Perhaps in reaction to a time in the past when boys were given advantages in school, as well as in business, over the past several years our public education system seems to be stacked against boys. There are those, today, who will argue that the materials used, and the methods of teaching, as well as some of the restrictions in Common Core, favor the way that girls learn, with the result that boys are having much more trouble keeping up in school, a gap that widens as boys progress from kindergarten through elementary school, and into high school. Greater than the obvious anatomical differences, boys are not the same as girls, and the public school system once recognized that. Boys develop fine motor and cognitive skills later than girls and, while in school, boys have a more difficult time sitting still for long periods of time. However, if the advantages given to girls today is related to the differences between boys and girls, we could expect this gap to narrow as boys catch up. Yet, it widens. Additionally, teachers factor behavior into their grading and, as a rule, girls are better able to sit still for long periods of classroom work. Teachers were once able to work around this by developing techniques that included an outdoor physical environment, but the new curriculum does not allow for much more than teaching the test, which emphasizes literacy and numbers. In most schools, today, recess periods are shorter, or have been discontinued altogether. In many schools, children are no longer allowed to go outdoors during lunch periods, which have also gotten shorter. In most schools, the amount of time that children spend in school has increased. The move away from phonetics to learning to read by recognizing shapes and pictures favors the way that girl's brains work over that of the boy's. The reading material stipulated by Common Core is more largely based on fictional texts, which favors the way that girls learn. Boys achieve better results when they are taught English from non-fiction texts rather than classical novels. If true, this goes beyond the public school system. Public television is heavily geared toward girls. Nearly every advertisement for public television features girls, with few even depicting boys; when they do, they are doing girl things. I am posting this in the conspiracies category because I believe that this is a conspiracy. Perhaps this is intended to even out the gap in wages, during working years, in which men generally earn more than women. If so, are our kindergarten, elementary, and high school boys to blame for this? Should they be handicapped? Related, I believe, is the way that boys are depicted in television and in movies. Years ago, the movies and television were ripe with shows where boys had a starring role. There are very few of those anymore. Programming that features children in a major way nearly always have a girl in starring roles. In children's programming today, the protagonist is nearly always a girl while boys, if featured at all, are usually relegated to annoyances.
I have been reading that some of the medications that are being given, as well as many of the vaccines, are also making men more apt to be sterile and have "ED" problems. If you add this to the school situation that you are describing, it certainly seems like some sort of a plan to leave men uneducated, and not prepared to cope with becoming the head of a family, and perhaps not even able to father children. Part of population control ? Or just part of the dumbing down of America, or maybe a bit of both. Either way, we seem to be turning out younng dults that have not gotten a very good education, can barely read or write except for texting, and can't even find Australia or Turkey on a world map anymore. I saw one program around the Fourth of July, and they were asking people what the celebration was for, and some had no idea at all, others said it was for declaring independance, but they didn't know what country was involved, or how long ago it happened. One lady was "pretty sure" that it happened before she was born....
That's the whole problem with the educational system in the US. It's not just girls against boys. It is that we have decided that there is only one way to teach our children. And we keep fighting over what that one way will be. Unfortunately, different children learn in different ways, and it's not just the difference between girls and boys. According to your thoughts, boys don't learn well by reading fiction, however my son loved fiction and, at 25, has a lifelong love of reading - anything. (He's also a PhD candidate in philosophy) I have a niece who is the same age as my son, and while he would sit for hours, quietly, and absorb everything he was being taught, my niece couldn't sit still for more than 5 or 10 minutes. She also hated reading. The way they learned had nothing to do with their sex, it was just the way they were. We need to take sex and race out of it. We need to look at how each individual child learns best, and have programs for that type of learning. For children like my son, sitting for hours at a time and listening to the teacher worked great. For children like my niece, you need to let them get up and touch things and be active while they learn. Most importantly, we need to put a lot more of the responsibility on the parents, where it belongs. We found out that our son was a "talented and gifted" student when he was in third grade. We worked with his teacher to find ways to engage him and keep him challenged. When his fourth grade teacher wouldn't work with us, we home schooled him for a year before realizing that he missed the social aspects. Because we knew the local school system wasn't prepared or able to meet his needs, we then moved 60 miles away to a city that had schools for gifted students. It would have been very easy to sit back, and complain that the school system had failed our son - that the system was broken and he paid the price. Instead, we made some hard decisions to make sure that he got the education he deserved instead of expecting someone else to do it.
Well if girls "needs" are being considered over boys...then it's about time. But I don't think girls are being considered over boys. If Society, etc. is trying to right some wrongs for treating girls like "property" instead of people then maybe they just need to learn to balance the "scales" better all the way around so that "equality" works both ways. I actually wanted to say more on this....but since you are talking about boys and girls and not men and women...I find I can't. Although there is a whole lot more to say here.
@ Ken Anderson touched on an area of great concern to me, which are the physical dynamics in which boys should be subjected as opposed to girls. Not only has a "recess" been reduced but the activities allowed during those recesses have been remarkably reduced due to a rise in fear that someone might get hurt. Playing catch and using playground equipment are almost deleted from most schools but there is one area that I cannot forgive and that is the omission of gym class. As boys grow they need more physical activity because that is the basic chemical and physical structure of a male in ALL species of mammals. Girls as well as boys need the physical part of growing up but it is especially important in males in order to develope proper muscular structure in line with the inevitable growth in hormonal makeup. The testasterone levels at the time of puberty should be about 40%-50% higher than that of estrogen in males and if that level isn't made necessary by physical activity then it drops causing obesity and more effeminate qualities. If left unchecked then more serious consequences are also inevitable. https://www.bodylogicmd.com/hormones-for-men/estrogen The government school system used to honor the role that physical activity plays in all humans in order to prevent obesity and slothful behavior but now they blame it on the lack of sufficient tofu at lunch time. One other conspiracy comes to mind..............There is not one man who cannot remember his first contact with a high cross bar on a bicycle when he was a boy. The girls always had that nice low bar even when they started wearing genes in the 60's. Frankie Valley might have been one such boy who never got over his first major discovery of male pain due to a cross bar but making a good thing out of a bad situation he did make a good living from his high voice.
I don't believe there is any conspiracy here and I think the new rules in place in schools "hurt' both boys and girls. It isn't good for any child to have to mainly sit in one place for 6-8 or even more hours a day. I believe all children need recess and physical activity, as well as free time to interact and talk with each other. I believe that girls as well as boys need more than 15 minutes to eat their lunch too. Schools now days are the pits and if I was still raising school age children I would Home School them because even with all they have taken away that children need in my opinion...schools still aren't teaching much and children are learning even less. If there is any conspiracy going on in schools, etc. it is in my opinion one of trying to take over our children and grandchildren, trying to control their minds so that they are robots instead of individuals when they come out of the school systems. They have even taken alot of truth out of our history books, etc. and are teaching our children, and grandchildren that there is no right or wrong, etc.
Yes, I agree whole heartedly that today's federal government schools are indeed the pits. But, back to the conspiracy at hand, and yes, I do believe @Ken Anderson might just be onto something. Normally, I do not subscribe nor ascribe to most conspiratorial thoughts but this time, after some study, I have to agree that there is something mysterious afoot and I do not think we need Dr. Watson nor Sherlock in order to find some of the answers. Well now,.........after looking at several different documentations I found one that pretty much sums up the majority of the problems between the present learning curve between boys and girls. Although I do not see it as a conspiracy, per se, there is much proof that boys are not being treated on an equal level regarding the differences between the two sexes. In short, teachers just do not know how to teach, apparently, like they used to. Let's call it, Boys get drugs, Girls get help. (actually, that's what the "Free Republic" called it) Have fun ya'll, it's a good and very easy read. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/972970/posts
I don't agree but that is what is so nice about this Forum. You don't have to agree and it's no big deal. Having raised 3 daughters through their school years and one stepson from 8 years old through all his...I did not find the differences that Ken spoke of. But I do know the schools now days are a mess and I believe both sexes "suffer" the consequences because of this.
I don't know what that time frame was, but I am not saying that it has always been that way. When I raised my son, I was seeing some of that but attributed it to the fact that it was in California, but when we raised our nephew a few years ago, it was much clearer, although what first caught my attention was the sharp reduction in boys as significant characters in movies, and the elevation of girls in these roles.
Oh, but the conspiracy goes even further than that Ken! In years gone by the epitome of girls finding their way to stardom was indeed in every episode of "Lassie" but who knew that there was skullduggery afoot in the family oriented series? Timmy was the co-star of the show but Lassie was the lead lady, but hold on to our seats and stop the presses!! The start of the gender revolution might be found right there on our old tv screens for Lassie, and all Lassies were............MALE and portrayed to be females. Male collies have better and heavier coats than females so for the camera's sake they did a "Mrs. Doubtfire" on him and made him a girl. Yes, Lassie was a guy in drag and not the progressive lady who constantly saved her master from wells, caves, wolves and other promising series stoppers. Think about it,..........did Christine Jorgansen get his first idea to become a girl by knowing about Lassie? Oh what a tangled web we weave.....................
One of my daughters is a Teacher, plus two of my cousins. We will all be together at a Family Reunion this coming Saturday and since I find this an interesting topic that I have not given much thought to until you brought it up Ken...I am going to ask their opinions on this. If anything, while my girls were in school there were a few incidents around them that actually leaned more towards boys being the favored ones. And I have always noticed schools offer more of a variety of sports activities for boys and pay more for their equipment and facilities too. One of my daughters was not a sit still person too and at a Teacher Conference they once suggested I might want to have her tested for ADD! I went home, did my research on how a child her age should behave, etc. and that research showed my daughter was behaving perfectly normal. So I called a Teacher Conference and presented the documented facts by Experts...and explained to the Teacher that because most of her students had been in public Day Care since they were 6 weeks old...they had become like "robots" who just automatically followed orders, etc. From that day on my daughter was treated like the individual she was and I actually think my research and conference with that Teacher helped her to see all the students as children again. There may be some truth to what you have noticed, just as there may be some truth to what I have. As far as the movie roles, etc. I have always believed girls were more of "sexual objects" in whatever roles they were given...whether in a commercial role or a movie. I still believe that to a certain extent...but women are much smarter now days and have more choices and more say so. But their is still plenty of this going around still.
I don't know if it's so much a "plot" as simply not caring enough when changing the structure to avoid lawsuits when kids get hurt outside at recess. Or trying to save on liability insurance.
You're probably right, certainly when it comes to movie and broadcast roles. This was particularly noticeable when Fox News started out. The only women to be offered an anchor position, or to have their own show on the Fox Network, were those who were young and majorly attractive, and it helped to be blonde, while pretty much any man who could string words together was good to go, as if they were looking men with broadcasting experience, while the female anchors just needed to be pretty. Now, they have some older women on the Fox Network, but they are the ones who hired for their looks many years ago, and they are in danger of overdosing on Botox. As for movies, the woman in distress theme is still very popular. I particularly like the theme where the woman is running in the dark woods, pursued by a killer, and there is no way in hell that the killer would ever be able to find her if she would only shut up, but she never does. I trust that a real woman would be smart enough to know that there's no point in hiding behind some bushes in the darkness if she's going to continue sobbing loudly.
I know for a fact that many of us women "have come a long way baby!" and would not be hiding in the bushes anymore sobbing. We would probably have our guns ready to shoot...and some self preservation karate, etc. moves on hold too!
I have 5 grandsons and there are playgrounds in all of their schools. That's where they go at recess. Except the oldest one in HS, no playground. So at least in CA. And IL. I've seen them, can't speak for other places.