We've had some thoughtful and passionate discussion on the previous post about the meaning of the changing gender proportions on college campuses. (prompted by Michael Gurian's article in The Washington Post entitled "Disappearing Act.") Are men really disappearing from campus or is their enrollment merely slowing while proportionately more college-age women enroll, and is that important? Do men have more remunerative job options without a college degree than do women and does that account for the enrollment difference? Are women, now that they've been given the chance at higher education, more successful at school? Has women's education made a population difference in their earning power relative to men? (no). Why?
In addition to the GITLR comments section, I'll be posting several responses I've received offline (with permission from the authors).
Below read Caryl Rivers, professor of Journalism at Boston University and co-author (with Dr. Rosalind Barnett) of the book "Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs." She writes about boys and girls education in the pre-college years as well.
Rivers:
Michael Gurian's ideas are very dangerous, since he doesn't know what he is talking about regarding boys' and girls' brains and learning styles. It's indeed dangerous to cast the whole "boys" issue in a girls-versus-boys paradigm.
These are the facts. Middle and upper-middle class boys are not dropping out, failing in schoolwork, lagging in verbal skills etc.
(Boys have more learning disabilities than girls on average, but that was also true in the 1950s.)
Nor do boys and girls learn in different ways. There are many intelligences, and trying to design classrooms by gender does not mesh with what the best science tells us. (Gurian is not a neuroscientist, he's a family therapist and his ideas about brains are very naive.)
Recent major studies and meta-analyses show that the differences between girls’ and boys’ cognitive abilities are trivial.
The boys who are failing en masse are poor and working class boys, mainly those who are Black and Hispanic. Indeed we do need to help them — especially at a time when government programs for these kids keep getting slashed.
A national "boys" movement, I fear, would wind up with most of the resources going to affluent suburban schools, and into setting up "boys classrooms" which will teach boys in a boot-camp way. Some boys would thrive — others would be turned off and bored to death. Some boys indeed do have trouble sitting still, relating to adults, and verbalizing. Others thrive in a high-verbal environment. Gender is not the issue.
Gurian seems to be setting women who go to college against poor and working class boys. But how many poor girls are in those college classes? Poor and working class girls need as much help as boys.
The issue of how will people work in the post-industrial world is a critical one. Once we get away from talking about boys vs. girls we can really come to some solutions. (The Defense Department has some very good ideas in its educational programs.)
Be sure to check the comments section of the previous post "Still Plenty of Big Men on Campus." Commenters like Jeff P., Assistant Village Idiot and Supercat all have important points. I like the question Supercat poses:
Supercat:
Markets are smarter than induhviduals, and I expect that includes the market of potential consumers of college. Inasmuch as sex ratios ARE changing, I think the question isn't "What disaster looms ahead becuase of this obvious lack of foresight on the part of 18 year old men?" The better questions is "What does the market for education know that the effete pundits don't understand?" I suspect the answer is something along the lines of, There are plenty of decent macho jobs for manly men without a degree who'll do difficult, physical, and risky stuff. But more and more, a woman without a college degree may become damn near unemployable.
10:11:24 PM 
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