Topic 8 Primary Education
Week 11
Do boys and girls receive equal treatment in education?
?Should boys behave more like girls?
?Is single-sex education the answer?
“Boys, Not Girls, as Society's Victims,” by Richard Bernstein’s review of The War against Boys
Christina Hoff Summers’ book argues that American education, despite popular perception, shortchanges boys, not girls.
Summary:
1. Mr.Sommer: First, boys being boys is not terrible. Second, girls are enjoying more freedoms and opportunities than any young women in human society.
2. Cause: women’s rights movement was veering toward self-pity and authoritarianism.
3. There is little evidence to support the notion that schools shortage girls. Girls are doing better than boys in school: getting better grades, going to college more often and join in more extracurricular activities than boys.
4. Incontrovertible fact: at top echelon of American corporate and professional life, women are grossly underrepresented.
5. Boys does seriously wrong not because of patriarchal culture but the absence of fathers.
“How the Schools Shortchange Boys” by Gerry Garibaldi .Garibaldi shares his personal experience as teacher.
He uses the example of Brandon to show us how feminized schools shortage boys.
Summary:
1. The feminization of our school is real-and far more pernicious than he imagined. Boys have become increasingly disengaged. Only 65 percent of them earned high school diploma in the class of 2003, compared with 72 percent of girls.
2. Feminists complaints that girls were losing voice in a male-oriented classroom have prompted the educational establishment to turn the schools upside down to make them more girl-friendly, to the detriment of males.
3. It is boys’ aggressive and rationalist nature –redefined by educators as a behavior disorder-that is getting so many of them in trouble in feminized schools.
4. Boys want a rational explanation for everything. If unconvinced by your reasons, they won’t work hard to learn. They often asked: what was the point of this lesson? But girls seldom do.
5. While girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male dysfunction in this world, female diagnosed with disabilities simply don’t exist. From then on, boys’ expectations of themselves as well as their teachers’ plummet. Special education rarely helped these children.
6. Boys today feel isolated and outgunned, but many don’t lack pluck and courage. They often seem to have more of it than their parents. Brandon’s struggle is an honest one: to prevent truth and his integrity。
6．Boys who get special education at last may have forged the resiliency of survival. But that’s not what school is for.“Single-Sex Ed 101” by Meghan O'Rourke
In this article, O'Rourke argues against single-sex education.
In October 2006, a new federal regulation made it easier for public schools to be single-sex institutions. O’Rourke thought the new approaches are based on magnifying gender differences. The single-sex school agenda are
programmatic and pseudoscientific. The single-sex education is somehow To urge that all students learn in programmatically gender-tailored ways– and even different things.
The National Association for Single Sex Public Education is head by a psychologist Leonard Sax. His solution is to urge educational techniques that cater to the unique gender characters. (i.e. girls have better teamwork, more sensitive hearing, and don’t enjoy abstractions. In a word, girls and boys learn differently.)
Several points against Sax. 1, despite the gender differences, there is wide overlap in capacities among individual boys and girls. 2, good teachers are, or should be, fine-tuning classroom chemistry. 3, we still don't fully understand the import of the neuroscientific studies Sax cites and leaping to sweeping, untested conclusions is hardly scientific.
Though at single-sex institutions students score better than their peers at co-ed schools according numerous studies. And one goal of single-sex educators is to get kid to enjoy school. But the gender-specific approach may easily narrow learning options for kids. (In the article, English learning is written as an example.)
And single-sex education goes against another central goal of school: learning how to work with those who have different aptitudes from your own. (An example about metaphors is given here.)
Within the single-sex education, the idea of ―essential‖ gender differences will reinforce gender-based thinking and filter down to kids and student who absorb others’ ideas about their group’s handicaps exhibit further declines in aptitude in the contested areas.
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By 张昱旻
“Learning Separately” by Peter Meyer
Meyer argues in favor of single-sex education.
Page 12 & 14
Profiles of the oldest girls’ school (Emma Willard) & the oldest boys’ school (Roxbury Latin) in USA
Both distinguished by academic excellence, and their respective leaders believe single gender is a vital part of the school’s program.
On Emma Willard
·a father thought his daughter ―was just not getting a serious education‖ in public school (He sent his daughter to Emma Willard.)
·‖You get really tired of dealing with boys. They are always a distraction in class…. But teachers always favored them.‖ Said a member of Emma Willard.
On Roxbury Latin
·‖One of our secrets to our success is that we are independent. We can do what we want.‖
·Faculty and students see the single-gender environment as liberating rather than confining. ―The big coed high school settings can be pretty repressed in many ways‖ said a teacher.
On K-4 School
· ―Carroll says that single-sex classes is just one of th e secrets to BCCS’s success.‖
―The first reason is to eliminate social distraction.
The second element is that there are certain things that boys and girls won’t do while the other gender is present in the classroom.
正文page 11, 13 &15
·Separate boys and girls so they can get their work done. ‖We can concentrate a lot better without boys.‖ ‖Young men
are able to focus much more ably on academics without girls.‖
·Single-sex classes avoid the fear of embarrassment or teasing from the opposite sex.
·On Page 15, two figures show the difference between boys and girls on academic performance (boys better on math and science while girls better on reading) and on educational attainment (i.e., graduation rate –women are better).
·Providence college sociologist Cornelius Riordan found that s ingle-sex schooling helps to improve academic achievement, with benefits greater for girls than boys, and that underprivileged children got the most benefit.
Sociologist James Coleman said there were times when coeducation is thought to be the right institution (此处建议此词作―制度‖解). At the beginning, single-sex school was just for boys. And the elimination of single-sex schooling could be seen as elimination of the dominance of boys’ schools.
Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights and feminist movements combined their equality crusade fervor to ―open‖ previously exclusive men’s (public) schools to women, and white schools to blacks. As a result, the congress passed a legislation mandating equal education for both sexes. Private schools fell the pressure as well, thus many wen coed as well. There was ample evidence to justify feminists’ skepticism about single-gender education, since for many decades (even centuries) such schooling was meant only to reinforce gender stereotypes and prejudices.
By then, the gender fights started to rise inside. Girls aged 9 to 15 suffered from lower self-esteem and less willingness to stand up for their views with teachers. Thus, great efforts were made to raise their self-confidence, and it has made sense to a large extent.
However, the problem has gotten so far out of hand—schools have become sort of anti-boy, which results in boys less challenging. Thus, the idea of single-sex education was raised up once again. In June of 1996, the Supreme Court declared VMI’s all-male admissions policy unconstitutional while noting the advantages of single-gender education. As a result, more and more single-sex publish schools have been set up since then. Study after study has demonstrated that girls and boys in single-sex schools are academically more successful and ambitious than their coeducational counterparts.
It is true, as Salomone says, that sometimes ―same is equal,‖ other times ―different is equal,‖ and still other times, ―more is equal.‖