Want Boys to Succeed? Don’t Teach Them How to Be “Masculine”

Article here. Excerpt:

'It is no secret that our nation is facing a crisis when it comes to boys’ education. Boys are lagging behind in almost every subject, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. According to NPR, boys are not only falling behind in school when it comes to the grades they receive, but also in their overall graduation rate and their participation in advanced placement classes. This also makes them less likely to pursue education after high school and, if they do, makes them less likely to be successful.

Recently, the attitude towards this growing national issue has been to create more boy-friendly classrooms, sometimes going as far as to create single-sex classrooms. The idea behind this solution is that, when boys are in classes with other boys, the teacher can target his or her activities to that audience, creating more hands-on and physically active assignments that will help boys learn.
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The report details options for helping boys in school, and the most interesting of them all is the suggestion to start treating boys more like we treat girls. This means that we need to ditch our traditional notions of masculinity in school. We need to encourage boys to participate in more tradiationally female-dominated activities such as drama, music and art and strip these activities of the stereotype that they are not masculine. We also need to paint a clear picture of how academic success translates into financial success for boys like we do for girls.

These changes will definitely benefit boys, but will also benefit girls. There is already ample evidence that shows that girls’ and boys’ ability levels are not different, and that they don’t actually learn that differently. Furthermore, when we start rethinking our definition of masculinity, as educators and as a society as a whole, we will be headed towards a much better society for women and men.'