The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

Author:Hanna Rosin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781101596920
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012-09-11T07:00:00+00:00

HOW DID THIS COME TO PASS? What goes on in the earlier years of schooling that discourages more boys from going to college? Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, various experts have looked in vain for the magic index or theory that could explain what is going wrong with boys. Many of their theories contradict one another. Christina Hoff Sommers caused a storm in 2000 with her Atlantic story “The War Against Boys,” which blamed a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers. Many other experts blamed a rigid and overly macho insistence on competition and testing.

The latest trend is to look for answers in brain scans. Boys, writes Michael Gurian, best-selling author of The Wonder of Boys and several other books explaining the “male mind,” are “graphic thinkers and kinesthetic learners,” meaning they like systems and prefer to move around a lot when they learn. In a Newsweek story, “The Trouble with Boys,” Peg Tyre referred to the “kinetic, disorganized, maddening and sometimes brilliant behaviors that scientists now believe are not learned but hard-wired.” But as neuroscientist Lise Eliot has written, brain science has only begun to figure out the fundamentals of neurological gender difference, and all those colorful illustrations of the male mind and the female mind are at this early stage, “frankly, bogus.” Neuroscientists know something about the different form and functions of the male and female brains, but not nearly enough to decide on “any meaningful differences between boys’ and girls’ mental or neural processing as they learn how to speak, read, or memorize their times tables,” writes Eliot.

The Nation’s Report Card (officially the National Assessment of Educational Progress) is a series of tests that’s been given every few years since the late 1960s by the Department of Education, as a kind of check-in on the progress of students in different grades. In the latest assessment, girls scored much higher than boys in reading, but girls have always scored higher in reading. The only significant change over the last decade or so is a dip in twelfth-grade boys’ scores. The dip is most acute for boys from poor and minority families but is not exclusive to them. At the end of high school, nearly one in four white sons of college-educated parents scored “below basic” on the reading section of the NAEP, compared to 7 percent of girls. In math, scores of both boys and girls have been steadily improving, but in the last few years girls have been closing the gap.

In any given year the differences are not alarming, and in some years boys in certain grades even do better than girls. But cumulatively the numbers paint a picture of an education system that plays to girls’ strengths, and a new generation of girls who are confident and ready to rise to those expectations. Schools have in effect become microcosms of the larger economy. Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, summarizes the trend this way: “The world has gotten more verbal; boys haven’t.

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