A Generation at Risk
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Colleges, universities seek a few good men
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Michael Gurian
Special To the
In the 1990s, I
taught for six years at a small liberal-arts college in
There were more
young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting
better grades than the guys.
Many of the young
men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the
young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught: literature,
writing and psychology.
They were bright
kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at
these words -- this is not really who I am."
That was a decade
ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at
"We are
having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We
are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."
Howard is not
alone.
Colleges and
universities throughout the country are grappling with the case of the
mysteriously vanishing male.
Where men once
dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American
institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this
downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated.
If we don't
reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the
productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the
ones that follow.
The trend of
females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978.
Growing crisis
Yet despite the
well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we
have yet to fully react to what has become a crisis. Largely, that is because
of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role.
Many times a week,
a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much
about boys when men still run everything?"
It's a fair and
logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still
caught up in old industrial images.
We still see
thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in
industry -- men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make
six figures selling cars.
We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and
George Bushes -- and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the
millions of young men who are floundering or lost.
But they're there:
The young men who are working in the lowest-level -- and most dangerous -- jobs
instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to
college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have
little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of
their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their 30s, by
which time the world has passed many of them by.
Of course, not
every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good
and productive man.
But a dismal
future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go
to college.
Statistics show
that a young man who doesn't finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely
earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He'll be three times more
likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to
get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women and more likely
to engage in crime. He'll be more likely to develop substance-abuse problems
and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, because men who don't
attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on
government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock and are
more likely not to pay child support.
When I worked as a
counselor at a federal prison, I saw these statistics up close.
The young men and adult
males I worked with were mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that
didn't promote education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they
had attended.
They were
passionate people, capable of great love and even possible future success. Many
of them told me how much they wanted to get an education. At an intuitive
level, they knew how important it was.
'Industrial
schooling'
Whether in the
prison system, in my university classes or in the schools where I help train
teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem with how we teach and mentor boys
that I call "industrial schooling," and that I think is a primary
root of our sons' falling behind in school, and quite often in life.
Two hundred years
ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions of kids, we took them off
the farms and out of the marketplace and put them in large industrial-size
classrooms: one teacher, 25 to 30 kids.
For many kids,
this system worked -- and still works. But from the beginning, there were some
for whom it wasn't working very well. Initially, it was girls. It took more
than 150 years to get parity for them.
Now we're seeing
what's wrong with the system for millions of boys.
Beginning in very
early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly,
don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys
than it is for most girls.
This was always
the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't have the comparative
element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls
separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic
educational principles that kept a lot of boys "in line" --
competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child's
education.
Now, however, the
boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly clear. Many families are barely
involved in their children's education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every
academic area.
Many of the old
principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of 30 kids, about five
boys will begin to fail in the first few years of preschool and elementary
school. By fifth grade, they will be diagnosed as learning-disabled,
behaviorally disordered, "unmotivated" or as having attention-deficit
or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. They will no longer do their
homework, though they may say they are doing it; they will disrupt class or
withdraw from it; they will find a few islands of competence -- such as video
games or computers -- and overemphasize those.
Boys have a lot of
Huck Finn in them -- they don't, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting
still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words.
For 20 years, I
have been taking brain research into homes and classrooms to show teachers,
parents and others how differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a
PET or SPECT scan of a boy's brain and a girl's brain, showing the different
ways these brains learn, they understand.
As one teacher put
it to me, "Wow, no wonder we're having so many problems with boys."
Startling
statistics
Yet every decade
the industrial classroom becomes more and more protective of the female
learning style and harsher on the male, yielding statistics such as these:
The majority of
National Merit scholarships, as well as college academic scholarships, go to
girls and young women.
Boys and men
constitute the majority of high-school dropouts, as much as 80 percent in many
cities.
Boys and young men
are 1 1/2 years behind girls and young women in reading ability. This gap does
not even out in high school, as some have argued; a male reading/writing gap
continues into college and the workplace.
Grasping the
mismatch between the minds of boys and the industrial classroom is only the
first step in understanding the needs of our sons.
Lack of fathering
and male role models takes a heavy toll on boys, as does lack of attachment to
many family members -- whether grandparents, extended families, moms or dads.
Our sons are
becoming very lonely.
And even more politically
difficult to deal with: The boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged
emphasis of the past 20 years -- an emphasis that I, as a father of two
daughters and an advocate of girls, have seen firsthand -- has muddied the
water for child development in general, pitting funding for girls against
funding for boys.
We still barely
see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change from an industrial culture
to a postindustrial one. We want them to shut up, calm down and become perfect
intimate partners.
It doesn't matter
too much who boys and men are -- what matters is who we think they should be.
When I think back
to the kind of classroom I created for my college students, I feel regret for
the males who dropped out. When I think back to my time working in the prison
system, I feel a deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys
whom we still have time to save.
There's still hope
And I do think we
can save them.
I get hundreds of
e-mails and letters every week from parents, teachers and others who are
beginning to realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters
in the industrialized schooling system: realize that boys are struggling and
need help.
These teachers and
parents are part of a social movement -- a boys' movement that started, I
think, about 10 years ago.
It's a movement
very much powered by individual women -- mainly mothers of sons -- who say
things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't know anyone who
doesn't have a son struggling in school," or "I thought having a boy
would be like having a girl, but when my son was born, I had to rethink
things."
We all need to
rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting and overly medicating our
boys, as if we can change this guy into the learner we want.
When we decide --
as we did with our daughters -- that there isn't anything inherently wrong with
our sons, when we look closely at the system that boys learn in, we will
discover these boys again, for all that they are.
And maybe we'll
see more of them in college again.
Michael
Gurian is a family therapist and founder of the Gurian Institute, an
educational-training organization. His most recent book, written with Kathy
Stevens, is 'The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School
and Life' (Jossey-Bass). He can be reached at
info@gurianinstitute.com.