Girls

• “A smaller and smaller proportion of boys are going on to college. Right now, the student body at the average university in the United States is 58 percent female, 42 percent male (with similar numbers in Canada and Australia).3 And going to college doesn’t guarantee any positive result, particularly for boys. In fact, college is where the gender gap in motivation really shows up. Most girls who enroll in a four-year college will eventually earn a degree. Most boys won’t.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 8
• “Imagine visiting a twenty-first-century kindergarten—which is to say, a kindergarten where children are expected to do what first-graders were expected to do thirty years ago, a kindergarten where children are expected to sit for hours doing paper-and-pencil exercises. In the typical kindergarten you will often find that the teacher has divided the children into two groups. Over here, with the teacher, are the kids who are ready to learn to read and write: mostly girls, one or two boys. Over there, on the other side of the room, are the other kids: the kids whom the teacher has (correctly) recognized are not ready to learn to read and write. That group is mostly boys, with one or two girls. There’s one thing five-year-old girls and boys are equally good at: figuring out who’s in Dumb Group. By November, the kids in Dumb Group are aware of their inferior status, and they don’t like it.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 18
• “The teacher’s intentions are good. But most five-year-olds are keenly aware of their status in the eyes of the adults. A boy whom the teacher has relegated to the Play Group (a.k.a. the Dumb Group) may think the teacher doesn’t like him. He’s figured out that the smart kids are in the Accelerated Reading Group. He wasn’t chosen to be in the elite group. He knows that the teacher was responsible for that choice. So he may decide that the teacher doesn’t like him. That’s unfair and illogical, but he is not a grown-up. He’s a five-year-old child, and five-year-olds are often illogical. Many five-year-olds, whether girls or boys, are likely to conclude that the teacher likes the kids in the Smart Group better than she likes the kids in the Dumb Group.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 19
• “Professor Deborah Stipek, dean of the school of education at Stanford University, has found that kids form opinions about school early.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 20
• “Critics of American education often point out, quite accurately, that the United States spends more money per pupil than most other developed countries and yet accomplishes less. On the international test most widely administered around the world, the United States ranks at #25, well below countries whose per-pupil spending on education is much lower, such as Hungary (#23), Poland (#21), the Czech Republic (#15) and Finland (#1).7 Finland, incidentally, consistently scores at or near the very top of all of these international rankings. What’s the most distinctive characteristic of public education in Finland? Very simple: Children in Finland don’t begin any formal school until they are seven years old.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 20
•  “Nevertheless, by the time they’re teenagers, Finnish children are beating American children by large margins on the same test. In the latest round of testing, for example, the average fifteen-year-old in Finland scored 545 in reading; fifteen-year-old American students taking the same examination scored 490. In problem solving, the average Finnish teenager scored 547, while the average American teenager scored a dismal 480.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 20
• “Lonsdorf, Eberly, and Pusey found consistent sex differences in how young female and young male chimps learn from their elders. Girl chimps pay close attention to the adult (usually a parent) who is showing them the procedure. Girl chimps then do just what the adult showed them: she breaks off a branch, cuts it to the same length as the adult had done, strips the leaves as the adult had done, and so forth. But the young males ignore the grown-ups; they prefer to run off and wrestle with other young male chimps, or to swing from trees.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 23
•  “The entire order of primates is characterized by profound sex differences, and those sex differences are fairly well conserved across the order. 17 Young male monkeys, like young male gorillas and young male humans, are significantly more likely to engage in aggressive rough-and-tumble play than are young females from any of those species.18 Likewise, young female primates are far more likely to babysit a younger sibling than a young male primate would be.b That’s true in our species as well: girls are far more likely to babysit a younger sibling than their brothers are.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 24
• “Girls are more likely to affiliate with the adults. They are more likely to share common aims and values with the grown-ups. Boys and young men, on the other hand, are less likely to be sympathetic to adult aims and values and are more inclined to engage in delinquent behaviors such as smashing mailboxes, street racing, mooning police officers, among others, than girls are. A boy who smashes mailboxes “just for the fun of it” will raise his status in the eyes of at least some other boys. A girl who smashes mailboxes just for the fun of it is unlikely to raise her status in the eyes of most of the other girls. Girls are more likely to listen to what the grown-ups are saying, and to do what the grown-ups ask, particularly if there are no boys around. (If boys are around, some girls become more likely to misbehave, perhaps because they perceive that disrespecting the adults will raise your status in the eyes of at least some of the boys.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 25
•  “Girls are more likely to see the situation from the perspective of the grown-ups. In one study, investigators examined twenty cases where students were plotting a school shooting but the plan was detected and stopped before any violence occurred. In eighteen of those twenty incidents, girls—not boys—alerted school officials or other adults to the plot. All the potential shooters were boys. “Boys feel like snitches if they tell on a friend, [while] girls [can] more openly seek out adults with their concerns,” said James McGee, author of the study. Boys’ first allegiance is to other boys. Girls are more likely to see the situation from the parents’ perspective.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 25
• “It’s easy to see how these sex differences are relevant to education. Girls will do the homework because the teacher asked them to. Boys are more likely to do the homework only if it interests them. If it bores them, or if they think it’s “stupid,” they are more likely to ignore it. Researchers have consistently found that girls are significantly more likely than boys to do the assigned homework,25 in every subject.26 Even the highest-achieving boys are significantly less likely to do the homework than the comparably achieving girls.27 Girls at every age get better grades in school than boys do, in every subject—not because girls are smarter, researchers have found, but because girls try harder.28 Most girls would like to please the teacher, if possible. Most boys don’t care much about pleasing the teacher or about getting straight A’s—and boys who do try to please the teacher and who do care about their grades will lower their status in the eyes of the other boys.29 Girls are more likely to assess their work as their teachers do. Boys are less likely to care what the teacher thinks of their work. That divergence leads to an enduring paradox: at every age, girls do better in school, but are less satisfied with their achievements, compared with the boys.30 In 2006, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported that girls’ greater self-discipline and self-control—perhaps deriving from their greater motivation to please the teacher—appears to be a key distinguishing factor that has enabled girls to survive and thrive in the accelerated world of twenty-first-century education.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 26
• “Louv provides a compendium of research demonstrating that when there is a profound imbalance in a child’s early experiences—when nature has been replaced by computer screens and fancy indoor toys—the result is an increased risk for attention deficit disorder. For example, Louv cites a Swedish study in which researchers compared children in two different day-care facilities. One facility was surrounded by tall buildings, with a brick pathway. The other was set in an orchard surrounded by woods and was adjacent to an overgrown garden; at this facility, children were encouraged to play outdoors in all kinds of weather. The researchers found that “children in the ‘green’ day care had better motor coordination and more ability to concentrate.”37 Similarly, researchers at the University of Illinois have found that putting children in an outdoor environment, where they can actually put their hands in the dirt and feel and smell real stuff, as opposed to interacting with sophisticated computer simulations, is helpful in treating ADHD.38 Ironically, the outdoor alternative is cheaper than the program with the fancy computers. Boys are at least three times as likely to be treated for ADHD compared with girls, and the rates of diagnosis of ADHD for both girls and boys have soared over the past two decades.39 One wonders to what extent the shift from Wissenschaft to Kenntnis may have contributed to the explosion in the numbers of children being treated for ADHD.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 31
• “A study published in 2006, conducted jointly under the auspices of the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin, found that the likelihood of a child being diagnosed with ADHD is a function of three main factors:42 • Sex: Boys are several times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls; • Race: White children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than black or Hispanic children;43 • Socioeconomic status: Affluent children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children from low-income families.   For white boys in affluent suburbs, the odds of being diagnosed with ADHD at some point in childhood may be as high as one in three.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men(Leonard Sax)  Page 34
• “For girls and for many women, if you believe you’re smart, you’ll actually be smarter—you’ll learn better and do better on tests—than if you think you’re dumb. A girl who thinks she’s good in math will test better than a girl of the same ability who thinks she’s bad in math.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 49
• “When these tests were first conducted thirty years ago, there was a substantial gender gap in the results, with boys outperforming girls. When the researchers repeated the tests in 2005, they found that the gender gap had vanished. The gap didn’t disappear because the girls were doing better. These researchers found that girls are not doing better; in fact, the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls in 2005 had deteriorated slightly in comparison with the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls thirty years ago. Instead, they found that the boys’ performance in 2005 was dramatically worse than it had been thirty years ago. “This is a huge and significant statistical change,” concluded Professor Shayer.18 Boys who are nearly twelve years old “are doing [only] as well as the eight- to nine-year-olds in 1976,” he observed.19 Why the drop? Professor Shayer suggested that “the most likely reasons are the lack of experiential play [Kenntnis] in primary schools, and the growth of a video-game, TV culture. Both take away the kind of hands-on play that allows kids to experience how the world works in practice.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 65
• “And what about preparing for the real world? In the real world—unless you’re a fighter pilot or a Marine sniper—being able to push a button 0.02 seconds faster than the other guy isn’t such a valuable skill. Preparing teenagers for the demands of real life requires skills quite different from the cognitive and visuomotor skills required to master video games. Imagine a young father, in his twenties let’s say, trying to comfort his crying baby daughter. There are no buttons to push, no photon torpedoes to fire. The right thing to do may be simply to rock the baby and hum a lullaby. The chief virtue required may not be lightning virtuosity with a game controller, but merely—patience. If you need to get along with a belligerent coworker, the chief virtue you need may not be lightning speed. In most video games, the best way to deal with difficult people is to vaporize them with photon torpedoes. In the real world, what you need is not high-tech virtual weaponry, but patience.”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 66
• “And what about teenage boys having relationships with girls? Surprisingly, especially to those of us over thirty, many boys today seem to prefer playing video games to being with girls.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 70
• “Boys prefer video games over girls? In the summer and fall of 2006, the New York Times published a series of front-page articles entitled “The New Gender Divide.” One of these described how many young men seem more interested in playing their video games than in being with their girlfriends. The reporter interviewed one young woman at college who had broken off her relationship with a young man, “in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day. ‘He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to fifteen hours a week,’ she said. ‘I said, “Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month. That’s my litmus test now: I won’t date anyone who plays video games. It means they’re choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them.’”  Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax)  Page 70