to make.
But not every guy teacher was the one I could focus on. He was the guy with the deepest voice, for some reason it didn't let my attention drift away.
Before that, I sucked in Chemistry, until some guy taught me. I don't know how that worked but did.
Then some guy taught me physics but his voice wasn't manly, and I started sucking at physics after that.
So I'd say as a guy, I was almost always better taught by men. Women (young or middle aged) bored me away from the subject. And that used to reflect in the batch performance for almost every guy.
Girls weren't impacted by it at all. They got good grades either ways man or woman.
I realize now how horrible it all sounds, but trust me I tried.
No, I thought the goal of those programs was to invest in the education of girls where it is lacking, and improving the representation of women in STEM fields to reflect their school achievements?
As society, humanity still lacks a proper vision and far away from calling a modern society.
Same problem persists under different disguises e.g. Gender based policies, religion based policies, cast based policies, region based policies. You name it. There are people who suffer for being in minority and then there are people who take advantage of being in minority.
- Why only black lives matters, what about white people, asians and many others? Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter' ?
- Why only 'lets girls to get code', what about boys and trans ? Why do we scare to say 'lets get everyone to code' ?
- Why do countries identify themselves with a single religion ? Why can't we respect the all religions ?
In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge. People are so scared to say right things and get shunned publicly. We should not create our policies based on phobias, stigmas and to allur particular votebank, but for universal integration.
Let's have first right vision. It needs a real courage to say the right things and more to do the same.
> and then there are people who take advantage of being in minority
I honestly don’t see this as a problem. So what if a person gets a little privilege just because they belong in a minority? What bothers me is the more common case of privileged person taking advantage of their privilege.
> Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter'?
Because I always hear “all lives matter” said in response to “black lives matter”. To me that sounds like you are discounting my previous statement, as if it’s not entirely sufficient, that black lives matter.
“All lives matter” is something that people also say. e.g. I hear animal rights activists say that all the time. Even the very same people that say “black lives matter” in an anti-racist rally are likely to say “all lives matter” in an pro-immigration rally, pointing to the fact that many immigrants suffer preventable deaths on the migratory routes.
> In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge
Good. If I say something that insults a lot of people I would like to know about it, so that I can know better in the future. I hate to be the one that speaks like an idiot and never gets corrected.
The answer to your 'why' questions is that there are (and were) exclusionary behaviors and/or tactics that either actively prevent or passively discourage those minorities from participating.
This was widely being talked about at least thirty years ago.
The elephant in the room is that Boys’ academic underperformance is tied to class, and thus resolving the issue has gone nowhere, because there’s no such thing as class and because the responsibility for all under-achievement therefore lies with the individual.
I don't understand why you say these things are opposites.
This one suggests (socioeconomic) class is a factor in lower performing boys' performance. This is true: at least in the US, boys' academic performance is more affected by socioeconomic class than girls' (though both are very much so).
balls187 says that the way boys' and girls' academic performance evolves vs. age is different. This is also true.
Edited to add: please also see the work from David Figlio et al. mentioned in Krona’s comment below. That’s an interesting study design that tries to demonstrate that boys in aggregate need higher quality schooling to achieve the same level of performance as girls in aggregate.
Its explained in the podcast by work of David Figlio [1]. One theory (from the podcast) is boys are more sensitive than girls to poor environmental factors involved in educational attainment.
Just gave the whole thing a listen, it doesn't seem to add more to the discussion than what is already known (to people who've been following the discussion, at least). The most critical point seems to be the social aspect: Boys ostracize academically successful boys, and therefore boys are afraid to be seen as academically successful. Other minor social factors seem to be that teaching methods unintentionally disparage boys who weren't academically successful, often by creating competitive environments where they fall into a failing feedback loop and just quit participating in the competition altogether.
It ends on a note saying that the way to fix is by acknowledging the fact that boys are falling behind, and adjusting our teaching methods and schools' social environments.
Except this only reinforces the current environment.
Anyone with experience in teaching environments knows girls are way worse at ostracizing successful students.
It’s very interesting to me the claim that boys are quitting because there’s too much competition, because my experience is the complete opposite. The only thing that makes boys quit competing in my experience is either seeing the competition as pointless (“bad boy” attitude) or realizing that the competition is not fair.
A lot of teachers are unaware as to how smart some kids can be. I’ve seen kids swap their names in tests just to validate the hypothesis that their language teacher was assigning grades based on who wrote what (which, having seen their numbers, looks like it was indeed happening).
I don't at all disagree; the variety of researchers interviewed had their own focuses, neither necessarily discounted what the others said. I do believe that a part of your anecdotal 'seeing competition as pointless' case must've leaked into the researcher who was discussing competition being discouraging.
This was true when I was in grade school as well (late 80's-90's).
Prior to puberty, nearly all the top performing students were girls. After puberty, boys were more represented.
The theory I heard was societal pressure in the US was higher on girls to be "liked" and accepted, and that girls felt that doing well in school was counter to that. Girls would stop focusing on performance and ultimately move towards the center of the curve.
Pressure to be liked, and antithetical attitudes towards academic performance also applied to boys as well, but to a lesser degree.
I taught in public schools and studied pediatric ADHD. From those experiences, I found boys had a number of disadvantages. First off, they are more motor-hyperactive, they move, fidget, get out of their chairs: their very neurochemistry develops differently, making them less adept at the "sit still and write notes" aspect of school.
This isn't "bad parenting" or "overdiagnosis of ADHD" by the way, the brain of a young male develops differently, specifically their pre-frontal cortex (executive function, how to behave/regulate oneself) develops much slower, whereas the motor-neural cortex is overly developed, relative to girls.
Beyond any developmental difference in the sexes, there's culture. Where I taught, the South and West sides of Chicago, any troubled boy was more likely to join a gang, sell drugs, commit violence, etc. These poor boys could be jumped and beaten for living on the wrong street. One student was having anger issues, his cousin got killed, he had latent anger issues which prevented prioritization of school work. Another common issue: his father is gone, he's switching homes constantly, there's no stability to facilitate the slow, incremental progress that is school and learning.
Beyond sheer dangerous problems like the above, I'd say boys channel their effort into sports and gaming more, whereas the girls I taught were more concerned with social circles, popularity, social media, etc. Question, do we think gaming is "better" for mental health than social media? If so, boys may be advantaged, I recall my boy students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic.
There is a change that happens around puberty, when I was in seventh grade I noticed it acutely. Students transition from caring what their authority figures think (teachers/parents) to caring what their peers think (friends). This leads to a degradation in class morale, unity, and overall drive and focus to follow the teacher's lesson. It was crazy that the 5th graders could stare at me doe-eyed as I explained volcanoes and robotics, but the 7th and 8th graders just zoned out on their hidden phones (god, that's a huge issue as well) or incessantly talked to one another.
Edit: There's a bit of discussion of "overdiagnosis" or "misdiagnosis" of ADHD. This is a complex issue, but I will say I don't think anecdata is constructive here. By blaming bad parenting or video games or candy, we ignore the reams of data which show that many children can not focus and struggle MIGHTILY due to this.
Children with ADHD have less friends, less academic success, more likelihood to abuse drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, cocaine/nicotine (their dopaminergic system is uniquely vulnerable to stimulants). This is a sad trajectory for these kids, and I think we should consider carefully before we blanket accuse the medical system of overdiagnosis or misdiagnosis.
> First off, they are more motor-hyperactive, they move, fidget, get out of their chairs: their very neurochemistry develops differently, making them less adept at "sit still and write notes" aspect of school.
Right. And instead of changing school to adapt to kids (e.g., less sitting in chairs, more free play), we change kids to adapt to school (e.g., medicate, discipline, hold back).
My son was just born and we are already looking at alternatives to the public education system. Guys I work with that have school age children are constantly at odds with teachers and school administrators. Of course the kids hate it as well.
Montessori had the right idea here, but goes pretty much ignored by the mainstream. It's a travesty, really.
I think it has to do with scalability; our current education system scales much better within the ridiculous budget constraints education faces (in the US).
"This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function.
"At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion.
"The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, "mental health" programs, etc.)"
It's hard to learn math, history, science, and literature running around playing. Changing school to be what kids want compromises the school. Kids don't want to study.
Boys may have a harder time staying still and paying attention, but that isn't just a school thing. Doing any sort of research for any sort of theoretical learning in life requires those same things. You'll never get to fulfill your every desire in life. Learning the discipline to control yourself now and have fun later is just as important a life skill to learn as any. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Couldn't disagree more. Humanity has developed a society with acceptable norms to make life more enjoyable for everybody. One of the important things school does is socialize kids.
If a stranger breaks into your home and kills your kid, the natural response for a lot of people is to kill the person that did it. There are a lot of reasons why we _don't_ allow that in civilized countries. People have to be socialized to reject that natural behavior.
More to school children, they as adults will not be successful if they frequently act impulsively. Adulthood in society is finding a fulfilling career, maintaining healthy relationships, paying your bills on time, and setting fulfilling long term goals for yourself. None of those things are helped by impulsive behavior.
> It was crazy that the 5th graders could stare at me doe-eyed as I explained volcanoes and robotics, but the 7th and 8th graders just zoned out on their hidden phones (god, that's a huge issue as well) or incessantly talked to one another.
My experience as well. I taught 7th and 6th grade and the 6th graders were especially fascinating as you could see the transition happening throughout the year and for different students.
> Students transition from caring what their authority figures think (teachers/parents) to caring what their peers think (friends). This leads to a degradation in class morale, unity, and overall drive and focus.
I remember this shift clearly. And I felt a lot more unity and focus afterwards than before, it's just that as a teacher, I would've been focused on unifying against you.
Beforehand there was a subtle sense of pride that I usually got straight A's and made my parents proud. Afterward I felt like I had had it wrong the whole time:
It's not me vs you according to whatever metrics the authorities choose, comrade. It's you and me against the status quo. We must specialize in wherever the authorities are weak and exploit that to the hilt. As it turned out, the authorities were confused by their technology, so the clear path forward was for us all to become hackers--or so it seemed at the time.
And so, twenty years later, all my male friends have mediocre academic records and decent salaries, while the girls (regrettably) have it the other way.
I don't know if my path is as open to thirteen year old boys today. We launched our games from a dos prompt, opportunity for exploration beckoned at every keystroke. Nowadays everything is part of a platform, you have to go out of your way to find opportunities to tinker. It's all so constrained.
As I see it, I lucked into a growth mindset that was compatible with my pubescent priority realignment (towards my friends and against authority). Do you think that the modern world offers similar opportunities that I'm just not seeing? If not, should we design for them?
Pediatric ADHD is terribly misdiagnosed (to the point where it's hard to say if it's over- or under-diagnosed). The funnel is typically teachers complaining about classroom behavior and entering that funnel is biased towards specific personality types (and also towards people who get screening because of other learning disorders).
I also think there is a socialization problem from a fairly young age. Many elementary schools have zero-tolerance on fighting these days, but I've observed many preschool environments where the teachers are fatalistic about boys roughhousing, but will take girls to task about the same behaviors. It's certainly likely that there are biological differences as well, but the current environment seems designed to magnify them.
Where is your evidence "that ADHD is terribly misdiagnosed"? I studied the issue from a scholarly perspective, to me it seems like there is more a public perception that it's terribly diagnosed, because most people are operating on anecdata about someone they knew.
> I recall my students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic, and they used area-numbers from the bubbles to strategize.
For those wondering, I believe this game is agar.io
> I recall my students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic, and they used area-numbers from the bubbles to strategize.
Readit News
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-gi...
Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more. In general somehow reading has seemed to grow more gendered over time; if you go into the average chain bookstore its apparent that its heavily targeted towards women, and something like Amazon's free Prime reads are often almost entirely women-targeted genre selections.
Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts.
Jon Scieszka, a kids author, noticed this over fifteen years ago and started guys read, a website trying to encourage boys to do so and raise awareness about it. But it seems to have stalled, and I don't hear a lot of talk about the feminization of reading.
I really think that this is a major part of why boys fall behind. Reading in general is the basis of learning, and boys over time have moved away. There's always been cultural resistance against "book-larning" but its weird how gendered reading itself has become lately.
Unfortunately it will be another 30 years before the 'girls are disadvantaged in education' trope dies, but bad ideas like phlogestion and trickle down economics take a long time to die.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
"I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls when they grade. This favoritism, estimated in the form of individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. Gender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school"
It also shows up in more anecdotal stories like this one, in which a teacher banned boys from playing with Lego whilst letting girls do it:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/31/kindergarten-teache...
The problem is one of feminism. It's not that boys have somehow inexplicably got dumber over the past decades, it's that women have become radicalised and collectively concluded that it's OK to express explicit biases towards other women on the basis of gender, because progress.
Have to disagree; the sort of reading discussed in that study isn't conducive to positive educational outcomes, but rather is more of a social activity. (Yeah, I know reading is often thought of as a solitary activity, but reading fictional narratives may be better understood as desynchronized socialization.)
Don't get me wrong, children can enjoy an educational advantage from pleasure-reading early on, as an introduction to how to read. But after that, pleasure-reading is a largely wasteful activity, at least in terms of educational advancement.
Further advancement in reading may come from learning to read expanded English -- including [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), $\mathrm{\TeX}$, `(string)"source code"`, M+A+T+H, technical texts, diagrams, schematics, etc. -- but it's unlikely that reading young-adult narratives provides the reader with any significant advantages. In fact, I suspect that it's likely to correlate with negative educational outcomes.
He states that there are Kind Learning Environments. These are places like golf, chess, or classical piano. Here, the feedback is quick, the goals are clear, and relative ranking is knowable. To excel in these environments, it is all about drill-and-kill. Repetition and stick-hours are the name of the game.
This is in contrast to Unkind Learning Environments. These are places like tennis, business, or jazz. In the unkind world feedback is harder to come by, goals are unclear, and relative ranking is often not knowable. To excel in an unkind environment, Epstein states that you have to be an information grazer. Getting as many viewpoints and mental schemas as possible is the best way forward in an uncertain world.
Epstein's book goes much more into depth on this and has many very memorable examples. It's on Bill Gate's best books of 2020 list, despite being published in 2019.
So, I think that having more reading of any sort is then better for unkind environments, as it is a method of information grazing. Even terse dime-novels will often expose you to new ways of thinking, a new word, or a new idea. Though not the best method of information grazing (whatever that may be), it matters what boys replace it with, if anything. If they replace it with the kind learning environments of CoD or WorldofTanks, then that is not as good. If they replace it with foreign films and TV, that may be just as good.
A shot in the dark guess could be that the attention industry (and the ad industry in general) is better at targeting boys grabbing them away from both homework and at home reading at a greater scale then the other genders.
How often do school libraries have things boys want to read? In high school, even among those who did read, very few of us ever used the library because it mostly had fantasy novels, fiction, etc. My friend group wanted to read about history and economics, topics not really covered.
Could you imagine if it was said that men only really like to watch documentaries if they watch TV or movies at all? We'd think it absurd right? But for some reason the idea men shun fiction is seemed as a truism. And if people would say "oh boys are too energetic, they can't sit still for a movie" we'd think they are nuts.
I'm not sure how it happened. I wish someone would research how this idea came into dominance
Remember that "intelligence" is tied to success on standardized tests, at least in the view of educational administration, because that is the alpha and omega of getting funding and keeping your job.
However, the massive bulk of the market ends up being targeted towards women. It's something where you'd need to actually look on shelves for, as there's a weird dynamic where in female-dominated markets or places, you have male "figurehead" things while the rest of the market is dominated by and caters to women.
I noticed this in Christian fiction ironically. You will see a big author like Ted Dekker doing his spiritual action adventure/fantasy/mild horror for a wide audience, but the huge bulk of the books are historical/amish/mystery romance aimed at women, to the point where no male alternatives exist. Even the small religious science fiction market is female dominated soft romantic sf.
In this case it's milking established demographics, as the religion itself has a mild demographics issue (not enough men.) But go look at a young adult shelf sometime; even superhero books feature women protagonists and are targeted to them now.
From personal experience, Rick Riordan's series had similar interest levels between girls and boys but later series (Hunger Games, House of Night, Fault in Our Stars) did skew towards girls. My reading also fell off as I got older so I'm sure I wasn't as in touch with what my peers were reading.
Disagree. If you love to read fictions, doesn't help you at all to read tech books unless you're in it.
My hunch is, it is related with puberty. Biologically boys hit puberty late while that time girls are already on the way being matured. So it could be more about distractions during puberty. (But I am not expert in this field, need proper data to validate), May be it will be good to increasge age criteria for boys to attend school like marriage.
Another related point is, incentives in puberty. Simple thing like being good in sports make you popular in crowd. So it is more important to have proper incentives for boys for studies.
> Boys read for pleasure much less and apparently don't read as well as girls when they do: they use less challenging books and skip/skim more
Disagree. Many boys are in comics, manga, sci-fi reading than classic and fictions. In my experience, where academic curriculum is more focused on memorization boys trail behind. But they do good in competative exams where analytical questions play big role.
> Young adult books for example are targeted almost entirely towards teen girls now, and even manga or comic books seem focused on the female market in increasing amounts
This is somewhat true, specifically in states. One of the reason behind it is, marketing agencies started to target teen-age girl group heavily for whatever reasons recently.
I work in tech where the gender disparity between men and women is discussed very often -- but I don't see these conversations taking place amongst teachers, most especially for earlier primary education which is more female than male.
Maybe there is a bias here or maybe women teachers have teaching styles that resonate with female students more. It definitely needs more attention.
source: https://www.tes.com/news/could-handwriting-bias-write-exam-c...
Women in general tend to be more compliant, which becomes an issue later in life when standing up for oneself in the workplace (e.g. getting promotions and pay raises), but it's an advantage in the classroom. Men need to be shown the value of something before they will learn it. This can be a problem as a lot of school lessons have no immediate practical value.
Before him I didn't care about math at all. I only learn when it's a guy teaching me for some reason. I can't focus on a woman if she's teaching, I get bored and started thinking about what to app to make.
But not every guy teacher was the one I could focus on. He was the guy with the deepest voice, for some reason it didn't let my attention drift away.
Before that, I sucked in Chemistry, until some guy taught me. I don't know how that worked but did.
Then some guy taught me physics but his voice wasn't manly, and I started sucking at physics after that.
So I'd say as a guy, I was almost always better taught by men. Women (young or middle aged) bored me away from the subject. And that used to reflect in the batch performance for almost every guy.
Girls weren't impacted by it at all. They got good grades either ways man or woman.
I realize now how horrible it all sounds, but trust me I tried.
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Because it doesn't fit the SJW narrative.
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UNESCO [1], World Bank [2], Unicef [3] have specific goal programs here.
[1] http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/priority-areas...
[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/girlseducation
[3] https://www.unicef.org/education/girls-education
- Why only black lives matters, what about white people, asians and many others? Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter' ?
- Why only 'lets girls to get code', what about boys and trans ? Why do we scare to say 'lets get everyone to code' ?
- Why do countries identify themselves with a single religion ? Why can't we respect the all religions ?
In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge. People are so scared to say right things and get shunned publicly. We should not create our policies based on phobias, stigmas and to allur particular votebank, but for universal integration.
Let's have first right vision. It needs a real courage to say the right things and more to do the same.
I honestly don’t see this as a problem. So what if a person gets a little privilege just because they belong in a minority? What bothers me is the more common case of privileged person taking advantage of their privilege.
> Why do we scare to say 'all lives matter'?
Because I always hear “all lives matter” said in response to “black lives matter”. To me that sounds like you are discounting my previous statement, as if it’s not entirely sufficient, that black lives matter.
“All lives matter” is something that people also say. e.g. I hear animal rights activists say that all the time. Even the very same people that say “black lives matter” in an anti-racist rally are likely to say “all lives matter” in an pro-immigration rally, pointing to the fact that many immigrants suffer preventable deaths on the migratory routes.
> In this well connected world, the price of being politcally incorrect could be huge
Good. If I say something that insults a lot of people I would like to know about it, so that I can know better in the future. I hate to be the one that speaks like an idiot and never gets corrected.
The elephant in the room is that Boys’ academic underperformance is tied to class, and thus resolving the issue has gone nowhere, because there’s no such thing as class and because the responsibility for all under-achievement therefore lies with the individual.
This one suggests (socioeconomic) class is a factor in lower performing boys' performance. This is true: at least in the US, boys' academic performance is more affected by socioeconomic class than girls' (though both are very much so).
balls187 says that the way boys' and girls' academic performance evolves vs. age is different. This is also true.
Edited to add: please also see the work from David Figlio et al. mentioned in Krona’s comment below. That’s an interesting study design that tries to demonstrate that boys in aggregate need higher quality schooling to achieve the same level of performance as girls in aggregate.
Can you explain this?
1. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.p20161074
It ends on a note saying that the way to fix is by acknowledging the fact that boys are falling behind, and adjusting our teaching methods and schools' social environments.
Anyone with experience in teaching environments knows girls are way worse at ostracizing successful students.
It’s very interesting to me the claim that boys are quitting because there’s too much competition, because my experience is the complete opposite. The only thing that makes boys quit competing in my experience is either seeing the competition as pointless (“bad boy” attitude) or realizing that the competition is not fair.
A lot of teachers are unaware as to how smart some kids can be. I’ve seen kids swap their names in tests just to validate the hypothesis that their language teacher was assigning grades based on who wrote what (which, having seen their numbers, looks like it was indeed happening).
Prior to puberty, nearly all the top performing students were girls. After puberty, boys were more represented.
The theory I heard was societal pressure in the US was higher on girls to be "liked" and accepted, and that girls felt that doing well in school was counter to that. Girls would stop focusing on performance and ultimately move towards the center of the curve.
Pressure to be liked, and antithetical attitudes towards academic performance also applied to boys as well, but to a lesser degree.
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This article from 18 years ago suggests that girls received extra encouragement to overcome the lowered expectations due to their gender.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-gap-boys-lagging/
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This isn't "bad parenting" or "overdiagnosis of ADHD" by the way, the brain of a young male develops differently, specifically their pre-frontal cortex (executive function, how to behave/regulate oneself) develops much slower, whereas the motor-neural cortex is overly developed, relative to girls.
Beyond any developmental difference in the sexes, there's culture. Where I taught, the South and West sides of Chicago, any troubled boy was more likely to join a gang, sell drugs, commit violence, etc. These poor boys could be jumped and beaten for living on the wrong street. One student was having anger issues, his cousin got killed, he had latent anger issues which prevented prioritization of school work. Another common issue: his father is gone, he's switching homes constantly, there's no stability to facilitate the slow, incremental progress that is school and learning.
Beyond sheer dangerous problems like the above, I'd say boys channel their effort into sports and gaming more, whereas the girls I taught were more concerned with social circles, popularity, social media, etc. Question, do we think gaming is "better" for mental health than social media? If so, boys may be advantaged, I recall my boy students used their Chromebook to play this bubble game where their bubbles had to chase and eat other students' bubbles: very benign and strategic.
There is a change that happens around puberty, when I was in seventh grade I noticed it acutely. Students transition from caring what their authority figures think (teachers/parents) to caring what their peers think (friends). This leads to a degradation in class morale, unity, and overall drive and focus to follow the teacher's lesson. It was crazy that the 5th graders could stare at me doe-eyed as I explained volcanoes and robotics, but the 7th and 8th graders just zoned out on their hidden phones (god, that's a huge issue as well) or incessantly talked to one another.
Edit: There's a bit of discussion of "overdiagnosis" or "misdiagnosis" of ADHD. This is a complex issue, but I will say I don't think anecdata is constructive here. By blaming bad parenting or video games or candy, we ignore the reams of data which show that many children can not focus and struggle MIGHTILY due to this.
Children with ADHD have less friends, less academic success, more likelihood to abuse drugs, like alcohol, marijuana, cocaine/nicotine (their dopaminergic system is uniquely vulnerable to stimulants). This is a sad trajectory for these kids, and I think we should consider carefully before we blanket accuse the medical system of overdiagnosis or misdiagnosis.
Right. And instead of changing school to adapt to kids (e.g., less sitting in chairs, more free play), we change kids to adapt to school (e.g., medicate, discipline, hold back).
Our approach is completely backwards.
I think it has to do with scalability; our current education system scales much better within the ridiculous budget constraints education faces (in the US).
"This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function.
"At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion.
"The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda, educational techniques, "mental health" programs, etc.)"
Boys may have a harder time staying still and paying attention, but that isn't just a school thing. Doing any sort of research for any sort of theoretical learning in life requires those same things. You'll never get to fulfill your every desire in life. Learning the discipline to control yourself now and have fun later is just as important a life skill to learn as any. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
If a stranger breaks into your home and kills your kid, the natural response for a lot of people is to kill the person that did it. There are a lot of reasons why we _don't_ allow that in civilized countries. People have to be socialized to reject that natural behavior.
More to school children, they as adults will not be successful if they frequently act impulsively. Adulthood in society is finding a fulfilling career, maintaining healthy relationships, paying your bills on time, and setting fulfilling long term goals for yourself. None of those things are helped by impulsive behavior.
My experience as well. I taught 7th and 6th grade and the 6th graders were especially fascinating as you could see the transition happening throughout the year and for different students.
I remember this shift clearly. And I felt a lot more unity and focus afterwards than before, it's just that as a teacher, I would've been focused on unifying against you.
Beforehand there was a subtle sense of pride that I usually got straight A's and made my parents proud. Afterward I felt like I had had it wrong the whole time:
It's not me vs you according to whatever metrics the authorities choose, comrade. It's you and me against the status quo. We must specialize in wherever the authorities are weak and exploit that to the hilt. As it turned out, the authorities were confused by their technology, so the clear path forward was for us all to become hackers--or so it seemed at the time.
And so, twenty years later, all my male friends have mediocre academic records and decent salaries, while the girls (regrettably) have it the other way.
I don't know if my path is as open to thirteen year old boys today. We launched our games from a dos prompt, opportunity for exploration beckoned at every keystroke. Nowadays everything is part of a platform, you have to go out of your way to find opportunities to tinker. It's all so constrained.
As I see it, I lucked into a growth mindset that was compatible with my pubescent priority realignment (towards my friends and against authority). Do you think that the modern world offers similar opportunities that I'm just not seeing? If not, should we design for them?
I also think there is a socialization problem from a fairly young age. Many elementary schools have zero-tolerance on fighting these days, but I've observed many preschool environments where the teachers are fatalistic about boys roughhousing, but will take girls to task about the same behaviors. It's certainly likely that there are biological differences as well, but the current environment seems designed to magnify them.
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
I don't agree with this sentiment, there simply wasn't great evidence that ADHD is misdiagnosed, at least when I studied it a few years back.
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For those wondering, I believe this game is agar.io
Agar.io?