by Hanna Rosin
A mother who went to college seems to have some effect on the daughter’s chances of finishing college, but no effect on her sons; they just don’t seem to consider her a suitable role model, or to be inspired to follow her example. These dynamics set the stage for a matriarchy laying down roots. Women in the middle class are less likely to get married these days, and if they do marry, more likely to marry someone without a college degree. Thus we look into a future where, generation after generation, mothers serve as role models for aspiring daughters while sons look on, lost. And, reversing centuries of tradition, families are investing in their daughters. The son preference that prevailed for so much of history was not based only on sentimental attachment or habit. Families poured their resources into sons because sons were the most likely to succeed, and perhaps to help support their parents in old age. With women dominating American colleges, the still-striving middle class is putting its best bet on its daughters.
HOW DID THIS COME TO PASS? What goes on in the earlier years of schooling that discourages more boys from going to college? Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, various experts have looked in vain for the magic index or theory that could explain what is going wrong with boys. Many of their theories contradict one another. Christina Hoff Sommers caused a storm in 2000 with her Atlantic story “The War Against Boys,” which blamed a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers. Many other experts blamed a rigid and overly macho insistence on competition and testing.
The latest trend is to look for answers in brain scans. Boys, writes Michael Gurian, best-selling author of The Wonder of Boys and several other books explaining the “male mind,” are “graphic thinkers and kinesthetic learners,” meaning they like systems and prefer to move around a lot when they learn. In a Newsweek story, “The Trouble with Boys,” Peg Tyre referred to the “kinetic, disorganized, maddening and sometimes brilliant behaviors that scientists now believe are not learned but hard-wired.” But as neuroscientist Lise Eliot has written, brain science has only begun to figure out the fundamentals of neurological gender difference, and all those colorful illustrations of the male mind and the female mind are at this early stage, “frankly, bogus.” Neuroscientists know something about the different form and functions of the male and female brains, but not nearly enough to decide on “any meaningful differences between boys’ and girls’ mental or neural processing as they learn how to speak, read, or memorize their times tables,” writes Eliot.
The Nation’s Report Card (officially the National Assessment of Educational Progress) is a series of tests that’s been given every few years since the late 1960s by the Department of Education, as a kind of check-in on the progress of students in different grades. In the latest assessment, girls scored much higher than boys in reading, but girls have always scored higher in reading. The only significant change over the last decade or so is a dip in twelfth-grade boys’ scores. The dip is most acute for boys from poor and minority families but is not exclusive to them. At the end of high school, nearly one in four white sons of college-educated parents scored “below basic” on the reading section of the NAEP, compared to 7 percent of girls. In math, scores of both boys and girls have been steadily improving, but in the last few years girls have been closing the gap.
In any given year the differences are not alarming, and in some years boys in certain grades even do better than girls. But cumulatively the numbers paint a picture of an education system that plays to girls’ strengths, and a new generation of girls who are confident and ready to rise to those expectations. Schools have in effect become microcosms of the larger economy. Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, summarizes the trend this way: “The world has gotten more verbal; boys haven’t.” In the late 1990s, educators acted on the correct assumption that all jobs now require more sophisticated writing. Cops now need advanced degrees and practice in communication skills; factory workers are expected to be able to fill out elaborate orders. Society expects most workers to have college-level literacy, even if their day-to-day jobs do not really require that.
Schools responded accordingly and began pushing verbal skills earlier in the curriculum. Now a typical pre-kindergartner learns what a first-grader used to learn. The verbal curriculum heats up long before boys are mature enough to handle it. As a result, they start to think of themselves early on as failures in school. Their discouragement builds and, many years down the road, schools face what Whitmire calls the ninth-grade bulge. That year often produces much larger classes than subsequent years, because classes are full of boys waiting it out until they are old enough to drop out altogether. Girls meanwhile amp up their ambition as they progress through school. They are more likely than boys to take college-preparatory classes, including geometry, algebra II, chemistry, biology, and foreign languages, although boys are more likely to take physics. A University of Michigan study found that 67 percent of female high school seniors say they plan to graduate from a four-year college, compared with 55 percent of male students.
Beyond straight verbal skills, boys tend to get tripped up by what researchers call “noncognitive skills,” meaning the ability to focus, organize yourself, and stay out of trouble. Boys of every race and background have a much higher incidence of school disciplinary and behavior problems and suspensions, and they spend far fewer hours doing homework. They are much more likely to be in special ed programs or diagnosed with a disability or some form of autism. Teachers consistently rate girls as being less disruptive and putting in more effort than boys in high school. And these days the temptations that can siphon off effort are much greater. Boys and girls both fritter away time on technology, but studies show that boys tend to do it in much longer blocks, spending hours after school playing video games. In fact, a consensus is forming that the qualities most predictive of academic success are the ones that have always made up the good girl stereotype: self-discipline and the ability to delay gratification. In other words, the ability to spend two hours doing your homework before you take out the PlayStation.
Of course, it’s possible that girls have always had the raw material to make better students, that they’ve always been more studious, organized, self-disciplined, and eager to please, but, because of limited opportunities, what did it matter? In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860, it’s clear that Maggie is much better suited to higher education than her brother Tom. She’s more curious and open-minded, and always has a book in her hand (although in that era, Maggie’s hunger for learning is interpreted as rebellious, not obedient). But the day Tom comes home from school and Maggie offers him two half crowns and a sixpence, he says: “What for? I don’t want your money, you silly thing. I’ve got a great deal more money than you, because I’m a boy. I shall always have half sovereigns and sovereigns for my Christmas boxes, because I shall be a man, and you only have five-shilling pieces, because you’re only a girl.” Silly though Tom thinks she is, he promises to take care of her always.
Now girls have much more of a sense that their efforts in school will count for something. “Monitoring the Future,” a large and long-running national survey of high school students, showed a rising generation of girls brimming with ambition. Nearly half of the girls said it’s important to be a leader, up from 19 percent in 1975. Seventy-one percent said they wanted to make a contribution to society. And for all the talk of girls’ declining self-esteem in the middle and high school years, in the most recent survey girls of that age rated themselves happier than ever before. Are they satisfied with “life as a whole”? Again, 71 percent said yes. And 75 percent said they were satisfied with themselves.
MY SCHOOL-AGE SON AND DAUGHTER are equally good students, but I can see how the system strains him in ways it does not strain her. In the early days, when my daughter was restless or nervous in school she created a series of imaginary finger puppets—the toothpaste fairy, the penny fairy—and played with them silently under the hem of her dress. A teacher watching her would see not
hing other than a girl looking down, sitting still; if called on she would snap back to attention and answer. My son, in the same circumstance, would stand up and talk without being called on, fidget and take off his shoes, or, if he was really restless, poke or shove one of his classmates until he got a reaction. Whether the school demands unreasonable stillness from him is hard to say. I only know that what was expected came much more naturally to her than it did to him.
As they have gotten older, they have continued to do well, but she does it with much less effort and assistance from me. At night before going to bed she makes lists of what she needs to get done on the following day or week and sends me e-mail reminders of what I need to buy her for projects. Her weekly to-do list can sometimes be longer than mine: practice piano, clean recorder, write essay in Spanish, frost cupcakes for the bake sale, etc. I realize I am making her sound like a stereotype of the good girl, but that’s not a fair way of seeing it, really. Why should she not be rewarded for her diligence and sense of responsibility?
As school gets more complicated, my son, by contrast, gets more easily overwhelmed. He sometimes remembers his projects and sometimes forgets, and as a result I can never just count on him remembering and take them off my list. I recall a few years ago a friend joking with me that in an age where school demands so much more, so much earlier, moms have become their sons’ secretaries. I’ve never forgotten that. Now I do everything in my power to help him develop his own inner secretary—write checklists he can look at himself every morning, put up a calendar where he can note future deadlines—anything to avoid him becoming the boy about whom the college admissions officers say, “What a nice essay his mom wrote.”
Recently I gathered together a focus group of my kids’ friends to ask them about their experiences in school. Immediately the difference between the boys and the girls became obvious. The boys seemed much more unruly but at the same time highly sensitive to being criticized. They had the sense that school was set up in a way designed to trip them up. “Don’t stand this way. Do stand that way,” as one second-grader told me. (Or as my son recently captioned a stick figure of his third-grade teacher: “Da-da-da, don’t do that! Put that down!”) Pretty soon all the talk of school sent the boys’ minds wandering over to action heroes, and they started acting out Raiders of the Lost Ark. I could see for myself what the teachers were dealing with. Tell a boy what to do and he will start to mastermind his escape. “You have to get in trouble sometimes,” one boy asserted.
This, I suppose, is the “kinetic,” “disorganized,” and “sometimes brilliant” behavior that Newsweek was referring to. But there are only so many Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses who get to behave that way and still succeed. In the last few years, educators have started to think of ways to marshal that rebellious energy in more productive ways. Australia and the UK are already several years ahead of the United States on this. In Australia, for example, the government has set up a task force to address the boy crisis, and has run several experimental programs that pay special attention to boys. A lawmaker in China recently proposed “differentiated” education, after noting that women were outperforming men in college entrance exams and dominating all the top high schools and universities, and men accounted for 80 percent of the fifty million children who are rated “poor students.”
Some of these programs do things as simple as introducing reading material that boys might like better—books that involve more adventure or mischief. Some break up academic tasks into smaller chunks to keep boys’ attention. Some just add breaks for boys to run outside or skateboard. There is even a new fad for all-boy classrooms, following the logic that the new underdogs need their own specially tailored environment to succeed. Any of these strategies might work in particular neighborhoods or situations.
Many parents I know agonize over a boy-culture that discourages academic or brainy behavior. Just before middle school, parents start to think of their boys as facing a choice of two roads: trouble or success. The responsible ones recognize that they can’t change the way the world is heading, but they can put a boy in an environment that doesn’t make him feel like a failure, and give him enough tools at least to keep up.
The first step, however, is to stop pretending the problem does not exist. As some Australian educators told Whitmire: “We’re over that debate. That was a debate twenty years ago.”
A MORE PERFECT POISON
THE NEW WAVE OF FEMALE VIOLENCE
In 2007, forty-seven-year-old Larissa Schuster of Clovis, California, was tried for killing her husband, Timothy, by stuffing him in a vat of acid. According to the prosecution, Schuster and a young male accomplice used a stun gun on Timothy, put him to sleep with chloroform, and then stuffed his body, headfirst, into a fifty-five-gallon blue barrel. Afterward, Schuster poured a few jugs of hydrochloric acid into the barrel to disintegrate the body. When police discovered the barrel in a storage unit, they found only the liquefied remains of the lower half of the body, and hardly any identifiable tissue. Forensic pathologists and other experts surmised that the body had been sawed in half, or that his feet had been sawed off in order to fit into the barrel. “She wanted to wipe him out completely,” said Bob Solis, a friend of Timothy’s, told me. “Make it as if he were never here.”
As the California “acid murderer,” Schuster joined a long line of infamous lady poisoners who work with lethal chemicals instead of brute force. Poison has long been considered the woman’s weapon of choice, although it’s not really a choice—women are generally weaker than men and can’t overpower them in a physical fight. Still, poison crimes have come to stand for women’s supposed lack of raw aggression and will to confront. A poison crime connotes domestic entrapment, the abused wife, or the wife with a lover, too timid to ask for a divorce. The weapon is typically something she bought for less than $5 during her regular round of oppressive errands, at the supermarket or the auto parts store. The favored poison these days is bleach, although many women opt for a more organic approach. Recently a Colorado woman slipped leaves from a foxglove plant into her husband’s salad and told him to make sure he ate his greens. Foxglove leaves contain the deadly poison digitalis.
In mythology and literature, poison is associated with witches, midwives, and cooks, and represents an “attempt to assert power by the powerless,” writes Joyce Carol Oates in a review of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In that novel the Blackwood sisters are town misfits, suspected by their rural neighbors of casting spells. They are also curiously obsessed with kitchens. Food is a fetish in the novel: home-cured bacon, fresh preserves, cookies, coleslaw, and endless pourings of tea. After poisoning the sugar bowl one day, the queer and childlike sister Merricat announces, “I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”
Schuster, however, did not fit this model of powerlessness at all. At the time of the murder, she was running her own successful biochemical lab, Central California Research Laboratories. (BAD CHEMISTRY was one headline favored by papers during the case.) Neighbors described her as working from six thirty A.M. until seven thirty P.M. most days, leaving Timothy, who was a nurse, to drive their two children to doctor’s appointments, music lessons, and football games (“Mr. Mom,” the media called him). During the trial, witnesses described Larissa as “intelligent,” “domineering,” “exciting,” and “ambitious,” and Timothy as “meek,” “timid,” “quiet,” and “accommodating.” Financial records showed that she made about twice as much money as he did and paid most of the mortgage on their new house. Schuster’s attorney, Roger Nuttall, described her to me as the “definite breadwinner” who “ruled the roost.” In fact, on the day of the murder, Timothy had just lost his job at Saint Agnes Medical Center; friends called the police to report him missing when he failed to show up for his exit interview.
Their relationship soured when Larissa started traveling around California, meeting with other chemical company executives, and then came home and measured her husband ag
ainst them, Bob Solis told me. “She decided he was—what’s the word—too domesticated?” Timothy liked to garden and hang out with the kids. He was a great bargain shopper and loved to cook—the night of his death he made Solis and his wife his famous vanilla custard ice cream in the churn, a recipe from his mother. Larissa, meanwhile, “was rubbing shoulders with a new class of people, and she thought he wasn’t quite up to her stature,” said Solis.
Larissa would come home and talk to their friends about what a “chickenshit” her husband was and how he should “grow up to be a man.” Over time, she became outrageously abusive. During the trial, prosecutors played voice-mail tapes in which she harangued him about how little money he made and his supposed impotence. “You couldn’t even fuck a dog,” she yelled into his voice mail. “You impotent gay faggot.” Timothy kept a gun under his couch cushion because, his friends testified, he was afraid of his wife.
At one point in the trial, the defense tried to shoehorn Larissa into the familiar lady poisoner trope. Psychiatrist Stephen Estner was called to testify that Larissa was suffering from battered spouse syndrome. “My impression was that Mrs. Schuster was a very direct and assertive person, and Mr. Schuster was a more passive and nurturing personality. And I think they started butting heads over that.” In Estner’s tortured logic, Tim’s passivity and his failings as a husband were making Larissa physically and mentally ill, with symptoms ranging from depression to irregular heart rhythms and hair loss. In a reversal of the usual scenario, she was a battered spouse, Estner posited, because Tim was not enough of a man—the first known use of what will perhaps become known as the “end of men” defense. But the jury didn’t go for it. Instead they believed the more straightforward motive, which was only novel in a case of spousal murder because it manifested itself in the wife rather than the husband: Larissa killed Timothy because she was afraid that in a divorce proceeding, he would take half of the very lucrative business she had built.