Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School | Hacker News Reader

Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still at School

theatlantic.com

325 pointstokenadult215 comments

School is half education and half babysitting. The problem is that schools aren't aware of that, and they try to cram too much learning/work into a day at school. Kids just don't have the attention span. College isn't taught this way. Colleges realize that even young adults can't handle 40 hours a week of continual instruction, why do we do this kids can?

I think the reason, is that we're always behind other countries trying to "catch up"--50 years ago it was the Soviets, 20 years ago the Japanese, now it's the "global workforce".

In our frantic rush to compete with everyone else we end up forcing an overambitious curriculum on kids. How much time can kids really spend learning everyday? A few hours at the most?

I have a friend who teaches 1st grade, she knows kids at that age can't spend time on focused learning for more than 20 or 30 minutes, but the school districts forces here to teach in 1 to 2 hour blocks and spend almost 6 hours out of the day instructing

(they get 15 minutes, no more, of recess; 30 minutes lunch, many times in silence because the lunchroom gets too loud; and on some days 45 minutes of focused PE).

What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day?

Historically many, many children have sat still at school and behaved themselves.

That doesn't mean that others should be stigmatized, but it's not like this is impossible and unprecedented.

Also historically, many, many children have been thrown out of school or deemed ineducable because they couldn't sit still in school and behave themselves.

Or they never went to school in the first place.

Similarly, the average high schooler was better back then because the average person stopped their education at the eighth grade, if not sooner.

(Note to non-Americans: In the US, high school runs from ninth to twelfth grade, usually named freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years.)

More to the point, the children/teenagers in question range from 13 to 18 years of age. I gather that "12th grade" is meaningless in much of the world.

Thanks. It was kind of cute how the american terms were explained using more american terms.

Elsewhere it is posted when people begin school in the US. The rest is arithmetic.

> Elsewhere it is posted when people begin school in the US. The rest is arithmetic.

This is true, you know. Or are you saying only Americans can do arithmetic?

First, historically mass education of the type we now employ is only about a century old, and designed to produce factory workers not to promote creativity. Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker.

Second, much of this is unprecedented. When my parents were children, they didn't attend Kindergarten, and first grade was a half day. When my parents younger siblings were children, Kindergarten was a half day. When I was a child, I didn't attend preschool.

In 3 generations we've added more than 2 years of education for every child, and that education is qualitatively quite different, even from what I experienced (Kindergarten 23 years ago)

When I was in kindergarten the majority of the day was playtime, we had 30 minutes of recess, 45 minutes of mostly freeform PE, 30 minutes of naptime, and a few hours of structured playtime (drawing, making crafts etc...).

From friends of mine who are teachers, since no child left behind, all of that has been removed or severely restricted. Recess is now 15 minutes, PE is more structured and not every day, no more naptime, and they don't have time for freeform activities because the curriculum is so dense.

In Kindergarten we spent almost the whole year learning the Alphabet. Now the curriculum assumes that children already know it.

Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education.

"First, historically mass education of the type we now employ is only about a century old, and designed to produce factory workers..."

Or else until about 100 years ago there was no economic benefit to educating the great mass of humanity, and industrialization created a type of work for which literacy and numeracy helped.

"Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker."

The education of the children--sons, mostly--of the well off always involved a lot of monotonous boredom. Orders were enforced with a stick.

But indeed kindergarten was a half day in my day. The extension of schooling to younger ages is at least partly a result of the need for day care, with more and more mothers in the work force.

"Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education."

Quite so.

You may want to have a look at Ernest Gellner's "Nations and Nationalism" for more on your first point.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Nations_And_Nationalism....

http://www.amazon.com/Nations-Nationalism-Second-Perspective...

http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/nation...

designed to produce factory workers not to promote creativity

I disagree with this common trope. The benefits of mass literacy are extremely obvious; consider that countries where agriculture was and is more important than industry also adopted universal education.

Indeed, factory workers, back in the Dickensian days, were uneducated masses. As most they had a 5-6 years of schooling, but none at all was also common. They sure didn't learn rote behaviour and obeying orders at "school".

And at the same time, higher classes attended highly demanding schools, with very high discipline and demanding curriculums.

Plus, on the 20th century, mass education was adopted by almost all countries (including agriculture based ones), and it had produced people working mostly in office and service sector jobs, not rote factory assembly lines.

So if anything, it's the inverse of the "old wives tale".

(See, we can also agree on some things!).

The benefits of mass literacy are extremely obvious

And? You can teach the average 9 year old to read in 50 contact hours. Quadruple that so they can learn arithmetic (200) and and quadruple that to account for the fact that all school hours can't be contact and you have 800 hours. That's 20 work weeks. Whatever school may be about it's a hell of a lot more than literacy.

>First, historically mass education of the type we now employ is only about a century old, and designed to produce factory workers not to promote creativity. Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker.

Actually it is the inverse. The higher classes (from rich upper class families to wealthy lawyers, doctors, scientists etc) were those that sat down and studied without much fuss, in quite demanding schools. Those classes had a high respect for education, and very demanding curriculums.

It's the working classes (factory workers then, office drones to McDonald burger flippers now) that did and still get by with laxer schooling, less "boring stuff", and more "creativity".

Most of the factory workers in days past didn't even get to go to school, or stopped very early. That they learned "to handle monotonous labour" and "obey orders" at school is a myth. They learned it by necessity at the factory. It was either that or not getting to eat at all.

The upper classes were generally privately tutored until they were sent off to "college" afaik. I think college was the first taste of "mass education" that anyone had, and seems to primarily have been a means of certifying the emergent professional class whereas the tradesmen had his guild and standing within the guild to do the same.

> that did and still get by with laxer schooling, less "boring stuff", and more "creativity".

Creativity is inherently good. It's literally what brought us from the plains fighting large animals to making monolithic structures that battle the elements. We can harness the power of the electron to post, critique and posture ideas in nanoseconds because of extremely creative people. The "boring" stuff matters just as much as the "non-boring" stuff. What kills me is that the STEM and liberal arts side of the education debate are arguing from extremes - and both sides sound like morons when it comes to creativity. Creativity is harnessed by two things: a wealth of experience and knowledge (ie learning Calculus is good, just like skipping rocks on the river), and treating idea generation like play and not like work. Obviously it's a little bit more nuanced than that, but that's the distillation and the point remains. The boring stuff matters. The non-boring stuff matters. Everything is relevant and we should be creating a culture of education that not only understands that, but actually does something about it.

On /r/askhistorians someone asked about this idea that universal education was brought about to raise a nation of docile factory workers.

Here's the thread, the idea gets debunked pretty hard http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hbezd/was_th...

I don't think that thread is convincing. The one substantial comment makes assertions with very little evidence. Here's some evidence:

Rockefeller's General Education Board wrote the following in 1906:

  "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our 
  molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our 
  minds, and unhampered by
  tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive
  folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children
  into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not
  to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of
  letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters,
  musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen,
  of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is
  very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a
  perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an
  imperfect way."

In 1915, the Carnegie and Rockefeller organizations together were spending more to promote and directly fund primary education than the entire government.

President Woodrow Wilson (one of our most academic presidents) said this to a gathering of industrial leaders:

  "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class,
  a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a
  liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

It is well-documented that the push for mandatory public education in the US also had a big xenophobic component. Protestants of Northern European descent were horrified by all the "dirty", "drunken", Catholic Southern European and/or Irish immigrants who didn't share their culture. Literal battles were fought over who was going to take those children and indoctrinate them into one culture or another. Mandatory public education was not about uplift per se, it was about conformity. (It's supporters would call it uplift, but only because they were xenophobic bigots.)

I don't think that Rockefeller Education board quote supports your position. Education had previously only been necessary for the professions and callings listed - and its not like simply having more schools meant the economy was suddenly going to be composed of 100% professionals. They just want to give to the children what their parents want to give them but can't.

I suspect that factory owners and other bosses would have been scared of a new class of worker that could read and write. In fact I tend to think more education means less docile and easily manipulated people - then and now.

> Protestants of Northern European descent were horrified by all the "dirty", "drunken", Catholic Southern European and/or Irish immigrants who didn't share their culture.

As a Southern European, I find that idea hilarious. Drunkenness is far more pervasive and culturally ingrained in Northern Europe and in America than in Southern Europe. If all you've ever known is America, you may find it hard to understand just how ridiculously obsessed with getting drunk your culture appears from outside.

That was then, this is now. At the time, they also thought the Germans were lazy and stupid.

The northern Europeans who liked to drink stayed in Europe. It was the Taliban-level Puritan extremists who moved to America to start their own society.

Later waves of immigration were not so Puritan, but the upper classes were still very much associated with those sects well into the 20th century.

And yes, I don't think it's a coincidence that a society founded by Puritans has a binge drinking problem.

> no child left behind

How about instead calling it -- teach everyone the same; teach to the bottom of the class, even if they still aren't learning anything; and no child is permitted to get ahead?

But now finally, at last, we have true, 100%, coveted, equality and social justice!!

Because most likely those schools were in the business of producing zombies, or scared shitless kids due to teacher's punishment techniques. Those days are gone for good unless you are in the third world countries.

They used to behave here 30-40 years ago as well. Getting your hands beaten with a wooden ruler is a hell of an incentive.

Sure they will behave, I can't imagine it produced a lot of motivation to learn and excitement about attending school.

Yeah, with the aid of a paddle.

Correction officers in prisons work to achieve this same effect. I absolutely think it should be stigmatized.

> Historically many, many children have sat still at school and behaved themselves.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Please quantify this. Historically many, many people haven't been felons, but we still have a criminal justice system.

How come they don't seem to have this problem in China, India or Germany? It isn't that kids can't handle the workload, the problem is the boring curriculum.

One issue is that people think that there is "the problem". It is a multitude of problems ranging from economic to cultural to institutional. There are many things wrong with our education system and trying to wrap it up in a talking point only prolongs the real discussion that needs to be had.

In China the kids take on an extraordinary workload, because long hours show dedication - but they're not learning effectively - instead they all cheat, bribe the teacher, etc.

The appearance of working hard and actually working hard/effectively are two different things. Don't be fooled by cultures with endemic corruption.

Germany obviously excluded.

>instead they all cheat, bribe the teacher, etc.

This is wrong. Sure there are stories of Chinese students, parents and teachers cheating the system, but keep in mind that China is a country of whopping 1.3 billion people.

Just this past week they had a riot because some poor teachers tried to crack down on cheating.

The justification for the protests was that the crackdown was a "pilot program" that only affected a small portion of students.

Which just goes to show how systemic it is, if cracking down on some subset of students put them at such a severe disadvantage as to be worth rioting about.

How are they not learning effectively? And do you have any sources or evidence to back up your claims of cheating or bribing teachers? Workload isn't an issue. It isn't like kids aren't capable of sitting for hours upon hours, they do these things in front of computers and TVs, the problem is that the public school curriculum is flawed.

Have you not heard of the high incidence rates of Chinese and Indian students being notorious for cheating? Ask any computer science teacher's assistant.

Srsly? Cheating in China is so entrenched that there was a riot recently when it wasn't allowed: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1013239...

How do you know they don't have this problem? In India and China, literacy rates are lower than in the US, and a much smaller percentage graduate secondary school (or even go to secondary school). The kids who can't sit still or study effectively probably don't stay in school. Plus, have you ever heard firsthand accounts of Chinese or Indian school curricula? It's a bunch of rote memorization and math drills. The American curriculum at least tries to encourage independent thought and creativity.

They very much have exactly this problem in Germany as well.

> The problem is that schools aren't aware of that

I think the schools, and the teachers, are very aware of their "half babysitting" role. The public schools, in the US, are paid based on heads-per-day, with some restrictions on minimum days and test scores (depending on the state). They get money for providing services to the children. So, as with all incentive plans, the system gets gamed.

> What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day?

The ones society wants to succeed in school. Like sports, not everyone has the ability required to succeed at higher levels. If someone hadn't forced me to stop watching TV when I was young, I would be in front of it right now. This says nothing about their ability in reality, just in playing the school game.

>> What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day?

> The ones society wants to succeed in school.

So, the malleable, obedient ones should succeed. I'm sure that will be convenient for someone.

> I'm sure that will be convenient for someone.

Individual action and group inaction can have the same result. A conspiracy is not required.

"School is half education and half babysitting."

As currently designed, the five basic functions of public school are sorting, socialization, warehousing, training, and FRPL. They tend to be pretty aware of all of these.

Yours is an interesting comment, but none of it is responsive to the submitted article's concern about differences between boys and girls in school. I have actually lived in another country, and I am aware by direct observation that that country has BOTH higher academic achievement by school pupils than the United States and pervasive recess periods during the school day when young children get outdoors and exercise. I think that United States school officials need to stop believing legends about what goes on in other countries and actually

a) OBSERVE what the school day looks like in other countries,

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740...

b) analyze textbooks and teaching practices that produce superior results

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

c) take careful note of classroom practices that respect learners and help learners learn deeply and not just superficially,

http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study

and

d) systematically train teachers in effective teaching techniques.

http://teachlikeachampion.com/

Boys and girls, all over the world, are exposed to many different kinds of school schedules and school practices, and it is the basic procedure of educational science to carefully observe the different combinations of home, societal, and school influences on children and try to figure out what helps learners have the best results.

Both of these comments - just changed my view of how I should teach my child and what their school should be like.

wow. Epiphany

I'm so glad my elementary school here in the US gave us 2, 45min (~10:30 and 2pm) and an hour long lunch/recess period each day. It really made things much more bearable; except Spanish, it was right before the afternoon recess

I have to second this. For instance, everyone in education and policy circles these days is talking about Finnish education. Besides the fact that Finnish schools make sure every student eats enough and teachers have a lot of autonomy to shape lessons to student needs, students get something like 50 minutes of recess at lunch and less formal breaks every hour or so during the day. The school days are often shorter, too.

(How I envied my Finnish cousins when I saw that they got to take an hour or two of nature class every week and sometimes they went home at 1 pm and sometimes they went home at 2:30... depending on the class schedule, which repeated weekly but was different every day!)

The article's suggestions for instructional activities that benefit boys outline projects that also benefit girls. The reason boys are disciplined more than girls when both are bored half to death is that many boys hit each other and run around while many girls are "nice" and just write notes, doodle, or sleep, staying in their seats as required. I say this as a woman who brought a pillow to class in high school and was seen as a stellar student.

Your point at the end is so true. I was reading that list of examples and thinking "Why are they putting the emphasis on boys? Every single one of these looks like something I'd have enjoyed in school."

A good example of bored boy behavior vs. bored girl behavior: one time in a personal finance management class, we played BINGO with elbow macaroni as markers. (The questions were really simple so the game was neither fun nor educational.) Quite a few guys in the class took to stomping on their macaroni and finding other creative ways to crush it. I was busy getting them all to stand up as little arches and looking for interesting ways to arrange them. I was just as bored but less disruptive.

I don't know how familiar you all are with the Montessori method, but I spent Preschool through 5th grade in one and it worked out quite well for me. Basically I had a list of things that needed to get done every week, so I would get them done on Monday and spend the rest of the week researching lasers, learning BASIC in the computer lab, etc.

I think unstructured learning time is hugely lacking in the traditional school setting.

Most schools in America do little more than condition children to the 40 hour work week + homework/overtime. It makes us slaves.

My school will be different, and America doesn't deserve it.

How many teachers in the past were men?

I went to primary school in the 80ies (Austria) and had only female teachers.

Which completely sucks as those women do. not. understand. young boys. Any natural behavior by young girls is good, any natural behavior by boys is distracting. You can't do that ad nauseum.

My step-son, 10years, had a male teacher for 3 years. What an amazing difference that makes. It's a mixture of laissez faire (I don't give a shit if they are beating each other with sticks) to quick and decisive aggressiveness (immediate consequence, not hour long conversations, nagging, etc.). The girls could not cope with this style so well.

Teaching became a female job around the early 1900s, but I don't remember why now... I need to find it again.

I once had a male teacher when I was 12 or something like that, he managed to engage both male and female students with pure awesomeness.

Also when male students had a problem, this teacher was the automatic go-to one.

Later during the end years of the school, I went to a elite one focused to get people into university no matter what (yet in my year 90% failed, while all previous years they had a 90% of success, and the only change is that on my year affirmative action went into effect), then I had balanced male and female teachers, usually the male teachers were way more popular (sometimes too much... ie: one of them got fired multiple times for having sex with female students, and then hired back because students demanded him back...), maybe because as you said, they tended to allow people do random shit (in fact, sometimes they joined the fray too, one teacher destroyed a lamp by accident after throwing a shoe across the room), but were also hard to crack down if needed (the sex with students teachers only once threw people out of the class in about 15 years of career, two female students that insisted in chatting REALLY LOUD and after it bothered him too much, he said: "Ugly near the fat, you two, out", after the news of that incident spread few people ever bothered in challenging him again, since it was quite clear he was ruthless if he wanted to).

What country are you from?

That's interesting. I went to primary school in Switzerland in the 90ies, and I only had male teachers. In fact, except for sewing classes, I only had male teachers all the way through high school.

Schools know that they are primarily a babysitting service: it's easy to understand from the nature of the fuss that parents make when school is closed on a work day.

:) Since UK schools are considering experimenting with shorter/different summer holidays for the educational benefit, there was a parent on talk radio just this morning saying this was unfair because he may need to organise more babysitting.

Luckily, most parents are looking for good education.

> now it's the "global workforce"

I know this is highly anecdotical in nature, but perhaps there's some useful information to it :-).

I'm part of the "global workforce"; I don't live in the US, but I have done some contract work with US employers as an independent consultant. I was born and currently live in Europe.

Funny thing is, while I absolutely loved learning and still do -- to the extent that an important factor in my choice of avoiding large corporations (after getting burned twice) was that a job there would leave me too little time for history, philosophy and programming of my own -- I didn't go to school that much. I was one of the top students in the class (I even unintentionally ended up as a valedictorian, so besides my BSc in Instrumentation Engineering they also handed me a badge of nerd shame or something), but I was regularly getting into trouble for skipping classes, faking illnesses and, every once in a while, challenging the professors' authority.

Fortunately, I actually had my parents behind me on this, and both of them are teachers (high school and university level, respectively). I'd literally tell my dad I was too hung over to go to school this morning, he'd shrug and tell me that as long as I think it's best to stay at home, I can stay at home.

And it was ok. I'm not starving -- I'm actually quite well off -- I have a job that I love, I do what I like and what I am best at. Despite my trouble with authority, my academic credentials are fairly good (to the extent that I am a published author -- my work ended up in IEEE journals -- but that was before I got my BSc, and I didn't push for an MSc after that).

Quite frankly, I'm horrified at the amount of work we put children to. I managed to dodge it because the system in my home country is shaggy enough that, as long as you're blunt and cunning enough, you can get away with anything. The sheer thought of actually having gone to school all that time is simply unrealistic, I'd have broken down.

I think this is a typical case of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". No one bothers to think what the problem is, and appears to put it strictly in terms of MOAR SCHOOL MY LITTLE MINIONS! This is woefully unproductive. I swear, if I'll ever have kids of my own, I'll do just like my dad did with me -- encourage them to think for themselves and learn what's interesting for them, treating school as the necessary diploma-producing evil it seems to have ended up in our days.

Your parents are truly nice, but that makes you the exception, not the rule. Most students at my university perform like crap because their parents are either too demanding or don't give a damn.

I also observed that people who get great grades at school usually can't get anything serious done on their own.

I'm perfectly happy being average in school.

I had a H.S. teacher admit to my mother that she was grading me on a scale that included how "distracted" I was by my girlfriend in the class. Little did she know that we had broken up months prior, and every guy in the class was probably distracted by her at some point.

I had a second teacher that was giving myself and my friends lower grades in computer class, because we were "goofing off" -- making websites, chat portals, playing with VB, etc. After completing our weekly assignments in the first day of the week, we were applying ourselves to higher levels of computing, which she equated to us not doing our work; in reality, she had no idea what we were actually doing or what a computer could be made to do that wasn't outlined in her spiral-bound curriculum. Let's take it out on these meddling kids!

That reminds me of the time my History teacher called up my mom when I was in 9th grade.

Teacher: Yes, hi. Your son isn't taking notes in class, even though he is required to.

Mom: Well, what did he get on his midterm?

Teacher: 100

Mom: :| Goodbye.

My parents were rather "amused" that I could almost be failing a class that taught you how to Open a document, bold text, and save, while at the same time as having self-made business cards and brochures and revenue from teaching Office '97 to professional folk and another service of building corporate web-portals.

My HS was really progressive, as the other 5 in town barely offered a typing class, and it's only gotten better for my school -- a Charter school.

Although I was a generally calm student (I am introverted and not into causing mayhem or attracting attention), I never copied from the blackboard, don't did my homework, slept during classes, or instead kept drawing, or later writing ASM code or toying with physics formulas, or I just outright spent my time chatting about video games with whoever was nearby.

Every time I had a new teacher, my parents were called into the school, and warned that I had some sort of problem (and my parents went into full denial hell not of course my child is not crazy... later I found out I DO probably have Aspergers, seemly inherited from the father of my mother), my parents reply were: "Alright, wait until the tests, and if he fails, THEN you can call us."

Unfortunately to those teachers, and me, I did not failed... Meaning I had to endure them, and they had to endure me. Specially because I completely ignored their lessons, and in the time of the tests I answered correctly but in my own way, this was specially bad related to hard sciences because I would use formulas I invented on the spot, and I wrote in totally random patterns, forcing teachers to spend LOOOOOONG time to figure what I did, also my calligraphy is horrible, thus all my teachers hated reading my tests, yet they could not just zero them, because I always passed, so if they did that, they knew I would send the test to their superior and would get them punished.

So yes, I can totally relate to the article.

Also I STILL don't sit still, right now as I type I am vibrating one of my legs. (I guess this is a way to keep energy burning considering I stay sitting the entire day).

Ah, to have grown up in an education system where homework and in-class participation aren't counted as some huge part of the grade!

class participation and whatnot counted, and I had not a problem with that, when a teacher asked a direct question and I was not sleeping deeply enough (if I was half-sleeping and heard the question I woke up) I would usually be the first to reply.

Only later I figured this was bad idea (here in Brazil at least, the norm is to noone ever try to reply to the teacher, as a kind of weird social convention, and since I always replied, even while half-asleep, I quickly attracted negative attention, I was frequently involved in fights I did not started with the less performing boys... also girls sometimes pulled some horrible stuff, like spreading rumors or attempt to frame me)

In high school (in the early 2000s, in the US), class participation didn't mean just answering a question when called on, in my school most of the time it meant preemptively offering an answer without being called on. You got graded on having the initiative to answer without the teacher asking you directly.

If someone tried that here in Brazil everyone would get a zero.

Specially, because they link someone posted about Richard Feynman is still very true, most students here don't know jack shit beside what they memorized, the genius wannabes quickly get stomped when they say crap and others laugh at them.

Schools here are best teach you how to be conforming to social expectations... at best.

Also I like to point out that the reason I did not failed at tests, was not the school, it was that being curious as I am, most tests ended asking stuff I already had learned somewhere else (usually reading a book), I still have as hobby read random books, encyclopedias, science sites... And I had that hobby before wikipedia existed (in my bedroom there was 5 different enciclopedias, including one focused on history and ancient religion, and another on botany, zoology and chemistry, also I have all the books that my dad read during when he was getting his civil engineering degree)

Just to give an example of what speeder means by "students here don't know jack shit": Over the years I have told friends and peers that, in a perfect vacuum and without taking into account the curvature of the earth, a bullet fired from a gun that's completely level and another bullet dropped from the same height, at the same time, will hit the ground at the same time. Everyone disagrees, says that of course the bullet from the gun will take much longer to fall etc, etc. Now, this is all people who went to private schools and had three (yes, three) years of physics (because if you go to high school here and your school is not a shitty public one, you will have physics for 3 years. You can't choose). I even argued with a friend of mine who is a geologist and works at Brazil's huge oil company Petrobras. You might say "oh, a couple of people, that's anecdote". Yes, it is, but it is just a couple of people because after the fifth I just said "screw it", no one learns physics here.

Feels for you, bro.

I don't know if Brazilian education has improved since Feynman wrote this: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

I suspect not by much.

Regarding the "test" mentioned there and it being self-perpetuating.

Brazil during the cold war, caught the propaganda of sorts that anyone to have success needed to have a degree, the country needed to go from almost none degrees to everyone have degrees.

The result was a severe lack of universities, so the government started to build them like if there was no tomorrow (and they are STILL not enough for the demand), and made into law a thing called "vestibular" that is a entry test that you take to join university.

The test subject is whatever the government ministry of education decided that schools must have as curriculum, thus the test asks questions regarding everything you learn in school from 3 to 18 years old of your life, and since it tests for everything and is applied to ANY course, the government mandatory curriculum has anything a university student might need, thus we have a curriculum that is so ridiculously big, that is impossible to teach it entirely.

Because here getting the students of your school into a federal university (here they are almost on US ivy league level) or to certain state universities (those have several courses listed alongside ivy league and Oxford on best courses list) is highly prestigious, and the only way to get in is passing the stupid test, the high schools developed a system that they teach you how to pass the test, literally, your final tests on the schools many times are directly copied from previous years vestibular tests, and students on those schools know how to pass the test, and only that.

Since here in Brazil university-level education is mandatory to be a teacher, only those that passed the tests, and teach new people how to pass the tests, making things worse.

Also, here in Brazil homeschooling is a crime (yes, they ARREST you for attempting to homeschool your kids), and joining university without a normal schooling is not allowed, you can be sure 99% of university students passed by this system (the other 1% are dropouts that later did a high school conclusion test sponsored by the government).

Terrific. I first read that Feynman piece long ago, but it was good to read it again.

That piece is a great illustration of just how messed up education can be. Not all of US K-12 public education is so messed up, but a lot of it is significantly messed up in similar ways -- formality over reality.

And in particular, for the OP, a lot of women trying to teach boys when the women do understand the girls, are happy teaching the girls, but assume that somehow there is something wrong with the boys. Indeed, in the OP, the author does make progress on the problem but for her teaching idea of having team members come to the front of the class to look at something for 30 seconds, she is back to some absurd formality instead of anything close to reality.

Here's one: Boys are good at figuring things out. So, mechanical things -- boys are good at taking them apart and then putting them back together. Then one level more advanced, boys are good at making things -- e.g., give them some elementary parts and pieces and ask them to make something, say, something that will be the tallest in the class or a bridge with the longest free span or a bridge between two points that will hold the greatest weight. Have them make, say, rubber band powered cars and then have drag races. There are paper airplane contests with well developed rules -- get the rules and have a paper airplane contest. Redo some of what the Wright Brothers did with the world's first, good wind tunnel. So, measure lift and drag for various airfoil shapes. Then discuss Reynolds number. For selecting the materials for the frame of an airplane, discuss density and Young's modulus. Move to have the students explain how Hughes was able to build the 'Spruce Goose', about the size of a 747, out of wood.

There must be some books somewhere with some good projects for boys.

If the girls want to do such things, too, okay by me. If the rubber band car, the bridge, the air foil, or the airplane they build wins, terrific.

But, then, teachers might want to understand some things about boys! If I was a boy in that class and making a rubber band powered drag race car, it'd all be fine as long as I was racing against other boys -- I'd like to win, but no biggie if I came in second or third. But as soon as one of the girls started to compete with me, it'd be no food, no sleep, nothing else in school, nothing else for 48 hours as I wracked my brains looking for whatever, anything, to totally blow the doors off that girl's car and send her back to decorating her picture of her little pink pony and doing gossip about lipstick! And, uh, I had some pretty good talent with mechanical things, spatial relations, etc. In the US a lot of boys are really good with mechanical things.

I was about to say that's not my experience at all. But then, it seems that the majoritarian experience of the the people that studied with me until our equivalent of high school was just like that... The difference is that I studied from the books, and just needed the teachers to ask questions (not during the class, of course).

At my undergrad things got slightly better. I guess the most advanced teachers got something from the lesson.

Exactly. In France it used to be that finals counted for 100% of the grade (everything else for zero).

That's the thinking behind the "bac" that marks the end of high school: you either have it (weighted average >= 10/20) or you don't, but what your teachers thought about you is irrelevant (except in special cases where your average is 9.8 for example).

Everything else used to work the same as the "bac": you study, or you don't, during the year, and at the end of the year a big exam tested whether you know anything or not.

Before my time it was even stronger; my mother (who's 80 and studied in the 1950s) was able to get her law degree without ever going to law school (she was a full-time secretary and studied law at night). She was a very fine lawyer and won most her cases (including a few for me ;-)

This is an incredibly fair system. What matters is, can you answer the questions on the test (and BTW, questions used to be real questions that you had to answer using full sentences and actual reasoning, never MCQs).

But things are changing. Things have always been changing, but now they're changing faster. People complain that setting up exams is costly whereas the marginal cost of tracking in-class participation is nil (since the teacher is already there anyway).

This is very silly and very unfair. What in-class participation measures is conformity/ability to repeat what the teacher wants to hear, NOT competence or knowledge.

Rating - or paying any attention to - in-class participation is confusing the means with the end. The end is knowledge/personal development. Listening to the teacher while sitting still, or "partipating" (?) is but one of the means to achieve this goal.

In this month's "Who's hiring?" thread I came upon an ad from "ClassDojo", the stated mission of which is to "manage behavior in the classroom" by "easily award[ing] feedback points for behavior in class in real-time, with just one click of your smartphone or laptop".

This upset me in more ways than I can describe.

Teachers should seek to ENGAGE students, not "manage their behavior".

Modern schooling seems to aim at training donkeys for a circus show, using treats provided by the likes of ClassDojo.

This is as far removed from "education" as possible; education is about autonomy of the mind.

To be honest, it's probably good you fidget constantly just for blood flow. Sitting still all day gets you airplane traveler afflictions like deep vein thrombosis.

Even better than fidgeting is surely getting up and moving around.

Are there any private all-boys[1] schools that embrace this side of childhood? Look at tiger cubs and what not: they play, they bounce around, they fight, they figure out the world around them through investigation and exploration.

I spent so much of my time outside as a kid, but I also spent a lot of time inside on the computer. Both were amazing worlds where your imagination could run wild; especially in the early days of computers and the internet... being a part of a "wild west" frontier at the age of 10 was a special privilege.

My point is that learning and running around in the mud are both very valuable and can be balanced to create well-rounded people who have confidence with technology and the outdoors.

Has any institution figured out how to balance these two in a formal curriculum? Spend half the day exploring the woods and classifying wildflowers, the other half back inside working with math formulae and reading lessons.

Some might say there's not enough time in the day to spend half of it outside, but I disagree. The kids will be more efficient in their inside learning time if they've spent half the day learning outside.

[1] I'm not saying that girls wouldn't appreciate the same type of learning. I suspect that in an environment that harvests the physical energy (horseplay, outdoors activities) of boys to improve learning, even in a positive and productive manner, might alienate some young girls who might feel uncomfortable, so perhaps it's better to separate the genders in this sort of environment?

A friend reported that The German School outside Washington, DC, (private, predominately but not exclusively male) has the kids in some of the lowest grades spend most of their time running around. Now, I don't remember whether this applied as high up as 1st grade.

"Look at tiger cubs"

LOL I read that the first time as a Cub Scouts reference and agreed completely.

You might be surprised just how much of your "thought experiment" vaguely resembles the many Cub Scout pack meetings I've attended, other than the pack meetings only being about 2 hours every other week rather than 8 hours every weekday.

Like most organizations, the Scouts get many things right and a couple things wrong, and it improves the level of discourse to stay on track. So bringing up their very peculiar unamerican ideas about religion or sex is not terribly relevant to the discussion of "educating boys", which is kind of the point of the controversy about them, but I digress...

On the other hand, from what I've seen of my daughters girl scout troop meetings, its mostly craft time and snack/gossip time.

There's a heck of a big difference between the two scout orgs beyond one group's parents sell cookies (just tellin' it like it is...).

I've heard good things about Adventure Scouts from people who did it growing up. It's co-ed and from what I've heard, they focus on outdoor exploration and survival skills. I wish I'd been able to do something like that as a kid. I'm definitely looking into it if I ever have kids of my own : )

Adventure Scouts: http://www.adventurescoutsusa.org/

If we're going to list groups that meet 1000 miles away from home, may as well list the Hacker Scouts org

http://hacker-scouts.org/

The weirdest part of the whole thing, is scouting originally started as "us boys wanna play pretend Army Special Forces, and whenever kids have fun, the adults descend on them with rules and regulations to eliminate as much fun as possible" much like little league, school, etc, and roughly a century of intense topic drift later, scouting has turned into boys programming arduinos and girl's parents selling cookies. Not that any of it is wrong, I'm just astounded at the scale of the topic drift.

I never fail to be amused at the whole "back to basics" people WRT scouting, they don't know enough history to realize they might "win" the sex and religion thing, but going "back to basics" means no more pinewood derby, no more blue and gold dinner, none of the modern stuff, just extreme hardcore camping and a bit of marksmanship, pretty much.

I don't know about schools, but the kindergarten that I went to was a "nature"-kindergarten, where we were out in the forest 80% of the day, no matter if it rained or snowed.

I must have catched a whole forest of insects, and investigated them.

It is very popular in Denmark, and I love the forest and the outdoor because of it, especially the different seasons and their impact on nature.

That sounds amazing. Google suggests "Waldkindergarten", at least as a name for the general category. Is that correct? Maybe just in Germany?

Edit: that wikipedia article is maybe the worst thing ever. Learning to be comfortable in a natural environment, more free-form play, these are good things in an of themselves. I don't understand why people need to fall back on crackpot theories to justify a program like this.

In Denmark it is named "Skovbørnehave" which translates to "Forest kindergarten".

I am actually a bit surprised that it worked, because we ran around without much supervision, but we knew exactly where we were allowed to be, and when we were too far away from the group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

The Montessori approach has some similarities to what you propose, and is probably about as close as you can get in current American education. Not outdoors or all-boys, but otherwise it's structured largely as you propose, with time divided between direct instruction in academic subjects and free-form exploration. Kids are free to roam the classroom and pick up whatever educational materials catch their curiosity: maps, books, geometric and mathematical materials, puzzles, and lots of other good stuff.

I attended a Montessori preschool and kindergarten, in the early 1980s. I'd wholeheartedly recommend it. (There's no formal definition or central authority, so schools and approaches will vary, but mine was excellent.) The open environment of creativity really helped my early intellectual development. I was reading everything, had most of the countries on the globe memorized, and knew squares and cubes up to 10 all by about age five, all thanks to the ready accessibility of all that stuff according to my own interests rather than being forced and tested all the time.

Yeah, the more I read about this stuff as well as our excellent public education system, the more I realize I will strongly consider putting my son into Montessori schools.

I went to elementary and high school in rural Minnesota and I only remember having to sit down about 2-3 hours a day. We did a lot of outdoor science-y stuff like your classify the wildflowers example, sports, PE, art class, orchestra and band, two recesses per day, etc. In high school, we had electives like small engine repair, CAD and in one course could even build an entire house. That said, the actual "academic" courses like math and history were heinously boring and poorly taught and felt like they lasted 8 hours each.

It would alienate some young boys, too. There are a lot of stereotypes in these comments.

Thank you, reading these comments and the OP makes me cringe with the sexism. I'd like some fundamental science proving possessing a Y chromosome and the male hormone tract in utero makes you behave so radically different socially at such an immature age.

My experiences with children in general (note, I'm in no way professional here) is that the domestication of girls is tremendously cultural from birth and up in how radically different people will treat a female child from a male one, even if they are physically indistinguishable (except the inherent physical differences) until they are 8 or older.

As a male who didn't have trouble in school and realized early on that just faking obedience and getting the grades would best enable me for long term success and didn't have some innate testosterone powered need to beat things up or break stuff I did not see some fundamental split between having a second X or a Y chromosome and your behavioral profile. People are different. There are boys and girls that will want to investigate and explore, just like there are boys and girls that like to memorize and convey information formulaically. Different people are different. Factory compulsory public education in prison like settings suits a very limited personality profile.

As a long-time teacher in multiple countries, I've also had this concern. I realize it's a fairly heretical belief to hold on this site but I think boys are systematically discriminated against in most western societies.

As a child that teachers (nearly all women) tended to be biased against boys and downright dismissive of male dominated interests such as science fiction, video games or arm-wrestling. Talking with students in recent years, I get the impression that my teachers were actually more tolerant of boys than most current K12 teachers are. Invariably boys get punished more severely for similar infractions, boys are more likely to be forced onto medication and more likely to receive "tough love" in the face of academic difficulties.

Compounding this is that even in this day and age when there's nearly a 3-2 ratio of females to males in college, it's the boys who get fewer grants, fewer sex-specific support organizations and less support in general. This chasm continues, even for mid-career adults. Many organizations provide women with free training in various fields, including tech (see Railsbridge, Women Who Code, etc) and allow men only as guests of women at all. In fact the amazingly good hacker school I went to charges men $2000 more than women.

Things probably still seem okay at this point due to the fact that the trends have gradually been getting more extreme and the educational imbalances weren't so bad 15-30 years ago, when much of the workforce was in formal schooling. But the swelling ranks of disenfranchised young men is a demographic that isn't going to be good news for anyone, including women.

> In fact the amazingly good hacker school I went to charges men $2000 more than women.

Is that even legal?

It's de-facto legal at the very least. AFIK all the schools do that. Actually, it looks like mine just gives $1k off for women and certain minorities. There were several students I talked to who paid 2k less than me, but I'm not sure what the reason was. The tuition price doesn't appear to have been consistent in the beginning.

I was one of the calm and orderly boys in school. However, this was because merely being at school where I didn't want to be made me mostly lethargic. I didn't have any energy left to make a scene as I was busy counting hours until the day ended. To be precise, since the first week of the first grade I practically counted days till the end of high school when I knew this suffering would end.

I did get good grades not because I was interested but because school was way too easy. I never even studied for exams except the last evening before, and that was mostly glancing at the books, yet I was always among the handful of best in the classroom. That is, until teenage when I realize I don't need all this bullshit and deliberately began to focus only on the few interesting subjects the school had to offer, and defocus on everything else. Didn't do too bad even after that.

I still think it was such a waste of years, and I'm trying to imagine a better way to waste it. I can come up with lots of ideas but very few of them would fit all people. I would've enjoyed a more fast-paced and in-depth classes of my favorite topic at the expense of the subjects I wasn't interested. I think different people ultimately need different kind of environment to be taught in, and I think that the current homogeneous standard schooling is likely to kill more of natural curiosity than sow it. I don't think any standard schooling works for all, unless it's so reduced down to the very, very basics (reading, writing, basic arithmetics) that everyone absolutely needs and which they can build on top of.

I really like this article. It looks at a severe problem (that traditional education is only reaching a small fraction of the students 'smart' enough to excel) and it suggests both a new way at looking at the problem (at least one I hadn't considered), and an approach to improvement that can be taken iteratively, without a sweeping change or expensive program.

At least one of my three boys would have an incredibly hard time with this. He's definitely "aspie" in a lot of respects.

The decision to home educate our 4 children is hands down the best decision we've ever made. Highly recommend it, if you are able to pull it off logistically. Very rewarding experience so far.

Any tips on getting started? It sounds interesting but I wouldn't know where to start.

Google homeschooling resources, and begin talking to the homeschooling groups in your local area. Homeschooling has a network of families that support each other generally. It's the easiest and best way to get started. Plus, you'll get a lot of guidance on what resources are good and which are a waste of time.

Having been homeschooled, this is a great suggestion. It's pretty easy to get too isolated, and homeschooling groups help a lot. Also check with your local schools - I was able to take 2 classes while still being classified as 'homeschooled', for free (since it's part of taxes already), which can give access to tools that are otherwise way too expensive.

Seconding this. I was also allowed to take two classes at the local high school free while being homeschooled. Useful for classes that benefit from in classroom interactions (foreign language) or expensive equipment (science labs).

> Having been homeschooled, this is a great suggestion.

Agreed. I was homeschooled as well, and homeschool groups were absolutely vital to making the experience a success for me. I did great teaching myself at home, but especially in high school, I needed outside classes and outside social activities. The city I grew up in had a huge homeschool community, so it was easy to find classes on a wide variety of subjects.

My son was in a great group this past year that was a Shakespeare deep dive. They gave a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the end of the year. It was a great experience.

I'm so jealous! My parents homeschooled me for nine years, but put me in public high school because they weren't sure how to teach language classes and science labs effectively, and they wanted me to have more opportunities for social development. I was miserable and ignored the opportunities for gaining social confidence until college (when I finally put effort into making friends and realized what I'd been missing out on).

I wish I could have gone your route; it seems like you got the best of both worlds! Oh well, I know what to look into for my own kids : )

It's nearly a guarantee that you have at least two homeschool groups in your area: one explicitly secular, one explicitly religious. Don't be afraid to go wading in the pool of the "other" group.

we haven't had much luck with the more religious groups (as heathens). The mormons are actually really cool, so I agree, cross the fence. It doesn't always work out, but it is worth the effort because we live in a broad world and everybody has something to offer.

We have a great homeschool group that provides a lot of high quality social time combined with sports and other activities. We also participate in a co-op that is a lot of fun and provides some variety. The oldest is in a leadership program that has benefited him greatly.

We are very loose curriculum wise and follow a self-education approach[1] loosely. The Robinson Curriculum is awesome, and I highly recommend it.

[1] http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/

I just want to say that you might want to consider public high school. There's a lot of social development going on there, even if most people come out of the entire system bitter.

My oldest is 15 and the decision is his to make. There are lots of avenues for social development and we talk about it as a family. He chose not to this year. I've offered both public and private options.

I'd rather they not develop 'socially' the way most high-schoolers do: conform to the group, if you're different you're wrong. Our children get plenty of socialization among their cousins and other home-schooled friends.

I walked out of the double doors for the last time. Where I had expected to see a large crowd of people there were only scattered groups of two or three. It didn't matter, they were probably already at flapjacks. I had never heard of the tiny breakfast diner until it was chosen as the unofficial after school lets out breakfast for my graduating class. Nobody else seemed to be showing up, so I walked with one of the tiny groups I saw. I had left home with the intention of eating at flapjacks, even if I dined alone.

Getting out of school has a strange unreality to it. The thing that changes for me is home work. At least with a regular nine to five job you clock out and it's over. With school it's never over, homework is dealt in sufficient quantities to make sure that you're always left wondering if you've done all of it or not. Otherwise enjoyable activities will suddenly be interrupted by your memory trying to figure out if there's any homework that needs to be done. So when I walked out of the double doors my sense of reality was underpinned by the feeling that nothing had seemed to change. It wouldn't be until later that I'd realize my sleep schedule returned to normal after school let out.

The walk to flapjacks was nothing to write about. We crossed a road, and then a bridge, and then a train track, and we were there. As we walked into the restaurant one of the boys at the center table yelled "GET OUT! GET OUT RIGHT NOW!", to which I yelled back an emphatic "FUCK YOU!". It took a few seconds of the other kids cacophony of "He can't say that..." before I remembered that I was, in fact, in a restaurant. I sheepishly apologized to the owner (who was cashier, waiter, and manager) and sat down next to the boy who yelled, Khanor.

Immediately I started to wonder why I came. He apologized and told me that he was actually commenting on my beard, which I had shaved a few days prior, he hadn't been there for them. I inferred that he was speaking in that strange vernacular that all groups of teenage boys invent, and I had shouted at him for it. The distance between us made itself even more felt. I'd been to flapjacks exactly three times, at the end of my Freshman year, my Sophomore year, and now my Junior year. I happened to be hungry, and left with twenty dollars for food, which I spent all of.

Part of the reason I came was to get a group photo. To take a photo in a public high school you're supposed to have everyone sign consent forms agreeing to be photographed. This is of course unwieldy for a group photograph, and I wasn't even sure where to get the consent forms. Besides, I wanted the photo to be organic, to show them accurately. When people pose stiff like corpses for a photo the memory is soiled. I remembered a photo I had seen on wikipedia of the Italian Arditi. The people in it seemed so lively that I could almost imagine standing there with them. I wanted a photo like that.

Part of the problem with getting it was that I needed to take the photo before anybody left. The other problem was finding a place to take the picture, everybody was sitting too far apart to take it from the ground floor. The shot would need to be taken from above the floor level. I eventually set the camera and its tiny tripod on top of a ledge painted green that had a piano set against its side.

It took me three tries as I recall to take the picture. Getting more than ten people to not pose for a group photo, but still look at the camera is an impossible task. What I eventually ended up with was a restaurant of boys and girls striking various poses. Even I had to quickly run to my seat to get in the photo. As I looked over the final photo I frowned, somebody had flipped off the camera, the others had tried to be "wacky" to stand out.

The more I stared at my photo, the better I felt about it. These kids were the type to flip off a camera, and they were the type to make funny faces for a group photo, which in that sense gives a viewer the "realism" of their personalities. More importantly though, it was my photo, I could share it with anyone I wanted, any time I wanted. It's probably the only photo I have of these people that I can show.

School got out at 9:15 as I remember it. My mom had made sure to tell me she couldn't pick me up if I missed the bus, so I knew that after I left this restaurant it would be a long walk home. I asked the boys next to me if I could get a ride in their truck. The short one, Mason, blew off the request, telling me it was a short walk to my house. (Later when I told my mom where I'd walked from her first comment was "That's clear across town!") I got up to pay, and went over my order with the overwhelmed manager, noting the orange juice he had forgotten to write down. (Flapjacks is the sort of restaurant that charges you three dollars for a glass of orange juice.)

As I walked out Khanor drove past me, shouting in a mocking tone "Have fun at the hydroponics store!", a place I had announced my intention to visit earlier. It was right next door. When I got to the road, a man with a backpack stood there with me. He asked if I had any bus tickets. I looked at his olive face and almost considered asking him the cost of a bus ticket and giving him the money, but showing money to a stranger seemed like adding more danger than necessary to a walk across town. I told him no, which was the truth, and he pressed the crosswalk button and waited.

It's funny, the last time I'd walked around in a town was years ago, and it wasn't until he'd pressed the button and I saw the little white man on the other side of the road that I remembered if it was the stop sign or the man that told you when to cross. In retrospect it seemed obvious that it was the man. I visited every store and building that I hadn't had occasion to prior. This included a trip to Value Village, where I looked over the used book selection and found it wanting, I usually have better luck at Goodwill.

I walked out of Value Village with a book on technical writing, and started again down the sidewalk. By this point it was something like one o clock. As I walked down the side walk I became distracted by a passerby and ended up walking in front of a blue truck. The driver didn't seem pleased, and made a motion for me to walk up to the window, I declined and kept walking.

And walking, and walking. I crossed another road, passed Starbucks, bought a Jones soda at Haggens, and made the final walk down to my house. On the way there I was worried about how I would clean up the soda bottle if I dropped it on the concrete. When I finally got to the door it was almost 2:15 PM. I sat down in my chair with a vague sense of malaise. The feeling of unreality from earlier had been heightened by the walk home.

I realized it would have been better to dine alone.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Italian_...

http://i.imgur.com/FtaMfSx.jpg?1

Agreed. In college, the kids who were home educated before just seem . . . off. And I say that as a slightly off person myself.

> In college, the kids who were home educated before just seem . . . off

This particular bias is probably why the normal people in college who were home-schooled didn't volunteer that information to you.

It's also a result. Normal people don't volunteer that they were home-schooled, the strange ones do.

I think social confidence has a lot more to do with personality than it does with school experience. By all means consider public school, but don't think of it as a panacea for social problems, especially if your kids aren't on board with the idea. The benefits it provides are available elsewhere, without the bitter fruits of tedium and frustration.

One of the things they used to do for this at my school (in another country) was to have 50 minutes of compulsory physical activity or drills in the morning, at least three out of five days. (This was excluding separate gym/physical training classes.)

I feel like this could go a long way into giving boys an outlet for their physical energy. I definitely know that even as one of the most talkative and fidgety kids in class, I used to fidget a lot less if I had returned from a bout of running or whatever.

Also, I am somewhat acquainted with some of the teachers in the US school system, and have found their knowledge about the subjects they are supposed to be teaching (specially science) to be severely subpar. Kids can often perceive this very accurately, and will respect a teacher less if he or she seems to be unsure or vague regarding what they are teaching.

One of the guiding objectives of the current cohort of education thought leaders is to focus on girls. So, we're focusing on girls. Boys, time for your pills.

My personal goal is to figure out how to make enough money to keep my children out of the insanity of public schools.

My personal goal is to figure out how to make enough money to keep my children out of the insanity of public schools.

It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to homeschool children. (Been there, still doing that.) It does take agreement among the parents about what lifestyle adjustments each parent is willing to make so that children have flexibility in their learning. My oldest son, now a programmer working for a startup, sent me a very touching email for Father's Day in which he attributed some of his success so far in the business world to having been homeschooled rather than being put in public school. "That has made it very easy for me to step into a leadership position and feel very comfortable in positions of responsibility" is part of what he wrote.

Finding truly excellent third-party educational materials and programs can be inexpensive

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Math_s/21.htm

or expensive,

http://ohs.stanford.edu/

depending on what your selection criteria are for "excellent" programs, and what your child's specific needs are, but some of the expensive third-party programs have significant financial aid that reaches up into the middle class, and some of the commercial materials and programs are available in a thriving used-materials or group-purchase market for homeschooling families. So shop around, and see what fits your family's needs.

There is a lot of information about how to get started in homeschooling

http://learninfreedom.org/sidlifgetstarted.html

on the World Wide Web, and my goal for next few years is to update my personal website (the link here) with more been-there, done-thats as I launch my younger three children into adulthood to joint their older brother in the big world.

I find it peculiar that you regularly cite scientific studies of this and that, and yet you are using this terribly misleading, n-of-1 implication that home schooling is why your oldest son has the success he has. Do you really think that children cannot do exactly the same thing coming out of a public school, and if so, why?

My son has taken up my thinking about the difference between anecdotes and research studies, and he actually mentioned the issue of successful co-workers he has who are public school alumni in another part of his email to me. But I shouldn't have to quote his whole personal email to make the point for onlookers that OF COURSE some alumni of public schools turn out to be very successful, and they are much more numerous than people who have been homeschooled. But there may still be an advantage for homeschooling at the margin, simply because it is generally more flexible and responsive to individual learner needs than mass classroom education.

I believe he said that his _son_ felt that home-schooling had the positive effect on his job.

I'm sure that people can do the same thing coming out of public school, but I think we can agree that many people coming out of public school (especially nerdy ones) do NOT feel empowered, or like leaders. Everyone's experiences are different, but I know that my self-esteem in high school was terrible, and didn't pick up until I was in college.

How on earth did you read that out of what was said? He implied that homeschooling was advantageous, and said that his son felt it was.

> "That has made it very easy for me[...]"

No, he obviously does not think that public school students are incapable of leadership positions in startups.

>> My personal goal is to figure out how to make enough money to keep my children out of the insanity of public schools.

> It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to homeschool children

I interpreted his original comment to mean they wanted to make enough money that they (or their spouse) had enough time to home-school. I'd be really surprised if the cost of materials approached the opportunity cost of the parents' time (although those are fungible to some extent).

It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to homeschool children.

Maybe he meant he wants his kid to go to private school.

In my experiences with three children in US public schools, this is not true.

-This article strikes a chord with me. I remember I was placed a year ahead in math, in Algebra I Honors, and the class was so easy that I would bring little toys into class and play with them while still getting A's. The teacher, a female, sent me back to Pre-algebra as a result. In hindsight, that reaction was so patently absurd. If anything, she should have tested whether I should have advanced to Geometry Honors.

-I don't think anyone is surprised that the article claims that boys perform better under conditions which simulate actual adult workplace conditions.

-A bigger issue is really the education system targeting the median student. That means those students with the highest potential have to fight against the system to reach it -- if they ever reach it at all. And holding back the brightest people, when the economy is advanced by that small percent of bright people, sounds horribly ineffective.

This educational system is an artificial structure imposed on people with disparate learning capabilities, trying to fit every peg under the sun into a square hole, and I think we've missed out on a lot of value because of that.

Hopefully, as automation increases, this is something we'll be able to improve upon.

As a youth, I was only able to sit still by focusing on sitting still. If I was paying attention to the teacher, I was fidgeting, and would be told to pay attention...

They gave me silly putty to harness my fidgeting. I soon discovered silly putty can be made into a bouncy ball, that I could use to distract everyone.

My son's classroom has employed smaller versions of exercise balls to keep some of the kids focused (including my own).

It's interesting to observe. The kids are fidgety and restless while sitting, but when you sit them on one of these the subconscious motor control going on seems to quell the foreground restlessness.

Maybe it's a metabolism thing? If they're used to burning calories a a certain rate, homeostasis will cause their bodies to seek to maintain that rate. Fidgeting burns a lot of calories. Maybe tensing up core muscles for balance fills that need?

I seem to recall studies in controlled environments where people were not allowed to exercise, and there was a significant difference in calorie burn attributable to small movements. So the homeostasis argument seems totally plausible to me.

But if you sit that same twitchy kid in front of a video game or stimulating TV show, the fidgeting doesn't happen. Interesting...

I recall being teased for moving around while playing video games...

I think it's more about the level of background "noise" in the brains of young kids. When unchecked/unfiltered in some kids it will start to trickle into the motor/cognitive areas of the brain and that's how you get fidgeting, twitchiness, those kinds of things.

Balancing on an exercise ball seems to engage those involuntary areas while not interfering with high-level processing.

My son gets to do his tests on a yoga ball, and it works very well.

Well done Sir.

Same here, I was constantly told to pay attention or my progress reports would say, "does well but does not pay attention".

I still do this at 26.

There has been research on this with adults.

People who fidget in meetings pay attention better and retain more information.

Even as an adult, when I'm really focused on something my right leg gets a mind of its own and just starts bouncing up and down rapidly. Maybe there's an evolutionary purpose to it (increasing blood circulation perhaps), but I've always found that when I force myself to be perfectly still I just don't focus as well.

During the baby boom there appeared to be an odd dynamic at work: in the primary grades, the neater, more docile girls were the teachers' favorites and got the better grades. Somewhere around or after puberty, they started to fall back behind the boys. Some of this was certainly socially motivated; a cousin said that boys didn't like to date girls they thought smarter. Some of it may have come from the teachers.

Just my two cents..

One of the most impressive girls I went to school with was kinda intimidating in her ferocious intelligence and confidence, but if I didn't dare to approach her, it was simply because it was painfully obvious she was out of my league, not because I didn't like her. She never sucked up, not to teachers and not to peers, she never failed to say what she thought, she played the piano and the violin and aced every single test anyone handed to her. And one time she passed some sweets on to me during class, and then laughed her ass off, because she had them in the mouth before wrapping them up again. If I utterly adored one girl in that time, it was her; so much I never dared to even fall in love with her.

In contrast, I never considered "neat and docile" pupils smart, just lame.

That wasn't even my two cents, just shamelessly indulging in nostalgia haha.

I have a 6 year old daughter in a Montessori school. After a class observation I noticed the teacher spent a significant portion of her time just dealing with a few rambunctious boys, while all the girls in the class worked quietly.

Afterwards, I asked the teacher why they just didn't separate the boys from the girls, since they were obviously two different species at that age (at all ages?) It seemed to me that a class with only girls in it could learn faster w/o all the silly distractions.

The teacher got quite serious and told me that girls and boys are a form of yin and yang. The classroom dynamic was an absolute necessity to the healthy social upbringing of each.

> a few rambunctious boys

As the parent of a less rambunctious boy, I believe that discrimination should be on the basis of behavior, not gender.

> The classroom dynamic was an absolute necessity to the healthy social upbringing of each.

I think that it is great to have everyone learn to work together, but I don't think it has to be all the time.

I am surprised to see that none of the comments really comment or reflect upon the issue this article brings up, which is that for boys to thrive they need to be taught differently. If we can actually create ciriculum that allows them to excel why would we not do this? I know that the main point against it would be that young girls perhaps would not thrive in such a system. Yet I think we have to find a balance between them if we want true equality and what is best for all of our children.

Mayhaps it is time to reaccess if we should not have separate classes for boys and girls..food for thought...

'Separate but equal' is never actually equal.

I bet girls would do just fine, and a sane combination of approaches works best. The biggest issue with schools is that everybody thinks they know how to fix stuff, but the research is spotty at best. Standardized tests and core curriculums? Differentiated learning or academic tiers? We all have opinions, and there are many in this thread, but not all of these opinions can be simultaneously right.

I grew up (in Ireland) with single-sex schooling until age 12-3 (primary) and mixed secondary. That has its own potential pitfalls (eg bullying, more playground fights) but I think there are benefits too. Also, in primary school it's the same teacher all day for a full year (or two) at a time, which makes it a lot easier for the teacher to know each pupil and manage the classroom appropriately.

I'm unsure why American schools are so tied to the lementary/ middle/ high model. It doesn't confer any particular benefit that I can see.

It varies considerably. Most public schools break have either a middle school or junior high school (grades 6-8 or 7-9) between primary and secondary grades. But most Catholic parochial schools run to 8th grade. A lot of private schools run from 6th to 12th grade on the same campus, some 3rd to 12th.

I suspect that the break is because in the middle years it becomes harder to find a teacher who can do everything--reading, history, math--adequately. A lot of what is called "science" in American primary schools I would call "environmental civics"--recycling is good; don't litter. Then in 7th or 8th grades one can actually encounter chemistry labs.

(On the other hand, in my 7th (8th?) grade science class a big chunk of time was given up to the evils of drugs; I didn't particularly disagree, but bilged the class because I found it tedious to cull clippings about overdoses or LSD flashback. And I have no idea what I might have learned in the "science" lessons of the earlier grades--how many planets, maybe.)

Every time I read an article about schooling I think about the best piece I ever read on the subject.

The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher (1992) by John Taylor Gatto

http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

Reading this article, for me, is just a reminder of what an awesome effect a really good teacher can have... In this teacher's writing I see a lot of positive qualities reflected from some of the teachers that made a huge impact on my life and disposition. In the end I suspect that - just having a teacher that is even willing to think or write about this - has much more of an impact than any rote following of procedural formula about "how to teach boys".

I had a horrible middle school experience which led me to the opinion that primary and secondary school is a much better system.

It's not just punishing students for not sitting still, though a friend was almost flunking because he couldn't sit through a class. It's teachers eating separately from students, no time for recess, and no adult to talk to without social ostracism.

Then I went to a New England Prep school; 3 sports a year, teachers eat with and openly question students, everyone feels like members of the community and people have a stake in things, and the Headmaster knows everyone's name. I can't thank that school enough; I went from failing with almost perfect test scores to really good grades and a sense of belonging.

I don't understand why at least rural schools can't follow the same model. The teachers are paid less but get better results; the students are cared for and more disciplined, and the academics and athletics are generally better. It's not about the student body, either; we had tons of kids on scholarship that outperformed everyone.

I don't see why we still have co-ed education in the early grades. It does boys no good to be told they're behaving badly for not being able to sit still in class, and it does girls no good to have boys disrupting class while they're trying to learn.

I got this problem in elementary, still got almost the highest possible mark on our CITO test (which is an indication of your education level here in the Netherlands), went to one of the best Gymnasiums, and essentially got kicked out of 80% of all my classes because of my ADD disorder, and refusal of treatment (i.e. not wanting to take Ritalin). It also ended up me being easier to calm the class by making an example out of me. I had to drop out of this school to a lower grade, which I passed without pretty much doing fuck all, cause it was too easy.

People should learn that distracted kids crave stimulation, and the stuff you teach them is probably not stimulating (i.e. boring, easy)

As a father of two boys, I cannot agree enough with this article. I just wonder how I can send this article to the teachers at my boys schools without offending them.

Perhaps they need offending.

Perhaps. I just worry about it being like insulting the person serving your food. Tack needs to be used.

Indeed, you might need to try a different tact.

I definitely recommend clicking on the "related story" link to "The War Against Boys", written by Christina Sommers in 2000. American education has been failing boys for quite some time now. All parents have a responsibility to educate themselves on this topic.

I got in trouble a lot for fidgeting at school all the time. I got diagnosed with ADHD and had to take medicine for it, mostly because of the fidgeting. One teacher made me put a giant a big inflatable cushion on my seat everyday and it was humiliating and didn't help at all.

I felt like they were describing me that whole time. I was diagnosed with learning disabilities and told to sit still countless times. Thankfully some teachers realized keeping me in extra circular activities would offset my energy but when I moved from that school the situation changed.

The frustrating part for teachers was that I typically scored higher on exams than my peers, including standardized tests. They then saw my scores and consistently lectured me about how if I just _applied_ myself I'd be doing so much better.

I always treated exams as a challenge I sit here for 1, 2 hours at a time and try and score as high as possible.

Overseas I used to go to school from 8am to 1pm with 40min classes(and I received much better education). In US I had to sit for over an hour per classs and until 4-5pm. Is this any wonder that kids can't sit from 8 to 4 with very small brakes in between? I didnt learn much in American HS, it was torture most of the day. All I wanted to do was to get my work done and gtfo /go home, but that system made it very difficult to do. In fact, I didnt care much for school as a result.

It’s unnatural for most any human to be expected to sit and focus on tedious crap for hours on end, especially children.

We live in one of the top school districts in Texas, and three years ago took our two boys out to homeschool them. No religious motivations, just got fed up with the bullshit custom we continue to call “education” in this culture.

They are learning, thriving, curious, creative and happier than ever.

Kids should spend have instruction for a while and then pushed out to play for a while. Alternating back and forth, maybe an hour each way. Then we wouldn't have as many fat kids and we wouldn't have so many kids disrupting classrooms. Our children aren't automatons, they need plenty of time to be kids. There is a lot of value in play.

"While Reichert and Hawley's research was conducted in all-boys schools, these lessons can be used in all classrooms, with both boys and girls."

Not true, research shows that girls do worse when their performance is evaluated in relation to others (competitively), as opposed to when their performance is evaluated against an objective standard.

Sad that I need a throwaway account to talk about this, but such is life.

Spend some time doing searches on terms like "gender grading gap" and reading the recent research. What you find may surprise you, is consistent across multiple Western democracies, and can be summarized thusly:

* When assessment is left to teachers, there is a grading gap in favor of girls; girls receive grades that are inflated relative to their performance on non-teacher assessments. This seems to be partly due to teachers including factors like "engagement" or "focus" in the classroom, which is known to favor girls, and partly due to bias by teachers in favor of students of their own gender (and many teachers are women, meaning the effect is most pronounced for girls).

* By surprisingly young ages, girls in public school systems internalize "we're better than boys" and boys internalize "we're worse than girls" (one UK study estimated boys internalize this by age eight), producing a performance/effort gap similar to that associated with racial stereotypes.

* This has ramifications all the way up the system, including an achievement gap which starts early and only grows with each milestone. Boys and young men are increasingly more likely to be held back and/or disciplined/medicated in early school years, increasingly less likely to get into advanced courses in later years, less likely to graduate local equivalent of "high school" and less likely to enter college/university or earn a degree.

Cool. Any good books on this you'd recommend?

Books are tricky since the required funding/publicity tends to mean that only people with reactionary/highly-conservative viewpoints can break into that, and come with their own views on why we have this gap and how to address it. Mostly this is something you'll find in academic articles and published statistics.

The US Department of Education's June 2012 report on gender equity is a decent starting point:

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/gender-equity...

What you'll find there is that the conventionally-assumed narratives don't hold; there's a lot more parity in enrollment for higher-level courses including sciences and many maths courses (and sometimes even a gap in the unexpected direction, as with girls outnumbering boys in AP science courses), for example. Girls are also more likely (and have been more likely for nearly 40 years) to be enrolled into programs for gifted/talented students, while boys are nearly 1.5 times more likely to be held back and forced to repeat a grade.

Judith Kleinfeld (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) has written a few articles -- though fully-cited and sourced versions are hard to find free -- arguing that a major component of perceived gaps in performance may also be from greater variability in boys; focusing only on achieving parity at the highest levels of achievement has meant that boys' original overrepresentation at the lowest levels has not only persisted but grown, and remains unaddressed.

A study at the University of Georgia published this year looked into why girls receive higher grades and lower standardized-test scores.

Summary: http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/why-girls-do-better-in-...

Full article (subscription required): http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/why-girls-do-better-in-...

Their findings indicated a persistent grading gap in favor of girls, based on behavioral rather than academic factors.

In the UK, research pointed to expectations and stereotypes as a source for the gap:

http://www.kent.ac.uk/news/stories/girls-believe/2010

Girls and boys both persistently believe that girls "are cleverer, better-behaved and try harder than boys at school".

And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. But like I said, spend some time searching on relevant terms and you'll turn up a lot of research that may make you question what "everybody knows" about gender and education.

Reading this stuff now, thanks for the links!

I'm confused about a so called achievement gap when men still hold the majority of highest paying and most powerful jobs in the country.

I'd truly like to understand what you mean by this.

I'm confused by what seems to be a non-sequitur. I'm talking about educational achievement, and there is an absolute, well-documented and undeniable gap there.

While it's true that within the highest ranks of Western society, gender plays a significant role, it's also true that socioeconomic background -- "class", for lack of a better word -- has a sunlight-to-candle relationship to gender in terms of getting into those ranks in the first place. Western society has drastically limited mobility right now, and the highest ranks are, unfortunately, more conservative in their views on gender.

And as an aside, there's a good example of a broader application of Kleinfeld's thesis there. Men dominate at the extreme high end, but also at the extreme low end. Efforts toward true equality need to address the root cause of that, which has more to do with rigid gender roles imposed on both men and women than with outright favoring of men over women.

You said: "This has ramifications all the way up the system, including an achievement gap which starts early and only grows with each milestone."

And I say, I do not understand how this achievement gap, as you call it, actually matters or is holding men back when men hold most of the advanced degrees, and wealth in this society. I don't think you need a throwaway account to discuss this stuff so long as everyone stays calm.

Meanwhile, you're spot on in my opinion about the role of class as well as gender. This is very true. It's also why the "right" way of doing many things is so often a "male" way of doing things, accepted as the default. They are absolutely interconnected and probably inseparable. Most feminists will absolutely agree that rigid gender roles hurt men and women, and we want everyone to fulfill their potential, and not be stuck in those roles.

I do not understand how this achievement gap, as you call it, actually matters or is holding men back when men hold most of the advanced degrees, and wealth in this society.

Well, at the moment women are earning more bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and yes, even Ph.Ds than men. That doesn't immediately erase a pre-existing gap among the older generations, but it does tell us that in the future we still won't have equality -- we'll have simply replaced one gap by another.

The goal really ought to be to start raising generation after generation of kids where boys and girls are equal in educational opportunity and achievement. We've thus far failed at that goal, and I don't truly understand how someone can call themself "feminist" whilst thinking that's not something that "actually matters".

The prevalence of people who do call themself "feminist" and hold such beliefs is why I shelter in my warm, snug anonymity. Pointing out such contradictions does not typically result in calm discussions.

> The goal really ought to be to start raising generation after generation of kids where boys and girls are equal in educational opportunity and achievement.

There are two very different goals stated there and they may not be compatible.

This is why I will homeschool my son.

Or girls.

Public school is essentially an obedience camp. Is it any wonder boys are lagging?

Are you arguing that boys are intrinsically badly suited to a highly regulated environment that expects them to do exactly as they are told as soon as they are told? You should tell the army.

why do you think the armies around the world have to threaten recruits with corporal punishment, prison, and even execution when they don't follow orders?

Don't forget the constant drill-and-ceremony, both in training and once stationed to a permanent post.

For those who don't "habla", drill-and-ceremony (D&C) is the "attention, left face, forward march" stuff that fills a good portion of footage about military life, not to mention certain films such as Full Metal Jacket.

Oh, and don't forget the role played by PT (Physical Training) in producing human drone-killers.

Do American football programs have to do the same thing?

At the elementary and high school level, yes.

Is this rhetorical? Of course they do. They're legendary and/or infamous for imposing extreme physical hardship as hazing to get kids to fall in line.

Which is why the army has to have somebody scream in your face to get you to do stuff.

Actually boys and girls perform well when rules are clearly laid out and punishments are not arbitrary.

The sitting and listening without moving is the problem.

As a boy who still cannot sit still at 30, the only way I survived being forced to sit still at school was by programming my enormously overpriced graphing calculator.

i remember i always got shitty 'citizenship' grades because i wanted to talk to my classmates all the time.

talking - what a terrible thing for a child to do.

Talking to your classmates "all the time" has very clear potential to be highly disruptive to the teacher and other students' ability to learn. Significantly different from just fidgeting.

But yet it may have been what he needed at that stage in his cognitive and social development.

It's only disruptive to a disciplinarian, industrial age approach to education.

And what of the needs of the other kids in the room, who might need to be able to hear what the teacher is saying?

A whispered request for clarification on something the teacher just said is one thing. 15 separate conversations about the latest Call of Duty and who made out with whom while the teacher tries to explain material is disruptive.

Teaching doesn't have to be organized as a lecture from the front. For how many of those other kids is it optimal? Alternative styles have been around for decades. It doesn't take much to learn about them if you just Google a bit.

What's also a good thing is social time with your peers. We separate kids based on age, based on which random class they're thrown in, and in bigger schools, which random lunch time they are assigned. None of these may match up with their friends outside of class time. Perhaps there would be less classroom disruption if friends could have time together outside of the one class they took together knowing that would be the only time they could be together?

> Perhaps there would be less classroom disruption if friends could have time together outside of the one class they took together knowing that would be the only time they could be together?

There is. School ends at 2:30, upon which point they can enlist in formal or informal shared after-school activities. Turning classes into a free-for-all where no one needs to afford the teacher and other students any respect for their time and attention isn't a great option.

Plus, most classes I took in high school had plenty of group projects, small discussion groups, etc. that allowed for social interaction with friends in a non-lecture context.

Problem is, there are no buses that take the kids home from their after-school activities. I don't know where you live, but there are many school districts in the US where kids can't walk home or expect their parents to drive them to and from school or a friend's house.

When I was in school, my house was an hour and a half bus ride from school. My parents worked in the other direction. Outside of being at school, there was no hope for social interaction unless we were in town for a festival. I'm also not arguing for turning classes into a free for all. I pretty explicitly said there should be room for social interaction outside of class. In districts with split lunch hours, there's literally no free-form social interaction unless you're on one of the last buses to leave at the end of the day.

We had buses to do exactly that. The "sports bus" departed at 6 p.m. every day; there weren't a lot of the buses, because not everyone did afterschool activities, but everyone who needed a ride got on the appropriate bus (east or west, as I recall) which dropped them to their home. It was free, too.

This was a rural school district, about 60 students in my class, and the district extended something like 20 miles in each direction from the town.

   Turning classes into a free-for-all where no one needs to afford the teacher and other students any respect for their time and attention isn't a great option.

This is an insulting straw man. But I'm glad school was optimized for your needs.

This comment is a bit rich, given that you're basically saying you want it changed so its optimised for your needs.

I didn't say that anywhere. I believe it should be possible to design school experiences that can meet a wide variety of needs.

If the other commenter needs a quiet environment where he/she can listen to a lecture, that should be available without forcing those for whom it is unsuited to be there too.

Sure you did, up there where you said "it's only disruptive...". That is saying you want school optimised for other people's needs (perhaps not yours, specifically). The tone of the comment ("industrial age") indicates that you think it's broken and needs to change.

Wrong. I do think school is broken and needs to change, however nowhere did I say that it should be optimized for my needs at the original commenters expense.

Have you not considered the possibility that a school could be optimized for more than one set of needs at the same time?

60 years ago boys had no problem paying attention in class. The problem is too many teachers today have degrees in education instead of the subject they are supposed to be teaching. They've turned schools into daycare centers. They rely on "projects", worksheets, videos, and busywork that have little to do with what the kids should be learning. When children are bored and resentful that their time is being wasted, they act out.

We can fix this by making it easier to fire bad teachers, require math, science, and English teachers to have degrees in math, science, and English, and prevent school funds from being used on new textbooks, televisions, videos, workbooks, or other wasteful materials.

Stop pandering to the internet crowd of "misunderstood" nerds, Atlantic [0]. You clearly know your audience and you've got your litany of "I was really smart but teachers kept me down" testimonials here on HN and Reddit, but this really adds nothing new to the discussion.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13atlantic....

Yeah , stop trying to teach kids discipline, especially when there is none at home ...

Some people with Asperger's have to fidget to be able to concentrate on what is being said. These people are not undisciplined, they are misunderstood.

Some people just aren't very good at sitting still for an hour, and repeating that for however many hours they are in school. We can either chose to spend time punishing them, which harms them but also everyone else in the class, or we can learn techniques to help those people cope. We can encourage non-distracting fidgeting.

These are quite seperate from discipline.

Sitting still is not a virtue. It literally accomplishes nothing. It's a secondary detail - whether or not the kid is sitting still does not tell you whether they're actually paying attention to the lecture and whether they're going to remember it.

You're taking a narrow perspective. Fidgeting is distracting, to everyone else. Whatever your ideals of a perfect world may be, 20 dump trucks of kids needs to be educated at one facility every day. Whatever you may think one kid is doing to help him focus, that kid is disrupting the focus of his 8 neighbors. Something needs to change, but it's more than just perspectives.

"that kid is disrupting the focus of his 8 neighbors"

Whatever else Catholic churches may get wrong, apparently all of the "modern" ones I've ever been inside figured out the "crying room" technology a long time ago. Setting up a "sound diode" isn't all that difficult with modern technology. If whats really important is forcing future factory workers to line up in alphabetical order in row/column format, then flexibility might not work.

Being able to listen attentively is a valuable skill upon which other skills can be built.

Being able to not disrupt a class or meeting is a valuable skill upon which other skills can be built.

Thumb-twiddling doesn't matter, but listening and not being pointlessly disruptive DOES matter and learning skills like this is part of growing up.

And yet if you work in an office the Health and Safety advice is to change position frequently and take regular breaks to standup, stretch and walk around. Sitting still for an hour is unpleasant and unhealthy.

This is almost completely unrelated to problems of children disrupting a class, not complying with requests, not listening, etc. Which are real issues. These are not strictly moral issues, but we are screwing kids over if we don't try to help them learn these skills in some compassionate and effective way, and we are screwing over all the other kids in a class when we do nothing about disruptions. What a kid wants right in this moment is not always what is best for the kid in the long term, even more often not what is best for other kids.

Aside from the flippant tone, I sort of agree with the point...judging by the habits that I see a lot of millenials exhibiting in the workplace, the general breakdown of discipline in primary education over the last 2-3 decades has not served students well in the classroom or on the job. I think it has mostly to do with "helicopter parenting" ("WHAT? My kid is not the problem, you are!") ... where teachers used to be able to count on parents backing them up, they mostly just complain and try to get the teacher fired for disciplining the kid - ergo, the teacher either has to give up instilling discipline in their classroom (thereby hurting the education of every other kid in the class) or resign themselves to spending a huge amount of time fighting parents instead of focusing on their lessons and having their career hurt as a result...it's a catch-22 for teachers.

Teachers used to be respected , but today you cant count on parent supports for the child education.

If the child has bad grades, it is because of the teacher , if the child cannot behave , it is the teacher's fault.

But for not one second parents question their parenting, Teachers get harassed , punched and even sued by parents when these teachers just try to do their job.

With parents like that ,well , these children will never behave like adults, since their parents are not either.

And we wonder why smart kids are all introverts...

This is not true.

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