The disappearing male, In College Classrooms, Men are Missing
NorthJersey.com ^ | 12.11.05 | MICHAEL GURIAN

The disappearing male, In College Classrooms, Men are Missing
NorthJersey.com ^ | 12.11.05 | MICHAEL GURIAN

IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college
in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that
was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my
classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better
grades than the guys.

Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't
take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as
much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They
were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here,
listening, staring at these words - this is not really who I am."

That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an
administrator at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He told me that
what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda
items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male
students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."

The disappearing male, In College Classrooms, Men are Missing
NorthJersey.com ^ | 12.11.05 | MICHAEL GURIAN

IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college
in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that
was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my
classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better
grades than the guys.

Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't
take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as
much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They
were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here,
listening, staring at these words - this is not really who I am."

That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an
administrator at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He told me that
what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda
items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male
students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."

Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are
grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men
once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students
at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003
statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing
unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the
male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next
generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.

The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially
measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of
ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react
to what has become a crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural
perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a
reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so
much about boys when men still run everything?"

It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that
our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see
thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and
in industry - men who get elected president, who own software
companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses
and John Robertses and George Bushes - and so we're not as concerned
as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering
or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level
(and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting
in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the
long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young
women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives
playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their 30s, by
which time the world has passed many of them by.

Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a
good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future
lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not
go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish
school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a
college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be
unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get
divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women, and more
likely to engage in crime.

The disappearing male, In College Classrooms, Men are Missing
NorthJersey.com ^ | 12.11.05 | MICHAEL GURIAN

IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college
in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that
was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my
classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better
grades than the guys.

Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't
take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as
much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They
were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here,
listening, staring at these words - this is not really who I am."

That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an
administrator at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He told me that
what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda
items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male
students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."

Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are
grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men
once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students
at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003
statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing
unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the
male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next
generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.

The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially
measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of
ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react
to what has become a crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural
perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a
reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so
much about boys when men still run everything?"

It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that
our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see
thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and
in industry - men who get elected president, who own software
companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses
and John Robertses and George Bushes - and so we're not as concerned
as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering
or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level
(and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting
in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the
long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young
women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives
playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their 30s, by
which time the world has passed many of them by.

Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a
good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future
lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not
go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish
school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a
college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be
unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get
divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women, and more
likely to engage in crime. He'll be more likely to develop substance
abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy,
statistically, since men who don't attend college pay less in Social
Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more
likely to father children out of wedlock, and are more likely not to
pay child support.

When I worked as a counselor at a federal prison, I saw these
statistics up close. The young men and adult males I worked with were
mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that didn't promote
education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they had
attended. They were passionate people, capable of great love and even
possible future success. Many of them told me how much they wanted to
get an education. At an intuitive level, they knew how important it
was.

Whether in the prison system, in my university classes, or in the
schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem
with how we teach and mentor boys that I call "industrial schooling,"
and that I believe is a primary root of our sons' falling behind in
school, and quite often in life.

Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions
of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put
them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids).
For many kids, this system worked - and still works. But from the
beginning, there were some for whom it wasn't working very well.
Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for
them.

Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys.
Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book,
raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes
classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This
was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't
have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught
a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with
greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a
lot of boys "in line" - competitive learning was one. And our families
were deeply involved in a child's education.

Now, however, the boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly
clear. Many families are barely involved in their children's
education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many
of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of
30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of
preschool and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be
diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered, or
"unmotivated." They will no longer do their homework (though they may
say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it,
they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or
computers), and overemphasize those.

Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them - they don't, on average, learn
as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking,
listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research
into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents, and others how
differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT
scan of a boy's brain and a girl's brain, showing the different ways
these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me,
"Wow, no wonder we're having so many problems with boys."

Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more
protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male,
yielding statistics such as these:

The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college
academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.

Boys and men constitute the majority of high school dropouts, as high
as 80 percent in many cities.

Boys and young men are 1½ years behind girls and young women in
reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some
have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the
workplace).

Grasping the mismatch between the minds of boys and the industrial
classroom is only the first step in understanding the needs of our
sons. Lack of fathering and male role models take a heavy toll on
boys, as does lack of attachment to many family members (whether
grandparents, extended families, moms, or dads). Our sons are becoming
very lonely. And even more politically difficult to deal with: The
boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the
last 20 years (an emphasis that I, as a father of two daughters and an
advocate of girls, have seen firsthand), has muddied the water for
child development in general, pitting funding for girls against
funding for boys.

We still barely see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change
from an industrial culture to a postindustrial one. We want them to
shut up, calm down, and become perfect intimate partners. It doesn't
matter too much who boys and men are - what matters is who we think
they should be. When I think back to the kind of classroom I created
for my college students, I feel regret for the males who dropped out.
When I think back to my time working in the prison system, I feel a
deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys whom we
still have time to save.

And I do think we can save them. I get hundreds of e-mails and letters
every week, from parents, teachers, and others who are beginning to
realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in
the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling
and need help. These teachers and parents are part of a social
movement - a boys' movement that started, I think, about 10 years ago.
It's a movement very much powered by individual women — mainly mothers
of sons — who say things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't
know anyone who doesn't have a son struggling in school," or, "I
thought having a boy would be like having a girl, but when my son was
born, I had to rethink things."

We all need to rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting,
and overly medicating our boys, as if we can change this guy into the
learner we want. When we decide - as we did with our daughters - that
there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look
closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys
again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in
college again.

We must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the
industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and
need help.

The disappearing male, In College Classrooms, Men are Missing
NorthJersey.com ^ | 12.11.05 | MICHAEL GURIAN

IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college
in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that
was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my
classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better
grades than the guys.

Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't
take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as
much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They
were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here,
listening, staring at these words - this is not really who I am."

That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an
administrator at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He told me that
what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda
items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male
students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."

Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are
grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men
once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students
at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003
statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing
unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the
male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next
generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.

The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially
measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of
ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react
to what has become a crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural
perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a
reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so
much about boys when men still run everything?"

It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that
our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see
thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and
in industry - men who get elected president, who own software
companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses
and John Robertses and George Bushes - and so we're not as concerned
as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering
or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level
(and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting
in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the
long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young
women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives
playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their 30s, by
which time the world has passed many of them by.

Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a
good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future
lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not
go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish
school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a
college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be
unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get
divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women, and more
likely to engage in crime. He'll be more likely to develop substance
abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy,
statistically, since men who don't attend college pay less in Social
Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more
likely to father children out of wedlock, and are more likely not to
pay child support.

When I worked as a counselor at a federal prison, I saw these
statistics up close. The young men and adult males I worked with were
mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that didn't promote
education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they had
attended. They were passionate people, capable of great love and even
possible future success. Many of them told me how much they wanted to
get an education. At an intuitive level, they knew how important it
was.

Whether in the prison system, in my university classes, or in the
schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem
with how we teach and mentor boys that I call "industrial schooling,"
and that I believe is a primary root of our sons' falling behind in
school, and quite often in life.

Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions
of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put
them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids).
For many kids, this system worked - and still works. But from the
beginning, there were some for whom it wasn't working very well.
Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for
them.

Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys.
Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book,
raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes
classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This
was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't
have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught
a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with
greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a
lot of boys "in line" - competitive learning was one. And our families
were deeply involved in a child's education.

Now, however, the boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly
clear. Many families are barely involved in their children's
education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many
of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of
30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of
preschool and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be
diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered, or
"unmotivated." They will no longer do their homework (though they may
say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it,
they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or
computers), and overemphasize those.

Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them - they don't, on average, learn
as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking,
listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research
into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents, and others how
differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT
scan of a boy's brain and a girl's brain, showing the different ways
these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me,
"Wow, no wonder we're having so many problems with boys."

Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more
protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male,
yielding statistics such as these:

The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college
academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.

Boys and men constitute the majority of high school dropouts, as high
as 80 percent in many cities.

Boys and young men are 1½ years behind girls and young women in
reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some
have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the
workplace).

Grasping the mismatch between the minds of boys and the industrial
classroom is only the first step in understanding the needs of our
sons. Lack of fathering and male role models take a heavy toll on
boys, as does lack of attachment to many family members (whether
grandparents, extended families, moms, or dads). Our sons are becoming
very lonely. And even more politically difficult to deal with: The
boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the
last 20 years (an emphasis that I, as a father of two daughters and an
advocate of girls, have seen firsthand), has muddied the water for
child development in general, pitting funding for girls against
funding for boys.

We still barely see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change
from an industrial culture to a postindustrial one. We want them to
shut up, calm down, and become perfect intimate partners. It doesn't
matter too much who boys and men are - what matters is who we think
they should be. When I think back to the kind of classroom I created
for my college students, I feel regret for the males who dropped out.
When I think back to my time working in the prison system, I feel a
deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys whom we
still have time to save.

And I do think we can save them. I get hundreds of e-mails and letters
every week, from parents, teachers, and others who are beginning to
realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in
the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling
and need help. These teachers and parents are part of a social
movement - a boys' movement that started, I think, about 10 years ago.
It's a movement very much powered by individual women - mainly mothers
of sons - who say things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't
know anyone who doesn't have a son struggling in school," or, "I
thought having a boy would be like having a girl, but when my son was
born, I had to rethink things."

We all need to rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting,
and overly medicating our boys, as if we can change this guy into the
learner we want. When we decide - as we did with our daughters - that
there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look
closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys
again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in
college again.

We must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the
industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and
need help.



--
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing
their memory, or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and
let them rewrite history." -- ***** Cheney 11/16/2005

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" -- Ambrose Bierce

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." -- John Updike

"Long term commitment in relationships is only necessary because it takes
so damn long to raise children. Marriage may well be some kind of trick
to keep the males around beyond sexual satiation." -- Captain Compassion

"Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
--Will Durant

Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMverizon.net