Much of the active time kids used to have during school has all but vanished. Thirty years ago elementary schools offered recess twice a day. Many US schools now have recess only once a day, and some schools have eliminated free time completely. The lucky few kids who do still get let outside are often told to slow down and walk. Rarely do they get to learn what their own boundaries are, play unsupervised, or at least have the illusion of playing unsupervised. So all that restless energy that young boys have has nowhere to be released—except in the classroom.
What's good about recess? Kids pay more attention and are more focused in class.5 Studies show that cardio exercise consistently has a positive impact on both boys' and girls' memories, motor abilities, and academic performance.6 Older school administrators have told us that playtime at recess is also critical in the development of social bonding for many kids, as that is the place where friends are made and social groups have the chance to interact.
Time for roaming and daydreaming is even being cut out of kindergartens, which now resemble what used to be a first-grade class. Since boys' brains develop differently from girls', they aren't receptive to the intense reading exercises now given to kindergarteners. In general, boys will be more physically active, but less socially and verbally mature, than girls when they begin school. Since boys are more active than girls, they have more difficulty sitting still for long periods of time.7 A five year old boy and a three-and-a-half year old girl have roughly the same language abilities. Trying to get him to learn to read at that age is not developmentally appropriate.8
Furthermore, elementary classroom lessons are four-fifths language based.9 If a boy is forced to learn before his brain is ready, he is unintentionally conditioned to dislike the task, and those early negative experiences create resistance and resentment for learning in particular and school in general. Since 1980, there has been a 71 percent increase in the number of boys who say they don't like school, according to a University of Michigan study.10 That dislike is both the cause and effect of poor academic performance. This means schools must take into account variation in children's learning styles, and differential rates of knowledge acquisition, as well as gender variations by age and subject matter. Boys tend to learn best with hands-on learning activities, and schools don't offer enough opportunities to manipulate actual things. Furthermore, diaries and first-person narratives, writing styles preferred by girls, are often favored over adventure and science-fiction, themes favored by boys.11
One size education does not fit all and may end up “mis-fitting” boys more than girls. New evidence has revealed a teacher bias against boys; when tests are graded anonymously the gender gap decreases by a third.12 Essentially this is a female teacher bias against boys, as 98 percent of preschool teachers, and the vast majority of elementary, special education, and secondary schoolteachers, are women.13
Boys and girls both do better in school when they have same-sex teachers. But in science, social studies, and English, having a female teacher raised the girls' performance on a standardized test by 4 percent of the deviation while lowering the boys' performance by the same amount—creating a gender gap of 8 percent.14 Imagine how this effect is compounded for young men, who will most likely have an opposite-sex teacher for most subjects year after year.
Another problem may be that most teachers teach to the average student, yet many boys are pooled at the bottom and the very top of performers.15 Thus a lot of boys are bored because they are not being challenged while other boys don't understand or perhaps care what's going on.
One female teacher from our survey recognized the imbalance:
I taught in private schools in the USA for eighteen years. Overwhelmingly, teachers were women and I found the learning environment much more suited to girls than to boys encouraged by the requirement to sit still for long periods of time to “color inside the lines,” etc. Boys also tended to be placed on Ritalin and other drugs at a far higher rate than girls, probably to make them conform to a gynocentric environment. The notion that gender is socially constructed—while true to a large extent—only complicated the attempt to tease apart the complexity of being a boy in America.
We see this in the evidence that the US ranked thirty-sixth on math and twenty-fourth in reading, while Britain ranked twenty-fifth on math and twenty-third in reading on international comparative tests in 2012. Commonwealth nations such as Canada ranked thirteenth and eighth, Australia ranked nineteenth and thirteenth, and New Zealand ranked twenty-second and fourteenth, respectively.16 In Finland, which is one of the highest ranked countries in Europe, children don't start formal schooling until they are seven years old,17 but they are learning much at home from their families. Earlier education has many advantages when it recognizes individual differences by age and gender and type of material being taught. Children as young as two and three years old have been shown to learn a great deal of math and even basic science principles in Montessori-based schooling, which highlights tactile skills (hands-on manipulation of objects representing various things, like numbers or events) as an effective way into a child's mind, for boys as well as girls.
It takes a patient and wise adult to guide them at this age, as one middle-aged mother with both a son and daughter observed in our survey:
One of the most difficult things for small children to accomplish is to focus. Once a child's ability to focus has reached its coping limit, they start to fidget, wiggle, roll around. Anything but sit still. They literally move away from the activity that requires focus. They move away mentally, physically, and their heart is no longer in it. The more mature their brains are, then the longer they can sit still and focus. When I am with a child that starts to wiggle uncontrollably, I instinctively know that it's useless to continue trying to teach them anything. If pushed beyond that point, then that is when the child starts to get turned off of learning. If they are pushed past the good-focus-point too often, then they will reach for any distraction to avoid learning. Video games are a convenient and tantalizing distraction. Unfortunately, they are also “numbing” and socially isolating.
There is evidence young men are more responsive to external rewards and get less gratification than young women from being a good student.18 Peer acceptance and a sense of independence usually mean more than parents and school to both young men and young women. Unlike young men, however, young women still “let” each other work hard at school. A young man may see the value of working hard and doing well at school, but he will downplay homework and formal achievement in order to gain acceptance among his other male classmates. Some have suggested that this motivation of boys to be successful in school starts to disappear in elementary school.19
Once students are in college, they face other kinds of challenges. The late Clifford Nass, distinguished communications professor at Stanford University, saw consequences of the ubiquitous digital life:
You walk around the world and you see people multitasking. They're playing games and they're reading email and they're on Facebook, etc . . . On a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once . . . Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is, You know what? You're really lousy at it! It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we've done suggests they're worse at analytical reasoning. We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.20
And that is true of some of the brightest college students in the world—the 1,500 select few who are accepted to Stanford from among the 30,000 applicants annually. If they can't multitask, but believe they can, what chance is there that less talented students can do so effectively? The short answer is—they can't.
All of us are forcing our minds to do a juggling act. The ability to have multiple monitors and Internet browsers open at the same time combined with the belief that we can multitask means we have
rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, which actually reduces the amount of content we remember. And with libraries reducing operating hours,21 the traditional location to concentrate and study without distractions is slowly becoming defunct.
Focused Effort Makes Success Possible
Another factor that may underlie the pressures that turn young men off could be a lack of a good work ethic, which many parents in Western countries no longer make a priority to teach to their children. Students in Shanghai were number one in both math and reading on the international PISA tests. Other places in East Asia such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea directly followed.22 Students in China take academics very seriously, and both parents and schools are determined to prepare children for success. Sometimes it's to an extreme, such as with the “sitting mothers.” In Vietnam, which ranked eighth place in math, half of all parents keep in touch with their child's teacher throughout the year to monitor their progress.23
The “all work and no play” philosophy has its trade-offs. In China, suicide is the leading cause of death in young people aged fifteen to thirty-four,24 mostly due to the stress young people feel in school, rising social inequality, as well as the difficulty in finding jobs after school is done.25 Excessive Internet use and excessive gaming are also well documented in South Korea and China, which have hundreds of treatment programs and bootcamp–style inpatient facilities to regulate sleep, diet, and exercise and rid the patients (mostly young men) of their compulsions.26
It is obvious that parents and societies must develop a balanced approach of promoting a solid work ethic in schools and in careers, but within the context of developing a more rounded child. Excessive stress on children to perform up to parents' overly high expectations can be devastating. In contrast, the laissez-faire approach, as in the US, of many parents can lead to chronic underachievement and failure to make the grade, not only in school, but with life's endless demands.
School's Out—Now What?
Today, all fingers are pointing toward careers in public and private educational services, healthcare, social sectors,27 and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) areas as guaranteed employment in the coming years. Currently, nearly twice as many students from China and the European Union are getting engineering and science degrees than students from the US, which is making us less competitive. The National Science Foundation actually puts the US twentieth out of twenty-four industrialized nations in terms of twenty-four-year-olds who got their first degree in the “hard sciences.”28
The same idea was emphasized in a Casey Daily Research report: “intellectual capital” will be the most important factor not only for the job market but also for growing national economies. To remain competitive, nations must make STEM studies a priority, such as investing in computers, electronics, biosciences, engineering, and other growing high-tech fields, because more jobs require advanced technical skills. In essence, right now there are too many liberal arts majors!29 And there are too many people with too little education, whose hope for a living wage may soon be taken out by automation.30
A study from Georgetown University lists the five college majors with the highest unemployment rates (crossed against popularity), with clinical psychology, miscellaneous fine arts, US history, library science, military technologies and educational psychology topping the list—all were above 10 percent. Unemployment rates for STEM subjects hovered around 0 to 3 percent: astrophysics/astronomy, around 0 percent; geological and geophysics engineering, 0 percent; physical science, 2.5 percent; geosciences, 3.2 percent; and math/computer science, 3.5 percent. Parenthetically, for psychologists, these are personally worrying statistics.
STEM jobs also pay more. The list of the twenty highest mid-career median salaries, by college degree, features no careers from the liberal arts. Liberal arts degrees provide few prospects for graduates. Yet the bubble continues to inflate. In the 2015 school year, more than one million non-US citizens were enrolled at US colleges,31 the highest level in the world. Foreign students now earn more than half of the total advanced degrees awarded in many STEM fields, leaving their US counterparts in the dust.32
Anyone from our survey who selected “Young men in America will not be as innovative or capable as their peers in other First World countries” may have rightly noticed these trends that are a neon sign of the times not to be ignored except at one's future peril.
Women climb, men decline in college landscapes:
This graph is one of the most powerful visual representations of our message throughout this book—that guys are declining in academic proficiency as girls are rising, even soaring, above previous generations of women.
Sex Education versus Porn “Education”
The high availability of Internet porn combined with a lack of sex education means many young guys don't know what they're getting into. They're going to have challenges later with women because they don't realize how it's impacting or shaping their sexuality. For them, sex becomes an objectified experience. I have talked with guys that have to fantasize about being with their partner when they're actually with their partner because they're disconnected from the sensation of their own body connecting with another body.
—Celeste Hirschman, sex and relationship therapist, co-creator of the Somatica Method33
Sex education is to porn as reality is to fantasy. There's a lot of fantasy material freely available, but very few informative resources out there for young people regarding real-life sex. We cannot label porn as all bad, but when young men are on a regular diet of it—watching it before they've actually started having sex or even kissed a girl—one has to wonder how it affects their foundational concepts for intimacy and sexual behavior. Almost all people can recall the first erotic image they saw; like a flashbulb memory it is forever emblazoned in our minds. Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam explain the kind of lasting impact that erotic cues can have:
Many male sexual obsessions appear to form after a single sexual exposure . . . almost all life-long sexual interests in men first form during adolescence. Clinicians report that it is very rare for an adult man to form a new sexual obsession with a visual object. If the male desire software was operating solely according to the principles of conditioning, then age should not be a significant factor. Instead, there appears to be a special window of time when visual sexual interests can form—what neuroscientists call a critical period.34
When this critical period gets hijacked, it seems men can suffer from what one Italian study called “sexual anorexia,” which occurs after watching copious amounts of online porn. Many of the young men in this large-scale 28,000-person survey started “excessive consumption” of porn sites as early as fourteen years old and later on, in their mid-twenties, became inured to “even the most violent images.”35 The problem worsens when young men's sexuality develops independently from real-life sexual relationships. As they develop reduced responses to habitually watched porn sites, their libido drops, and then it becomes nearly impossible to get an erection. From 2005 to 2013, the number of Italian teens reporting low sexual desire jumped from 1.7 percent to over 10 percent.36 A lot of young men in our own 20,000-person survey said that porn distorted their idea of a healthy sexual relationship and that “the script” of porn was always playing in the back of their mind when they were with a real female. Many women however, reject the scripts, especially when men try to enact certain scenes without any prior communication.
Surely those views would be tempered by better sex education and conversations about what to expect from real-life sexual relationships. Here's how one male high school student from our survey responded:
I think that our society, one which allows the display of blood and gore and viscera on a network television but gawks at the slightest implication of a nipple, likely due to lingering protestant ideals, should become better acquainted [with] and less ashamed of its sexuality, especially considering how much more common and us
eful it is than a desensitization to death and disembowelment.
Many children have seen porn by the time they are in middle school. Sexual education in nonreligious public schools tends to begin around the same time, and in the US it is taught mainly in two forms: abstinence-only and comprehensive. The abstinence-only approach promotes the abstinence from sex before marriage. Comprehensive sex education promotes abstinence but also informs students of the benefits of contraception and how to avoid sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Neither the comprehensive nor the abstinence-only approach discusses porn. According to a 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), almost all teens in America have received a formal sex education by age eighteen, but only about two-thirds have been taught about birth control methods.37 Amazingly, only thirteen states require that instruction be medically accurate and nineteen require information on condoms or contraception, while thirty-seven require that information on abstinence be provided.38
Not surprisingly, neither the comprehensive nor the abstinence-only approach is very effective in its stated objectives. People are marrying later than they ever have; the average age in the US is twenty-eight for men and twenty-six for women.39 Meanwhile, 88 percent of teens who pledge abstinence and 90 percent of Americans overall will have sex before marriage.40
Obviously, nations with a strong religious orientation within their political realm, like the US, have pressures to downplay sex altogether, as something reserved only for marriage, and the topic is not discussed openly in civilized conversation.
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