The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (5 page)

Today, all fingers are pointing toward STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers as guaranteed jobs. The College Board recently stated some sobering statistics:

The same idea was emphasized in a recent Casey Daily Research report:

A study from Georgetown University lists the five college majors with the highest unemployment rates (crossed against popularity): clinical psychology, 19.5 percent; miscellaneous fine arts, 16.2 percent; U.S. history, 15.1 percent; library science, 15 percent; and (tied for No. 5) military technologies and educational psychology, 10.9 percent each. 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.

STEM jobs also pay more. The list of the 20 highest midcareer 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 2009–2010 school year, around 690,000 non-U.S. citizens were enrolled at American colleges, the highest level in the world and up 26 percent from a decade ago. Non-U.S. students constitute 2.5 percent of bachelor’s degree students, 10 percent of graduate students, and 33 percent of doctoral candidates, with 18 percent of non-U.S. students enrolled in engineering programs — nearly triple the level of U.S. students.
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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.

Young men are not failing at school; the school system is failing them. The United States spends more money per pupil than the majority of other developed countries, but it achieves less gain per buck. And now that many schools receive funding based on test results, teachers teach for those outcomes, not for curiosity or critical thinking, nor for learning nonspecific principals or values. Such training to focus on fact memorization lowers the intellectual level of the teachers themselves, not just their bored students.

“The quality of teachers has been declining for decades, and no one wants to talk about it. … We need to find a more powerful means to attract the most promising candidates to the teaching profession,” said Harold O. Levy, chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, in 2000.
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There are a lot of amazing teachers out there, but in general, the current batch of teachers are less intelligent than earlier peers, buried in the bottom third of the SAT class.
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IQ is definitely not the sole predictor of good teaching, but the difference between having a strong or weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Kids who have a good teacher in the fourth grade are less likely to become teenage parents, are more likely to go to college and will, on average, earn $50,000 more over a lifetime.
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But because there are few tangible incentives to being a dedicated teacher (poor wages, less status), over time many educators get discouraged and don’t invest the effort to make their classes engaging or relevant to current events. Thus many kids end up just dumbed down by rote memorizing to achieve teacher approval and school-targeted results. Much education is not problem focused or solution oriented, or relevant to real-world challenges, as we believe it should be.

What else is wrong with school dynamics? Too much boring homework; absent parents who are not interested in their kids’ progress or academic problems, only their results; elimination of gym class and structured playtime (no time or place to release pent up energy, socialize at recess or develop imagination); and the ever-tempting option to text and surf the Internet in class, which swamps directed attention at the lesson of the day.

Thirty years ago elementary schools offered recess twice a day. Many schools now have recess only once a day, and some schools are eliminating play or free time altogether. So all that restless energy that young boys have now has nowhere to be released — except in the classroom.

Kindergarten now resembles 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. If a boy is forced to learn before his brain his ready, he is unintentionally conditioned to dislike the task, and 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.
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That dislike is both cause and effect of poor academic performance. We see this in the evidence that the United States ranked No. 25 on international comparative tests. In Finland, which ranked No. 1, children don’t start formal schooling until they’re 7 years old,
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but they are learning much at home from their families.

Since B’s have become the new C’s — it is now unacceptable to be “average” — has the pressure from having to perform turned boys off from trying in the first place? Many guys from our survey said yes. In particular, 64 percent of boys age 12 and younger agreed that “pressure to perform combined with fear of failing causes young men to not bother trying in the first place.”

SAT scores are often seen as a valid predictor of college success.
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But guys’ SAT scores are the worst they’ve been in 40 years. With more and more-diverse test takers than ever before, a decline in scores is somewhat expected. But these scores affected boys of all races and SES (socioeconomic status) levels. So why the regression? Despite the Obama administration describing as fatally flawed the Bush administration’s plan of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it’s still the law of the land, and its test-driven accountability measures are falling short, even if we did not disagree with the premise of teaching to the testing.

“Unfortunately, [NCLB] testing did not translate into improved learning. A Rand Corp. study released last week found that schools did pay more attention to underserved groups, but teaching focused on test prep rather than learning. Schools reduced time for teaching subjects that weren’t tested but are important for training citizens, like social studies,” a
San Francisco Chronicle
editorial reported in January.
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The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) article “What’s the Problem with School?”
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sums up the situation well:

• “The average boy is less mature socially and verbally yet more physically active than the average girl when he starts school.” Since boys are more active than girls, they have more difficulty sitting still for long periods of time. (As a side note, much of the active time kids used to have during school has all but vanished. Children spend about half as much time outdoors today as they did in the 1980s, and some schools have eliminated recess altogether. In recent years, 40,000 American schools have eliminated recess, with only 12 percent of states requiring elementary schools to offer any free time and only 13.7 percent of elementary school students having gym classes at least three times a week.
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  )
  
• Children are now being taught to read in kindergarten, and boys, being less verbally skilled than girls, are not developmentally ready to be receptive to reading exercises.
  
• “The elementary classroom is four-fifths language based, and girls are, on average, stronger than boys in language.” Thus boys feel like they are not good at literacy, and that perceived deficit becomes a part of their new negative self-identity.
  
• 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 comic books and science fiction, themes favored by boys.
  
• Fewer than one in nine schoolteachers is a man.
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  Most teachers in elementary schools are women, which leaves fewer male models for learning as a masculine pursuit. (We would add that this is even more true in high school classes.)
  

Once students are in college, they face other kinds of challenges. Clifford Nass, distinguished communications professor at Stanford University, sees consequences of the ubiquitous digital life:

And that is true of some of the best college students in America — 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?

In 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor John Gabrieli and his research team found that medication for ADHD improves the performance of normal kids by the same degree that it improves the performance of kids with ADHD.
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So when someone responds well to the medication — better behavior, focus and grades — it doesn’t necessarily mean they have ADHD, yet many parents and doctors are using these improvements to confirm the disorder.

What’s the harm if the medications help the kid do better in class? While kids generally do perform better and become more manageable, being on these medications for even just a year can lead to changes in personality. Friendly, outgoing, adventurous boys become lazy and irritable.

Professor William Carlezon and colleagues at Harvard University Medical School recently reported that giving stimulant medications — such as those used to treat boys with ADHD — to juvenile laboratory animals resulted in those animals displaying loss of drive when they grew up. These animals looked normal but were lazy. They didn’t want to work hard, not even to escape a bad situation. The researchers suggested that similar effects could be seen in children. Children might look fine during and after taking these medications, but as adults they won’t have much motivation or drive.

Sax writes in
Boys Adrift
that stimulant medications appear to harm the brain by damaging an area called the nucleus accumbens, where motivation is turned into action. If a boy’s nucleus accumbens is damaged, he may still be hungry or sexually aroused, but will not do anything about it. Independent groups of researchers at Universities in the United States and Europe have found that even when young laboratory animals were exposed to even low dosages of these medications for short periods of time, permanent damage to the nucleus accumbens can happen:

He just won’t do much or want to do much, but be a smiling couch potato. This is especially relevant to guys since nearly 85 percent of all stimulant medications are prescribed to American boys.
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One of the side effects of taking stimulants is nervousness and anxiety. What’s a great way to reduce these side effects? Smoke pot.

Many young men, both those taking and not taking medication, smoke marijuana. And marijuana is not the same drug it used to be. The average potency of weed has risen steadily for the last three decades. The average THC content (the psychoactive constituent of marijuana) in 1983 was less than 4 percent, but in 2008 the THC content was more than 10 percent, and it is expected to rise to 15 percent or 16 percent in the next 10 years. In October 2011, the Dutch government announced that high-potency weed (with a THC content of 15 percent and higher) would now be classified in the hard drugs category along with cocaine and ecstasy.
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One reason for the reclassification may be that high-potency weed significantly impairs executive function and motor control,
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processes that are involved in planning, memory, attention, problem solving, verbal reasoning and resisting temptation. From one generation to the next, marijuana has become an entirely different drug that can potentially do more harm than good.
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One male freshman college student told us a story that is becoming more and more common:

He added that he smoked a fair amount of marijuana, which was a common practice across campus.