It's a male thing
Are boys struggling to achieve because schools are too
girl-friendly?

Boys and girls are different. There’s no disputing that. How schools deal with those differences—or not—is an entirely different matter, and one that can generate plenty of disagreement.

Some basic facts do seem to confirm the concerns of authors such as Michael Gurian, who believes that boys are not being well-served by what he calls our “girl-friendly” schools. Boys receive 70 to 90 percent of the D’s and F’s given in high school, they create up to 90 percent of classroom discipline problems, and they account for 80 percent of high school dropouts and less than half of college students, notes Gurian, whose most recent book is titled, The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life.

By girl-friendly, Gurian means that success in school comes more readily for students who can read and write well—areas in which girls tend to do better than boys. The flip side is that boys—obviously the generalizations don’t apply across the board—learn better when they can move around rather than sit still.  That can translate into discipline problems in a classroom where quiet and order are expected. What’s more, the majority of teachers are female. Gurian, who has trained more than 15,000 teachers through his institute in Colorado, argues that teachers who deal better with a noiser and more disorderly atmosphere tend to connect better with boys.

Single-sex classrooms are one extreme approach to boy-girl differences. That approach has drawn more interest lately, and not only among those like Gurian who see the merit of different instructional approaches based on gender. Others recognize single-sex classrooms as a way to reduce distractions that result from having boys and girls in the same room, especially after elementary school.

Gurian’s solutions to address the needs of boys include some physical changes in classrooms, as well as modifications in curriculum and learning materials. Some of his more controversial suggestions focus on what Gurian sees as the physiological differences between the sexes. For example, he believes teachers should have more light in their classrooms and should speak louder to boys because males don’t see or hear as well as females.

Likewise, to appeal to boys’ visual nature, teachers should use more visual aids rather than just reading a story, for example. Increased use of videos, movies and other multi-media in language arts might encourage more reading and writing among males. Schools should also provide a wider variety of reading materials to include topics that appeal to boys, he adds. Technology can be another tool to help boys. Because Gurian believes boys don’t take notes as well as girls, schools should consider making laptops more available for note-taking. And back to the difficulty that boys have sitting still, schools should allow them to move around more during activities, which Gurian says might also give their creativity a boost.

Clearly, Gurian’s ideas are controversial and are not shared by all experts, especially some of his notions about gender-based brain differences. But there is growing evidence that more boys are being left behind in school, so the more discussion there is about how to prevent that, the better.