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5. Boys and Education
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| 75 5 Boys and Education Masculinities affect boys as they move through the educational process in a number of ways. The evidence that boys as a group are doing poorly in comparison to girls as a group includes lower grades, being held back more, a higher dropout rate, lower test scores, more behavior problems, more suspensions, more failure, and a lower likelihood of attending college. Boys are also disproportionately diagnosed with learning disorders, particularly ADD and ADHD, and show up more frequently in special education classes. The dialogue about why this is so frequently is antifeminist and antigirl. It is said that girls and women have been overly assisted as a result of the feminist critique of education and that efforts to correct girls’ disadvantage have tilted the system against boys. The concern about boys and education dovetails with a more general concern about the “crisis” of boys and men as a result of feminist progress. A more sophisticated analysis, according to the critics, reveals several things. Most significantly, the differences among girls and boys are far more striking and significant than the differences between them. The disadvantages of boys are disadvantages only for some boys, not for all boys. A more balanced view of gender and education is that girls are advantaged or do better in some areas, boys in others. What has changed in the past few decades is the removal of barriers that held girls back, so that their achievement is now more related to their actual effort. As the data on boys and education is unpacked, what emerges is a complex picture, because external factors play such a huge role in gender and education, including familial socialization and gender norms. It is here that masculinities scholarship has much to offer from a developmental perspective, as well as in exposing the social and structural dynamics of school. Boys’ underachievement seems particularly linked to pervasive social norms that dictate that doing well in school is not a desired part of masculinity. 76 | Boys and Education Education is one of those areas where the benefit of incorporating masculinities scholarship into feminist analysis is very clear but also very challenging . It demonstrates the potential for masculinities work, while also illustrating the dangers. Most importantly, masculinities analysis reveals the complexity of the gendered nature of education and the need to approach education issues from a carefully nuanced analysis that does not buy into “either/ or” analysis but rather expands gender analysis to include boys and men. History Concerns about gender and education historically have focused exclusively on boys. John Locke, for example, worried about boys’ lack of achievement in the 1600s (Frank et al. 2003; Locke 1692). In colonial New England, only boys were educated, and there was significant resistance to educating girls (Lesko 2000). If boys failed to achieve, the system was viewed as failing them (M. Cohen 1998). Boys were assumed to have sufficient ability, so if they failed, blame was placed on external factors. Girls, on the other hand, historically were assumed incapable of being educated because they were not intellectually the equal of boys (Frank et al. 2003). If they failed, it was due to their inherent, essential nature. Contemporary concern about girls and education emerged with the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s, peaking in the mid-1990s with studies documenting how girls were cheated of classroom time and respect as compared to boys (Lesko 2000). Title IX was enacted to remedy gender inequality in education in 1972 (20 U.S.C. 1681 [2000]). Following on the heels of this focus on girls, a focus on boys emerged in the mid- to late 1990s (WeaverHightower 2003; see also Connell 2000b). This “boy turn” was highlighted in several best-selling works that claimed a “crisis” in boys’ education (WeaverHightower 2003). The sense of crisis for boys is tied to a sobering set of statistics that indicates how education fails boys. The data include lower grades, a higher rate of being held back a grade, a higher dropout rate, lower test scores, more frequent behavior problems, a disproportionate representation in the pool of students labeled learning disabled and emotionally disturbed, a higher rate of suspension, a higher rate of suicide, a greater likelihood of inflicting or being victimized by physical violence, and being less likely to attend college (Kimmel and Traver 2005). The boy crisis is also linked to concerns about violence, including bullying, harassment, homophobia, and the most dramatic instances of violence at schools, school shootings...