If there is any truth to the notion that male students are being turned off in schools, colleges and universities, perhaps the curriculum needs to be amended to become more fitting to the needs, aspirations and intellectual capacities of male students.
Curriculum design based on the Aristotelian model of naming aspects of a subject, and then learning through memory to repeat those facts, or even to be able to replicate the equations at the base of each mathematical inquiry, or chemical or physical experiment, while interesting, is not likely to stimulate the imaginations of many of the students whose goals differ from those targetting medecine, law, accounting or economics.
While making money is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile avocation, the creation of new approaches, or new ways of doing things is far more interesting and exciting in and of itself.
Most industrial designers will say that they never talk about design to a client who hires them. They speak only about increased efficiency, or decreased costs but never about design. The reason, according to Lionel Tiger who writes about conversations with industrial designers, is that they believe the society generally is illiterate about the subject of "design." And that includes both the theory of design and the practical applications of that design theory.
As we move ever more intimately into a knowledge-based economy, with the processes that enable, and then drive and then store and recall whatever it is that we are "knowing" designed by an ever diminishing number of design engineers, it is the applications of those new designs that we are going to have to "create" and to implement.
In the industrial society, according to Lionel Tiger once again, we lost focus on the reproductive capacity of the society, while focussing exclusively on the productive capacity. And, in the process, we turned the reproductive capacity of humans into another "productive" capacity, through the birth control pill, and other choices for females to make regarding whether or not they wished to procreate thereby "industrializing" procreation.
Today, we need to re-capture the male intelligence through an intimate and rigorous education into the processes, theories and capacities of creating and designing.
We need to raise our general and societal knowledge and appreciation for the goals, theories and processes of design, through a curriculum that introduces students to new societal needs, and also newly designed, and evolving design processes.W can no longer count only on the economists to turn the economy around; we need a concerted collective political and intellectual movement that understands where the economy fits in the larger picture. We can no longer count on the medical schools to bring about an optimum human wellness; they are so stuck in the "disease" model of diagnosis and treatment that they cannot see beyond it to prevention, without pharmaceuticals. We can no longer count on the lawyers to write the laws in our legislatures, because they write them for their profession, and we can no longer afford to give up our democratic access to the political levers to accountants and lawyers. We need generalist thinkers who are familiar with change, with change theory, with design theory and practice, to provide leven to the society of specialists that have "left" the rest of us behind.
We need people trained in thinking outside the box, and the one thing the Canadian, and perhaps to a little lesser degree the North American education system is not is, "outside the box." The system is a traditionalist, conserving, preserving and repressing system run by people who are addicted to the perfection of the system, both men and women. And that repudiates the intellectual and aspirational needs of, especially, male students.
And while female students are and will continue to be compatible and compliant with such a system, male students will not comply. Nor should they.
We have the capacity to create individual curricula for every student, witness the recent story in The Atlantic of one male student who dropped out of college, because he could not withstand the monotony of the routine. Becoming a professional writer is only one of the clear indications of his intelligence.
We need to harness every student's innate capacities, cognitively, creatively, socially and industrially.
And we are not doing that. We do not need to conduct labour market needs surveys to determine what those who are hiring need, because those needs will be obsolete before the students whose curriculum meets those goals graduate. We need to truly democratize the curriculum, including everything we know, and everything we do not know, about the dangers our planet faces, our bodies and spirits face, and the potential for creative imagination inherent in each student and demanded by every force contending against our well-being.
And we need to stop trying to replicate the past, with our "standardized testing" to make the politicians and the replicators happy, and returned to office. We must stop holding our schools, colleges and universities hostage to the needs of the "establishment" because they have proven conclusively that they cannot be trusted to even consider goals, in both content and pedagogy, that are appropriate to the individual student, not to mention to the long-term aspirations of the society, exclusive of its need and desire for money.
And that is another reduction "up with which we will not put" nor will the students.
We fail our students by reducing "sex" education to "morality" and "body parts."
We fail our students by reducing the management of money to economics 101 without showing, first, how the economy must serve the students and citizens, and not the other way round.
We also fail our students by refusing to design and deliver a wholistic curriculum around the creating, sustaining and adapting to changing circumstances in RELATIONSHIPS! Little wonder there is at least a 40% failure rate in our fmaily relationships.
If that were the rate of failure in our schools in the subjects they are currently teaching, there would be ratepayers tearing down the school doors in every town and hamlet across the country.
And yet, that is one of the measurements of today's schools: we fail at least that percent of students who have no idea how to communicate, how to read symbolically, how to negotiate with both peers and with authority, how to create and improvise with raw materials, for any project, and how to capture their dreams in a cogent and creative manner.
And so they wander about "connecting" with digital instruments that serve primarily as distractions, and certainly not as provocateurs of new ideas. While they also remain the most alienated, and isolated generation yet to appear. And that's not THEIR fault; it is our's. We have failed them!
An influential statement of the classical position was made by William Morris in a famous lecture on The Beauty of Life given at the Town Hall, Birmingham, (Alabama) in 1880. He spoke of the 'danger that the present course of civilization will destroy the beauty of life,' and that 'the civilized world' will forget 'that there had ever been an art made by the people for the people as a joy to the maker and the user'. He struck the populist note that 'You cannot educate, you cannot civilize men, unless you can give them a share in art.' (Lionel Tiger, The Manufacture of Evil, p. 304)
Here is a comment from one who has taught secondary school and has gone through the conventional school system, including undergraduate and graduate schools (obviously a male!):
The problem is the school system itself: the Classroom setting is no good. Sitting, staring at the front, being lectured. It doesn't work. Especially for boys who in general are very high-energy and filled with hormones. Perhaps some kind of curriculum designed to take that into account. I a not a someone with a myriad of academic qualifications to suggest the best way to design curriculum, but I think the general schema would be to make it more experiential, more physical and more dynamic (in that the classroom isn't locked into one place).
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