Strange Proportions
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
Way back when I was in college, taking women’s studies courses (hey! it was the Nineties, didn’t everyone take a women’s studies course back then?), I remember learning about the whole “voiceless girl” theory of classroom inequality. At the time, the Carol Gilligan studies about girls different ways of knowing/thinking/etc. were very big, and one of the things that had received a lot of attention was the “finding” that boys tended to receive a lot more teacher attention in class. Now, in retrospect, we find that there wasn’t a particularly good distinction made in the study between positive and negative attention. And the whole thing was flawed because it started from the assumption that receiving less attention necessarily correlated to lower self-esteem for girls. But at the time, the big thing was to point out that boys were getting more classroom attention and that this intimidated girls into not participating in class.
Of course, the big problem with this set-up is that it is boys, not girls, who have been demonstrating lower test scores, grades, clasrrom engagement, college attendance, and so on. Whatever kind of attention boys may have been getting in school (in whatever quantities), it certainly wasn’t doing anything to help their literacy scores.
And then today, I came across this article from the Guardian, which suggests that the problem is more or less the opposite of that old women’s studies axiom. Rather than intimidating girls into silence, it is possible that boys may be hiding in the background in English classes, where girls tend to shine. The study suggests that as the proportion of girls to boys in an English class rose, the boys performed more poorly. Converesely, in classes with a smaller proportion of girls, boys tended to perform better.
None of this is to suggest that this is somehow the girls’ fault, or that it’s not a good thing to have active, intelligent, and engaged girls. But it is suggestive of the value of single-sex classes in certain subjects where different learning styles may be creating a class of “voiceless boys.” I wonder what the women’s studies department would make of that?
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