Education can't be fixed until this is addressed
I talk a lot about education here. Most of the time, it’s about the cultural issues surrounding education. I’m an advocate for school choice and I’m a homeschool dad, “declared” an honorary homeschool mom by my homeschool co-op.
The fact that I have kids has made me very interested in education, up to and including taking my daughter’s education into my own hands.
One thing I’ve noticed for some time is the unequal outcomes in education.
A lot of people talk about racial inequalities regarding educational outcomes, but I’ve been looking at the inequalities based on sex.
In short, girls perform better than boys. They have higher GPAs and while boys tend to do better on standardized tests like the SAT than girls, that advantage is shrinking—to say nothing of becoming meaningless as more schools stop using the SAT altogether. Further, more girls are enrolling and completing college than boys.
This wouldn’t be the end of the world except for the fact that this disparity creates issues down the road. Women want to marry men who are economically equal to them, if not who make more. College-educated women, as a result, don’t want to date men who aren’t also college-educated. This creates a situation where good, decent, hardworking men are left struggling, looking for partners in a world that is pushing them away simply because of educational outcomes.
Which brings me to part of the problem.
See, while we talk about CRT in the classroom and gender ideology being foisted upon our kids, the educational system in general is failing young men even without these problems.
In Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Laurence Steinberg writes that ‘high-school aged adolescents make better decisions when they’re calm, well rested, and aware that they’ll be rewarded for making good choices.’ To which most parents, or anybody recounting their own teen years, might respond: tell me something I don’t know.
But adolescents are wired in a way that makes it hard to ‘make good choices.’ When we are young, we sneak out of bed to go to parties; when we get old, we sneak out of parties to go to bed. Steinberg shows how adolescence is essentially a battle between the sensation-seeking part of our brain (Go to the party! Forget school!) and the impulse-controlling part (I really need to study tonight).
It helps to think of these as the psychological equivalent of the accelerator and brake pedals in a car. In the teenage years, our brains go for the accelerator. We seek novel, exciting experiences. Our impulse control – the braking mechanism – develops later. As Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist and neurologist, writes in his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, ‘The immature frontal cortex hasn’t a prayer to counteract a dopamine system like this.’ There are obvious implications here for parenting, and the importance of helping adolescents develop self-regulation strategies.
Adolescence, then, is a period when we find it harder to restrain ourselves. But the gap is much wider for boys than for girls, because they have both more acceleration and less braking power. The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labelled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.
Think of the adults you know with ADHD. Think of the difficulties we have just dealing with day-to-day life.
Now, imagine an entire sex that’s basically that way at the moment when they need the most maturity, the most focus.
That’s what we’re dealing with.
This creates…issues.
The gender gap in the development of skills and traits most important for academic success is widest at precisely the time when students need to be worrying about their GPA, getting ready for tests, and staying out of trouble. A 2019 report on the importance of the new science of adolescence from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine suggests that ‘sex differences in associations between brain development and puberty are relevant for understanding… prominent gender disparities during adolescence.’ But this emerging science on sex differences in brain development, especially during adolescence, has so far had no impact on policy. The chapter on education in the National Academies report, for example, contains no specific proposals relating to the sex differences it identified.
The debate over the importance of neurological sex differences, which can be quite fierce, is wrongly framed as far as education is concerned. There are certainly some biologically based differences in male and female psychology that last beyond adolescence. But by far the biggest difference is not in how female and male brains develop, but when. The key point is that the relationship between chronological age and developmental age is very different for girls and boys. From a neuro-scientific perspective, the education system is tilted in favour of girls. It hardly needs saying that this was not the intention. After all, it was mostly men who created the education system; there is no century-old feminist conspiracy to disadvantage the boys. The gender bias in the education system was harder to see when girls were discouraged from pursuing higher education or careers and steered toward domestic roles instead. Now that the women’s movement has opened up these opportunities to girls and women, their natural advantages have become more apparent with every passing year.
The gender gap widens further in higher education. In the US, 57 per cent of bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to women, and not just in stereotypically ‘female’ subjects: women now account for almost half (47 per cent) of undergraduate business degrees, for example, compared to fewer than one in ten in 1970. Women also receive the majority of law degrees, up from about one in twenty in 1970.
Now, I tend to agree that this wasn’t some nefarious plan by The Matriarchy to put men at a disadvantage going forward. The system was, in fact, created by men.
But I’ve never said men get everything right.
The author notes that this wasn’t exactly obvious when young women weren’t really going off to college and then seeking a career. Sure, many would go off to college, but a lot of that back in the day was to simply be well-rounded in one’s education so they could hold a conversation at parties.
They weren’t expected to earn money themselves, so the issues with inequality wouldn’t be obvious.
Today, things have changed, but the way we ultimately teach hasn’t. And yes, this system favors girls over boys. This is something I’ve observed before, though now we have more of the science behind why it does.
Now, I’ve always said that unequal outcomes are signs that we should figure out why those outcomes are unequal and then find a way to address the causes.
In this case, we know.
It should be noted that piece from The Spectator points out that the gender gap exists regardless of race. What I mean is that it’s not just one demographic driving this. While black educational outcomes are lower than, say, Asian outcomes, the gender difference tends to be pronounced everywhere.
And when you consider brain development—basically, most boys are the equivalent of having adult ADHD—and you’ve got the root of the problem. Yet there are ways we can adjust how we educate boys so that we can cut the gap.
The problem? It would likely end co-education as we know it.
If boys and girls learn differently, and need to be approached differently for education, then it’s not reasonable to expect teachers to handle both approaches in the same classroom. At a minimum, classes would need to be made up at least primarily from students of the same gender.
This would likely lead to a return to all-boys and all-girls schools. It doesn’t have to, but I don’t see any advantages to putting more burden on educators to juggle two different approaches by having them in the same school.
Unfortunately, I don’t see it happening.
Why? Because teachers don’t want to change what they’re doing.
Most teachers are women. We’re seeing better educational outcomes for women. Any attempt to actually improve things for boys will likely be met with bitter opposition, claims of misogyny, and who knows what else.
While feminism isn’t to blame for the status quo becoming the status quo, it’s unlikely feminism will be open to changing the status quo.
Maybe that’s where school choice can be beneficial.
If boys need a different approach to education, then maybe private all-boys or primarily boys schools could benefit from school choice programs that will allow boys to be enrolled in an educational facility that caters to their needs.
Keeping girls out wouldn’t necessarily be required—the issue isn’t the presence of female students, after all—though I’m not sure if they would thrive in the same environment a boy would, for the most part.
And if it’s school choice, those who it doesn’t work for can seek education elsewhere.
Unfortunately, right now, it’s all a dream. It’s a fantasy that I can only hope comes to fruition before it’s too late.
Tilting at Windmills is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for 15% off the first year or making a one-time donation here. Your support is greatly appreciated.