Asking for fixes to systemic issues (e.g. pathologizing young children just because they can't sit still) doesn't negate girls' issues. We can work on both.
Men dominating leadership positions is a problem. Men getting degrees at a much lower rate than women is also a problem.
They have separate causes. It's not like every gendered trend is a tug-of-war with every other issue.
* Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
* Lessons requiring motor activity.
* Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
So, I guess I don't really see these as separate issues.
I think it is also important to state that men don't just dominate leadership positions, we also typically dominate compensation as well and I'm not talking about equal pay in the context of women and men in different jobs. For example, men are the highest paid teachers and professors despite the reduced participation by men in higher ed.
So my opinion remains that men do perfectly well with traditional instruction and we don't need to make adjustments to it to favor them, particularly not the types of adjustments that would disadvantage women.
I agree that it's worse to fix the one disadvantage without the other, which is tempting because it seems like the less-intractable one. Wage and job disparity is deeply ingrained; "women's work" has long been poorly compensated because women are seen as wanting to do that work. We lump a huge amount of effort under "homemaker" and don't pay for it at all. We then heap even more effort on women working outside the home, for which we don't even have a single name -- cleaning, note-taking, emotional labor, etc. -- unpaid and often marking one as less valuable.
I don't have a good answer to this, and resist fixing the "easier" problem that puts girls at a disadvantage.
I'm glad you raised this related issue though as I believe that many of the legions downvoting my opinion feel that somehow I am ok with that strategy. I feel that the systemic need to identify energetic and inattentive students and then solve those issues with medication is a travesty that rises directly as a result of increased classroom sizes resulting from school funding shortfalls. I'm not advocating that at all. What I am advocating is that teaching strategies in my opinion do not need to be altered to accommodate boys contrary to what I perceive the article to actually be about. Changes such as:
* Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
* Lessons requiring motor activity.
* Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
Boys (in general) are already proficient in learning though competition and movement, starkly opposed by middle school girls who (in general) are not, at least not when it comes to physical contests with boys. Boys just don't need lessons that reinforce competitive games and motor activity. If anyone would benefit, it would be girls but that would also likely require a single gender school system.
Boys go on to dominate (almost) every profession so clearly altering middle school teaching strategies to favor and accommodate them at the expense of girls is both unneeded and would likely lead to larger systemic disadvantages to women.
Yes, men dominate leadership of most fields. That's a widely known problem. The stats are glaring and blatant. It's difficult to fix, but we generally know some strategies that work. The challenge is building political will.
This article is about a problem that is not widely known, which is obviously why she chose to write about it.
Forgetting about whether elementary school performance results in leadership positions, first look at the effects of penalizing high-energy children (regardless of gender):
- ADD over-diagnosis
- poor grades due to teacher bias, which the article mentions (academic grades are artificially deflated based on unrelated behavioral issues)
- school-to-prison pipeline (not mentioned in the article, but a huge problem for boys and not at a problem at all for girls)
Maybe a solution would be to have gender-only schools, but that might cause other problems. It seems that most of the problems in education are a result of treating children as a homogeneous group instead of individuals, which is another thing this article points out.
There may not be enough money to have individual lessons for children, but perhaps a more college-like system (where high-energy children can enroll in physical classes while low-energy children can choose to do something else) would work.
For the record, I was extremely high-energy and not athletic at all. The solution for me was not to do competitive, physical classes. It was to do active classes that involved working (even if "working" was just filling out worksheets) instead of sitting still and listening to a lecture.