Boys And School

February 8, 2010

Interview with Richard Whitmire, author of the book Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That's Leaving Them Behind

_______________

Mike Carruthers:
Kids in elementary school are learning more, sooner and it’s creating a problem for boys.

Richard Whitmire:
For example today a kindergartner is doing verbal skills what a second grader did twenty years ago. The girls adjusted beautifully to that, the boys have not.
 

Richard Whitmire, author of the book Why Boys Fail...

Girls are just hard-wired to absorb those literacy skills earlier. They get a faster start. In theory, the reading experts tell me, that boys should catch up by forth, fifth grade but now they’re not. They don’t catch up and it affects their other courses.

Essentially Richard says, boys have trouble catching up because there is simply too much stuff to catch up on.

What they do is they see that it’s the girls that are succeeding and they conclude that schooling is for girls. And as a result they check out and they look for things for which they’re more successful, take video games for example. So they get swallowed up in video games and then of course video games get blamed for the problem.

So, what’s a parent to do?

If you see your boys struggling in elementary school and you talk to the teacher and the teacher says, “Don’t worry boys always start out slower but they catch up” – don’t believe that teacher - because that was true twenty years ago but it’s not happening now. And then at home focus on literacy skills, what in the past has been true is the Dad’s will read to their daughters and throw the football with their son – well that doesn’t work anymore.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here