Canadian Boys lag behind girls in literacy,reading and now science: PCAP Report

By Kat Hammar, Globe and Mail, November 28, 2011
Canada’s report card on schools will be handed out to the provinces Monday, revealing mixed marks for Quebec and growing struggles in science and reading for boys across the country.

Once every three years, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, or PCAP, measures the reading, math and science proficiency of Grade 8 students in every province and the Yukon. Though the latest results are strong overall, when pulled apart, they identify weak spots for Canadian schools.

The results, taken from a random sampling of 32,000 students in 2010, also show that boys, who have lagged behind their female classmates on literacy tests for decades, are now also behind in reading and, for the first time, science. Math scores between the sexes were tied.

“We’re used to seeing boys having a disadvantage in reading but not necessarily in the other domains,” said Andrew Parkin, Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education. “The report is good for sending up little flares for the provinces. I think that boys in science can be seen as one of those flares.”
The reason for the achievement gap between the sexes is the subject of debate, but academics and educators have blamed video games, attention deficit disorder and the feminization of the education sector.
School districts in Toronto and Edmonton are looking to single-sex education to help close the gap, aiming to tailor the classroom to boys by making it more active, choosing reading materials that align with boys’ interest, and including more male role models in the curriculum.
Boys behind girls in literacy, now reading and for the first time in science...and reasons cited include:

• video games
• attention deficit disorder
• feminization of the education sector

Single gender classes might help some. However, there is a growing argument to be made that the culture of North American education is counter-intuitive, in many ways, to the education of boys and young men. And, reports, like this one, merely underline the "turning-off" of boys, not merely the failing grades.
Let's add to the list above of possible contributing factors to this slide: the role played by money and the greed of many of the best and brightest male minds over the last generation at least. Remember, it was Lee Iacocca while president of Chrysler, in 1986, who could not recruit male graduates for the auto industry, and who received a letter from the presidents of Yale and Harvard. In effect these letters were "mea culpa" letters by those university presidents for "teaching the wrong values to their students" meaning that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake had replaced "making a contribution to society" while earning an income.
This problem of falling male grades did not start in the last year or two. It goes back a long way and unless and until the politically correct imposed silence on the issue of feminization of education is lifited, the education establishment will not aggressively approach the issue.
It is not a slam on women teachers, principals or even board members to say that men are different, wired differently, learn differently, have different ambitions, different cultural attitudes, different cultural language and differenty cultural archetypes through which they see the world. And to say all of that is not to excuse inappropriate or violent or crude or offensive behaviour, attitudes or socialization.
The ratio of male to female teachers has fallen disproportionately.
The culture of schools generatlly has tipped in favour of women both in leadership roles and in mentoring and in cultural acceptance of selective behaviours.
And "making nice" about these issues, will not permit nor initiate substantive change.
Parents of male students need to consider membership on school councils. Parents of male students need to ask for reports on the culture of the school, documenting the rates of detentions, suspensions, withdrawals and drop-outs between male and female students. They need to ask about hiring practices, and the need to hire more male teachers, more male principals, and more male superintendents.
They need to petition the Colleges of Education and their provincial members of the various parliaments to examine the issue of male student performance and its implications. The provinces and the federal government need to put some research money into graduate studies in education, around the world, to determine the best practices for male student success and by incorpotating those "best practices" set goals for reversing the trends documented in these latest set of testing instruments.

Roots of "mancession," --narcissism and alienation among young men

By Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, November 10, 2011

There’s a young man I know called Ben, whose story has become familiar. Ben is 24. He finished high school, but university was not for him. He’s bounced through a lot of low-paid jobs in retail and fast food, with spells of unemployment in between. Nothing has quite caught on, and he has no plan for his life. Like many twentysomethings, he can’t afford to live on his own, so he’s moved back in with his mother. It’s not clear – least of all to him – how he’ll establish himself as an independent adult.
The recession has been particularly hard on guys like Ben. Even so, he’s luckier than many. In Canada, the jobless rate for young adults is a relatively low 14 per cent. Across the European Union, the jobless rate is more than 20 per cent. In the U.S., the jobless rate for high-school-educated men between 20 and 24 – Ben’s generation – has reached 22.4 per cent. That’s more than double what it was four years ago. The situation of young American blacks is much worse. In Illinois, for example, only about 25 per cent of young black male adults have a job. And this time, nobody, anywhere, expects the job market to pick up any time soon.
Despite what the Occupy movement says, the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.
Young men without work aren’t just an economic problem. They’re a huge social problem. “We’re at risk of having a generation of young males who aren’t well-connected to the labour market and who don’t feel strong ownership of community or society because they haven’t benefited from it,” Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Wall Street Journal.
Young men without work are trapped in a twilight world of failure to achieve adulthood. They don’t move out and they don’t get married (although they’re increasingly likely to have kids). In the U.S., four out of 10 men between 18 and 30 are living with their parents. In Britain, it’s five out of 10. In Italy, it’s eight out of 10 (although that also reflects the extraordinary attachment of Italian parents to their grown-up kids).
But young men who live at home also have less incentive to find work. The longer they go without work, the dimmer their prospects become. And the more likely they are to drink, do drugs and develop other habits that will make them even less employable.
There’s a reason this downturn has been called the “mancession.” Jobs in manufacturing and construction have dried up, while employment in female-friendly fields such as health care has stayed steady or even grown. But something else is going wrong. A lot of young men seem to have given up. In an age when having a university degree matters more than ever, large numbers have gone AWOL from higher education. Even the ones who have degrees face higher unemployment than women do, a British study found. Bahram Bekhradnia, the director of a British think tank on higher education, blamed the men’s underachievement on complacency and “general hopelessness.”
Psychology professor Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, also thinks behavioural factors are holding young people back. She argues that an epidemic of narcissism has created millions of young adults who think they don’t have to work or study hard because they’re already smart. “It’s delusional thinking,” she told a conference of psychologists in Australia.
Joblessness is not the same as poverty. It’s worse. There’s lots of evidence to show that the scars of joblessness can last a lifetime. And fixing the problem will be very hard, because the problem is not simply economic. It’s also structural and social. We’ll need more than an economic upturn to reconnect a lot of our young men to work. But it matters more than we think – because without work, there’s no path to manhood.
A mancession?
General hopelessness?
An epidemic of narcissism?
Complacency?
AWOL from higher education?
There is simply no doubting the statistical data. Men are in profound difficulty, and as a result, the society itself faces an increasing and potentially insurmoutable problem.
But the story does not start with the useful data to which Ms Wente refers.
It goes farther back to young boys looking for mentors, models and supportive coaches. Of course, we make much of the honourable few who serve in that capacity. But there are so few, compared to the need.
There is a culture, at home and in the elementary schools, for starters, that favours female children and students. The last fifty years have seen a triumph of feminism, and a resulting demographic swing in professions like teaching toward women practitioners. Schools have become the domain of women, both in the front of the classroom and in the principal's office. Male students are "necessary evil" making disturbances when they should be quiet; rough-housing when they are supposed to be solving problems, doing math, learning history, or even playing organized games.
Male students far too often replace "school" and the many potential opportunities for socializing, learning and growth with some high-tech gaming device, preferring a virtual reality to one with people many of whom find his "gender" second class, to put it mildly. Too many boys are put on ritalin because they are diagnosed with ADHD, and need "more control." Too many boys are sent to the office for discipline because they are bored, alienated from the compliant-dependent school culture which is much more suited to compliant female students.
Reading and writing, both involving skills in which girls develop earlier and more easily, and it would seem naturally, are relegated, in the boys vernacular to "girl" subjects. Math and science, formerly an arena in which boys could hold their own, with interest, motivation, curiosity and some inherent skill, are now less attractive because, for one reason, the "game-boy" is more complex than most school science experiments.
If the early signs of what a boy considers "the establishment" are more supportive and encouraging of female students, and if his home life lacks a male figure, where does he go for male fraternity, collegiality and even just hanging out.
He has no trouble finding other males his age who are equally "turned off", tuned-out, seeking the comfort of their own "victim" (without ever condescnding to that word) and school work is the last thing he thinks about when the school day ends.
So while we are diagnosing the societal symptoms of what is now called a "mancession": a recession based almost exclusively on males without work, the fork in the road was taken many years before the unemployment numbers were gathered.
Our faculties of education, and our school boards and our principals associations and our colleges of teachers and our teachers' unions have to step up to the plate, and they will only do so if and when the epidemic of men withdrawing from the society reaches proportions where the public demands an affirmative action recruiting program to recruit male teachers for elementary schools, and for secondary schools and when teachers federations demand gender equality for men when hiring for positions of responsibility, and when curriculum designers ask boys what and how they would commit to learn, in order to qualify for seats in universities and colleges now either unfilled or filled by women, and thereby take their place as willing participants in a society that so trashes the current stereotypes of masculinity that almost every television ad contains another dumb, sexually driven, and socially inept male figure, not to mention the billions of dollars being generated by programs like The Big Bang Theory, in which highly educated males demonstrate their almost total estrangement from society and the female gender, with whom they are constantly trying to connect.
To overcome the potential tragedy of the impending mancession, we will need a commitment from all sectors in the society to recognize the blind spots in our vision of equality, in our modelling of respect and tolerance for both genders and a receptive culture for masculine and feminine qualities in all humans, celebrating the androyny bestowed on all of us by nature.
That will take generations....and we really don't have that long!

To all Canadian males 16-25: challenge yourself to achieve your potential

By Kate Bolick, The Atlantic, November 6, 2011
Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.

By themselves, the cultural and technological advances that have made my stance on childbearing plausible would be enough to reshape our understanding of the modern family—but, unfortunately, they happen to be dovetailing with another set of developments that can be summed up as: the deterioration of the male condition. As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. ...
But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller....
(T)ake 1940s Russia, which lost some 20 million men and 7 million women to World War II. In order to replenish the population, the state instituted an aggressive pro-natalist policy to support single mothers. Mie Nakachi, a historian at Hokkaido University, in Japan, has outlined its components: mothers were given generous subsidies and often put up in special sanatoria during pregnancy and childbirth; the state day-care system expanded to cover most children from infancy; and penalties were brandished for anyone who perpetuated the stigma against conceiving out of wedlock. In 1944, a new Family Law was passed, which essentially freed men from responsibility for illegitimate children; in effect, the state took on the role of “husband.” As a result of this policy—and of the general dearth of males—men moved at will from house to house, where they were expected to do nothing and were treated like kings; a generation of children were raised without reliable fathers, and women became the “responsible” gender. This family pattern was felt for decades after the war.

Indeed, Siberia today is suffering such an acute “man shortage” (due in part to massive rates of alcoholism) that both men and women have lobbied the Russian parliament to legalize polygamy. In 2009, The Guardian cited Russian politicians’ claims that polygamy would provide husbands for “10 million lonely women.” In endorsing polygamy, these women, particularly those in remote rural areas without running water, may be less concerned with loneliness than with something more pragmatic: help with the chores. Caroline Humphrey, a Cambridge University anthropologist who has studied the region, said women supporters believed the legalization of polygamy would be a “godsend,” giving them “rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits.”
While the Bolick piece focuses on the future of marriage and coupling, there are serious implications for men in the numbers. And those implications apply to Canadian males between 16 and 25...We cannot afford a lost generation!
Why, for example, are men not attending university in greater numbers, to acquire what most people, including the academic researchers, agree is one of the best ways to, if not guarantee then certainly to access, healthy and rewarding employment, access to health care, and not incidentally enhanced access to the most qualified and most interesting women in your town or city?
Rather than withdrawing into a cocoon of resentment about the economy and job losses especially among men, and rather than acceding to the stereotype of males as "dead beats" or "playboys", neither of which are attractive to healthy women looking for a mate, why not hit the books, or the desktop, depending on where and how you do your homework in grade and secondary school, aim for the best marks you can achieve, seek the support and coaching from your favourite teacher and crack the vault by opening the scholarship and bursary money available to see that your education does not stop prematurely.
If senior males suffer from Erectile Dysfunction (sometimes known as premature ejaculation) why should younger men suffer from premature elimination from the brain development pool?
That may sound like a flippant question but the implications are very serious.
Getting a quality education, in a field in which you as a male are interested, may be the most significant decision of your first quarter century. By taking such a decision, you rebuild the reputation of men on the North American continent, a reputation badly in need of shoring up. By taking such a decision, you also invest, not only in your own intellectual, social and cultural development, (and income-earning potential) but in the enhanced potential for your children, and your family. A university or college grad is far more likely to witness his children enrol in post-secondary school, and also to graduate from those schools. And that is no small accomplishment.
It may be true that high school culture is not "your cup of tea" especially with all the rules and regulations imposed without much logic other than the need of the system to keep control. It may also be true that your gameboy and/or your I-Pad, are far more interesting and more fun and more attractive than your algebra equation, or your chemistry experiment, and it may seem difficult, if not nigh on impossible, for you to make the connections between macy of the shards of information and light and the larger picture of your professional career, and the development of your highest potential.
However, we need each of you, each male in the 16-22 age range, to climb on the seemingly horseless wagon that bears the address (University/College of X) without the kind of cynicism and resentful withdrawal that accompanies what looks like alienation from the system, and separation from the public culture of corporate greed and job losses, and female empowerment, and broken marriages and families...and jump into the challenge that is obtaining first an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in your choice of discipline.
If playing a sport is your best expression, then go at it with vigour, including both finding an outstanding coach and a team mate whose mentorship you can share. Search all the best schools where your sport is being played. Search the best coaches and the best lecturers in the academic discipline of your interest.
Say "YES" to your commitment to your self, and forget about the late nights, and the term tests and the essays and exams that will accompany your decision. Keep your eye fixed on completing that degree, and the admittedly only potential (not guaranteed) access it will give you to a job in your field and demonstrate to your friends and family that your goal is worth pursuing.
You do not have to be a "type A" personality nor do you have to be a "nerd" nor do you have to be a "genius" to enter the most challenging academic stream of your capacity to learn....you just have to believe that your fullest development is more important that a million oilsands for the recovery of the energy within.
If Canada is not a nation of "intellectual, cultural and social" developers, and merely a developers of technology for the extraction of heavy oil, and soft and hard lumber, and expensive minerals, then we will have sacrificed our most precious resource, our human resource on the altar of profit, greed and reductionism.
And, while young women are, or seem to be, committed to their own full development, and men are loath to compete with the same women they may seek to date (wisely) it is time to reverse the image of attempting to compete with the female cohorts of your graduating class.
Your competition is not the narrow one of "besting" the women in your class; your competiton is to "best" the best of the young men and women from every major country in the world, where your next generations peers and intellectual mentors will come from. Whether they speak Mandarin, or Hindi, or Farsi, or German, or Norwegian...we need a huge cadre of well-education Canadian male brains connected to their bodies and their imaginations and their highest ideals and best angels and so do your children and your grandchildren.
And, while, as Red Green says, "We are all in this together, we are also counting on you!"





No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.