(no subject)

[rivendellrose]

Here's a question for you - if the dominant number of successful books for children are still written about boys, how the hell is it that a major concern in education right now is getting boys to read? What's going on here?

Same question applies to college attendance - it can't just be my imagination that more than fifty percent of college students are women, and I've got a feeling that the GPA break-down is female-biased, too. I'm not trying to say that boys or men are naturally less intelligent than women - not at all - but rather that as a general population (and horribly over-generalized) they don't give a shit about education. And I'm curious if anyone has any opinions of why or how that would be.

In other news, I'm in a horrible, depressed mood at the moment. Blargh. No connection to the previously mentioned ponderings, although the ponderings are probably symptomatic of the bad mood, to some extent.

Comments

[ursula]

If the girls read everything, and only a few books can lure boys as well, of course the books which lure those boys will be more successful.

Certain disciplines & types of schools are still male-dominated, but I think you're right about the general stats.

(I actually think about this stuff a fair amount, because it's the flip side of the "Why aren't there more women in science?" question. I could probably dig up actual literature on the subject, if I thought hard about it.)

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Good point on the first one - I knew that, too, and just didn't think of it as I was writing the post. Silly me.

The whole 'women in the sciences' thing always kind of amuses me. Yes, there are probably few women engineering majors, but from what I've seen women dominate biology, and most of my TAs in astronomy were women. I know it's accurate in some fields, but the reverse always fascinates me.

[ursula]

Yeah, the life sciences are about even. Astronomy is still male-dominated, though, so you may just have been lucky, or the department may be so small it doesn't reflect the general stats, or a disproportionate number of women may be TAing. Math averages around 30% at the grad student level, and much less once you hit tenure. Engineering, physics, and computer science have far fewer women than math.

There's at least anecdotal evidence that one reason more women don't go into technical fields is that they're more interested in other things (writing, saving the world) than similarly talented men.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

A *lot* of it is because women are steered into the so-called "soft sciences" (anthropology, sociology) and medicine rather than "hard science" like physics or chemistry. I would be willing to bet that the majority of women who *do* persist in obtaining advanced degrees in hard sciences and engineering received their undergraduate training at women's colleges.

[ursula]

I'm obtaining an advanced degree in math, and the women's college graduates are still a minority. Small liberal-arts institutions in general do produce a disproportionate number of grad students, however.

[lovelies.livejournal.com]

That's happening all over. Girls dominate the high schools here. Women are taking over the University. Even at my faculty most of the new attendants are women, and it's traditionally considered a male-oriented field - it's only in '88 that we got our first female pastors.

And it's an interesting trend. I think the introduction of co-education has something to do with it at least when it comes younger boys. And that boys in their puberty would need stricter disclipine to keep their concentration from wandering into sports and other masculine forms of socialization, the sorts of rites of passage that fall on that age, and our school system as it is now is more about personal freedom and responsibility in choosing subjects etc., which may be easier for girls in their puberty to navigate.

(Maybe because girls are traditionally raised and encouraged to be more submissive than boys?)

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Maybe because girls are traditionally raised and encouraged to be more submissive than boys?

I was thinking of it in the terms that boys desire rebellion and have a greater tendency to want to thumb their noses at authority, but you're probably right that there's a connection there. Also, intelligent/bookish girls are constantly receiving the message from books and older intelligent women role-models that education is vital, that we need to take the opportunities that our female ancestors didn't have, whereas boys have no such impetus. Society doesn't encourage boys to be doctors or lawyers or scientists, it encourages them to be basketball and football stars, and to look down on the nerds who pay attention to books and knowledge. And in my experience, even the nerd boys in highschool take the tack that they're smart already, they don't need school, it's just busy-work and all that. At least that was how my male friends viewed it in highschool.

[miss-arel.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that trend, too. In my extensive college searching of the last year, I noticed that at liberal arts or general education colleges, the female to male ratio is generally about 60:40, while at technical or science schools, it can be as low as 20:80 -- only 1 woman for every 4 men. And at the AP classes at my school, the AP math, science, and computer classes have relatively few girls, while my AP english class has only 3 boys out of about 20 students.

Why things are this way is something I shall have to think on more.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Is it sad that my strongest reaction to statistics like that is "no wonder it's so hard for intelligent women to find boyfriends who are their equals, especially in college?"

Even the AP math and science classes at my school had a fair proportion of women, and AP English was vastly female-dominated. And in college, my English senior seminars of fifteen to seventeen students tended to have two to four guys per class. Granted, the ones on the 'two' end of that spectrum tended to have concentrations more on the Jane Austen end of things, while the one with four or five was a required seminar for anyone entering departmental honors that quarter, and focused on W.E.B. duBois.

[llhinkle.livejournal.com]

A really good book that touches on this is "Out of this World; Why Literature Matters to Girls" by Holly Virginia Blackford. The book touches on how/why girls identify with boy characters (it is a feminist text, and I think her reasoning is excellent).

Boys don't necessarily read the books about them, I think.They really aren't necessarily reading at all. It's not "cool".

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Because the publishing industry, like much of the world, is still focused on men rather than women.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

Oh man, if I wasn't insane at this hour, you'd all be getting ten times the snort full.

Yes, we "smart boys" tend to think we're pretty smart already because the stuff they teach us in the liberal arts is stuff that we can learn through intuition. I've found that most things learned about thought, literature, and words are merely technical or logical terms given to realities that we know on a day to day basis. Guys snort at this kind of thing because generally, we learn the terms before we understand the concepts when we deal with things. When we start to discover that a good chunk of it is stuff we already know, it becomes simplistic and derivative. Essentially, a good deal of us learned to talk the talk early on and we've done nothing but that since then.

The current culture of the liberal arts excludes male perspectives. I believe that the critical arts community has overcompensated. While the 20th century embraced individualism and the development of personal integrity, the sarcasm and neo-marxism of the current trend can't accept an individual for his or her own traits. Instead, what most students learn in the arts now is a canon of abuse and mistreatment and then redemption through community.

The idea of a person taking a stand has given way to the idea of a community or a matriacal family weathering a storm. Men are constantly portrayed as serial killers, abusive husbands, intolerant demagogues, and figures of incompassionate authority. "positive" male roles are often of men who are forced into positions of violence and danger. Even Harry Potter has to kill and maim to protect himself. Those who don't fit those roles are often either angry losers or anti-heros. There are very few depictions in contemporary culture of positive, intelligent, understanding male role models.

While women are afforded an entire range of emotions and behaviors that are appropriate, men are severely limited in the scope of what is acceptable. Feminity has come to mean any acceptible behavior in which a woman participates, while masculinity has remained a staunchly aggressive, physical stereotype of machismo.

Increasingly, male behavior is also viewed dimly and as unacceptable. Coupled with outright parent paranoia, increasingly organized and uncompetitive playtime, and a plain lack of physical activity, I am not surprised that most boys aren't interested in school. They have nothing to do, they're restless, and they have to read books full of facts about people they don't know. Once they get to college, they are confronted with a culture that lables them as willing and participatory abusive representatives of an imperialistic partiarchy bent on the destruction of everybody.

In addition, the publishing industry is not focused on men anymore in the slightest. The industry goes where the money is and the money aint in men. Women (especially women minority writers) dominate fiction in a way that is completely unprecidented.

I believe that there are still more children books for boys than girls because girls move on to that horrible genre of 'tweener media much sooner than boys do. Boys don't have an entire machine of culture pumping out an endless parade of media at them ala the "I'm a sexy princess and boys are dumb get out of my room dad" crap that has become so popular in the last 10 years.

What is there for little boys? It's a wasteland of recycled crappy japanese cartoons, trading cards, and unisex entertainment that fails to address boys specifically. Everything has to cater to girls now lest they feel excluded.

If boys don't read it's the culture's fault, not the inherent biology of the boy.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Good points on culture, but trashing the liberal arts does not help your case.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

Forgot to spell check, mea culpa.

[zhapper.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I am not quite done.

An excellent tome on the development of the contemporary male attitude is Susan Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone also addresses the growing instability of a culture of dissociated, alienated men who can only connect through pop culture.

Let me make it clear that I don't blame feminism or the women's movement for the failure of the American man. I blame a milquetoast culture of conformity and fear. We are too quick to roll over to whatever the cultural preferences are, especially in education where a great deal of softheaded, irrational decisions about teaching and society are made without any real reasearch. Education has long been considered an intellectual back water and we've reaped the rewards in a system full of overmedication, stauch political division, and irrational, overtly authortarian policies that have absolutely no common sense whatsoever. Everyone is so worried about feeling good and playing safe that boys don't learn the concepts of negotiation, fairness, and comraderie on their own. Instead, they receive them from an outside, usually female arbiter of the system.

At home, boys either have no father or male role model due to often bitter divorce or they have a father who feels like a boy himself and has no idea how to interact with his son due to the cultural spectres of the post world war II generation gap and the fear of damaging his son's self-esteem.

Boys aren't designed to be docile creatures forced to live without good male role models and without anything but busy work and sycophancy to look forward to.

Movies and video games don't make up for building forts, riding bikes, and throwing dirt. Later, they don't make up for driving around, playing pick up games, and going to the burger joint.

This is a culture that is afraid of groups of unsupervised boys.

Subsquently, men don't know how to act anymore and it's making our boys fat, dumb and mean.

[lokapala.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was an interesting insight into American culture. Thank you.

[becksbooks.livejournal.com]

I think it depends on the age range. Speaking based on my knowledge of middle-school/high school kids, I'd say the issue begins here, while the boys are a little young for adult fiction (either in maturity or reading level) and yet too old for child lit. After a few hours (ok, a few DOZEN hours) and lots more dollars spent in the YA sections of various bookstores, I can tell you that most of the books written for those ages are catered towards girls. There are endless series written for girls (Gossip Girls, Tamora Pierce's various series', all the crappy TV show rip-off series' such as "The OC", etc.) and only stand-alone novels for boys. I would say probably 75% of what I see in the YA or Teen section is catered towards girls.

That means that boys don't tend to have a lot of selection, plus if they're in the bookstore they're faced with shelves of 'girl stuff', which re-inforces the idea that boys don't read. Which of course shows up in demographic studies, and since female-oriented books sell more, they're marketed more, and the selection for boys is even crappier.

I never even thought abut this until I started actively shopping the YA section for my classroom. It was my 3rd or 4th big purchase that I noticed 'hey, these books are almost all for girls' and started trying to find GOOD books for the guys. They are preciously few and far between.

[narsilion.livejournal.com]

"I think it depends on the age range. Speaking based on my knowledge of middle-school/high school kids, I'd say the issue begins here, while the boys are a little young for adult fiction (either in maturity or reading level) and yet too old for child lit."
Do you really think that Middle and High school boys are too young for adult fiction? In my dealings with kids (which, granted I'm not a teacher, but have always spent a lot of time around kids)
all of the Middle school and High school kids I've known have read adult fiction.

[becksbooks.livejournal.com]

High School tend to read higher-level writing, but in middle school/9th grade (who I see most) only the "smart kids" (those kids who are going to read regardless) read adult fiction. My point was, there's transitional lit for girls, but not as much for boys - they have to jump from children's lit to adult lit. Girls have all the teeny-lit catered to them, which encourages steady progression in reading, as opposed to the jump boys have to make.

A lot of it has to do with confidence level...kids aren't confident of their reading ability