Gender and Education

Until we recently began covering this topic in my Sociology class, I never paid much attention to the lack of boys in my high school and college classes. Once we read a few articles and watched some movies about gender equity in the classroom however, I wondered how I never noticed that this was going on. I thought back to the classes I took in high school, the majority of which were all honors or EEP classes, and almost all of them had a majority of girls. In my English Honors EEP class senior year for example, only 3 of about 12 people in the class were boys, and in my Honors EEP Anthropology there was only 1 boy out of about 20 people. The same trend is evident here at RIC as well, and not only in my education classes where a female majority tends to be expected, ALL of the classes I have taken so far are made up of a majority of females.

One of the articles that we read for my Sociology class was The War Against Boys. This article does a great job explaining what the issues are with gender inequality in today's classroom, and why schools are in this situation. This article also gives surprising statistics that show just how far behind boys are in the classroom.

For years now girls have been told that they can achieve anything they want, they are pushed to do well in school because that is the way to succeed in life and there have been programs put in place to help girls gain self esteem and reach their highest potential. But throughout this 'girl power' movement, no one has stood up for the boys, and consequentially they have fallen behind in the classroom.



This video covers a wide variety of topics that have to do with why boys are being shortchanged in the classroom, how things are being taught the wrong way, and what we need to change in America's classrooms so that boys are just as motivated as girls to do well in school.



I thought this video was very interesting. It shows just how early on children learn gender roles, and gender stereotypes, just as the black children in the doll experiment conducted by Dr. Clark had learned racist stereotypes.


This next video is one we watched in my Sociology class. Although it does not directly talk about education, it does offer an explanation of why boys are falling behind in schools by showing what boys are taught to view as important. (The entire film is 9 parts all together, to watch the rest of the film click here and pick from the related video list on the side)