Literacy And Gender, Privilege And Opportunity

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I may have inadvertently begun a gender war in my Advanced Composition class.  This week we began reading Wilhelm and Smith’s award-winning “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys”:  Literacy in the Lives of Young Men.  Let’s just say there was not universal agreement among the students about the causes of or solutions to the issues addressed by Wilhelm and Smith.

I began the class by sharing a few facts.  Boys drop out of school at a rate about one percentage point higher than girls.  About 7% of all boys age 15 to 24 lack a high school diploma.  The number is closer to 4% for girls. Boys who drop out of school are more likely to wind up in prison.

In high school and college, girls have higher GPAs and take more honors classes.  And there are more girls in college.  About 58% of the entire undergraduate population is female.  And women are making significant gains in graduate school.  Only in the hard sciences, engineering, business, medicine, and law do males still outnumber females at the graduate level, and in the latter three categories not by much.

I half-joked that maybe the young women in class did not see this as a problem, or had reason to resent that their success was being cast as a masalah for male literacy.  Nonetheless, the academic decline of boys is troubling, and it’s worth asking if there are things we can and should be doing differently in the classroom to address this.

Several of the women in the class thought it was problematic to address the problems as gender-based problems or as ones that were pedagogical in nature.  If boys and girls have the same educational opportunities, then there is something boys and/or society need to do to fix this.  Some of the boys seemed to feel this was an unfair response, and while I can see why some might take it that way, I don’t think the response is without merit.  After all, why shouldn’t a boy and a girl from the same background in the same school experience similar success, unless we think there is something essentially different about boys and girls?

The discussion made me think of a very different study I just finished (which I wrote about briefly two weeks ago) called The Smartest Kids in the World.  In that book, Amanda Ripley follows three US students who study abroad in Finland, South Korea, and Poland.  These three countries are among the highest achieving countries in international tests of student learning (namely PISA), and through her study of these students and extensive interviews with many other students, Ripley attempts to draw some conclusions about why US students perform so unimpressively on international tests while students in these countries perform so well.

Now, we know that when we discuss gender or international education there can be no single causal factor.  However, among Ripley’s conclusions is the notion that, since the second world war, Finland, South Korea, and Poland have developed cultures of imperative national ascendancy.  In short, as each of these countries emerged from the crises of World War II (and in Poland’s case the more recent crises of the Cold War and the Solidarity Movement), they developed a cultural attitude “born out of crisis” that “focused the national mind” on success.  And much of this focus has been on education.

I have been wondering if this rationale could also be applied to the rapid ascendency of girls and women in the US in the area of education.  The passage of Title IX in 1972 did not so much launch a new cultural attitude as catalyze a long-emerging one.   

Ripley writes that after World War II “wealth had made [academic] rigor optional in America.”  We were so prosperous for so long, so dominant on the world scene for so long, that we had grown to assume things would always be so.  By contrast, the Finlands, South Koreas, and Polands of the world possess a hunger we have long lacked.

Could something similar be said about boys in the US?  Has male privilege existed for so long, been entrenched in our culture for so long, that we (not just adolescent boys but all of us) have come to assume success for boys regardless of effort or participation?  By contrast, are our girls, so recently given equal educational opportunities, in possession of a hunger or a focus that has likewise been born of the crisis of long-denied educational opportunities?

I know this would be at best only one factor, but the question is worth asking.