Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Entry 1: Young Men and Education


    Becoming a young man is the entrance into a transitional period in who you are, and often markers that indicate how successful you will be as an adult tend to appear in the years between ages 16 to 21. This may put an ungodly amount of pressure on your shoulders, either because you are just coming out of high school and don’t know what to expect just yet, or are already in college and have had a rough start.


Stress is a concept you have probably become very familiar with over the last few months of your life: deadlines, college applications, lab reports, etc. Ironically enough, stress tends to make problems appear a lot worse than they actually are, but your stressed-out mind does not realize that just yet. There is an easy way to get rid of that stress, and that is to become organized, though some young guys like yourself may (wrongly) deem it to be too feminine. After all, who would want to appear girly to their friends? 


Of course, I am not saying that you should get a pink and flowery agenda either, I am simply saying that the act of writing something down on paper or in a calendar somewhere will keep your mind focused on the workload that you have to do for the week, and you will subconsciously start to think of your free time as a time where you could be completing these assignments instead of waiting until 4 hours before the deadline. Instead, since it is probably safe to assume you also have a problem with procrastination, start being impulsive about when you do your work. By this, I mean that it tends to help to not give yourself time to create excuses, instead simply jumping into doing the work a few days early and that as soon as you think about the work being due. This is guaranteed to give you more time to think, and more breathing room to relax in general. After all, being relaxed and having a good outlook on school is critical to keeping high morale going higher in your education.


While there are solutions and you should always try your best, you also need to understand that the education system isn’t that well fit for boys either and that your troubles aren’t exclusive to you. You are, in fact, not alone. Let’s look at some statistics.


According to research, boys are 21% less proficient in writing than girls are. This might not seem like that big of a deal, but when looking at it from a bigger picture we need to remember that being skilled in reading and writing are both really necessary when it comes to succeeding in life.  Speaking of success, boys are also expelled three times as often as girls are. Girls also seem to be favored over boys when it comes to grading their school tests. This prejudice does not apply to boys who behave the way girls would in a classroom by being attentive.


What causes the problem in terms of boys’ education is what Warren Farrell and John Gray call the Drop-Out, Left-Out Cycle. What happens is that due to absent father figures in the neighbourhood, a boy will drop out of high school. Due to his lack of education, this boy will be seen as undesired by his family and employers. Then, if the man somehow ends up having a baby with a woman, they will raise the child without him due to the man being undesirable, which resets the loop and brings us back to boys who don’t have a father.


Schools need to increase vocational education. Instead, they’ve been doing the opposite. They need to give more variety in terms of what people want to study instead of filling high schools with generic classes where everyone does the same thing. By doing this, it would help boys in their studies as they having concrete goals encourages them to use their mind more.


As always, if you need someone to talk to, we are here to help. You can message us on Facebook or Instagram, or you could also leave a comment on this post. Sharing our posts on all platforms also helps spread the word about our cause.






Sources:

Farrell, Warren, and John Gray. “The Crisis Of Our Sons' Education.” The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do about It, BenBella Books, Dallas, TX, 2019. 

OECD, “How Do Girls Compare to Boys in Mathematics Skills?” in PISA 2009 at a Glance (Paris, France: OECD, 2010) 22, doi:10.1787/9789264095298-en. 

D. Salahu-Din, H. Persky, and J. Miller, The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2007, NCES 2008– 468, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, (Washington, DC, and Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), table A-9. Average scores and achievement-level results in NAEP writing for eighth-grade public school students, by gender and state. 2007.

NCES, “Number and Percentage of Students Who Were Suspended and Expelled from Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, by Sex and Race/Ethnicity: 2002, 2004, and 2006,” in Condition of Education 2009, ed. Michael Planty, William J. Hussar, and Thomas D. Snyder (Washington, DC: NCES, June 2009), table A-28-1, p. 206. 

C. Cornwell et al., “Non-cognitive Skills and the Gender Disparities in Test Scores and Teacher Assessments: Evidence from Primary School,” Journal of Human Resources 48 (Winter 2013): 236–64.

#sos #mentalhealth #boys #boysmentalhealth #heretohelp #activism



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