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J. Steven Svoboda is a member of TheMensCenter Advisory Council, an Independent attorney active in human rights law and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC).
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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
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By Michael Gurian and Patricia Henley with Terry Trueman.
Michael Gurian and Patricia Henley have crafted a truly wonderful book, full to bursting with succinct summaries of research on differences and similarities between male and female brains as well as findings and suggestions for effective education techniques.
Part One collects data on brain research which over past decades has given us a much broader and deeper understanding of the common and distinct educational needs of boys and girls. Gurian and Henley seamless integrate three primary points of view on brain-based research--neurological and hormonal effects on learning and behavior, developmental psychology, and gender-difference research. They deftly summarize both familiar and relatively unknown data.
Part Two shows how we can create the ultimate classroom for boys and girls by setting up and altering learning environments, at home and at school, to fit the needs laid out in Part One. It offers a practical blueprint to help teachers and parents assess their strengths and weaknesses and learn how to design a successful learning environment for boys and girls.
These ideas work; in Kansas City, discipline problems were reduced by over one-third within just six months after teacher trainings in how boys and girls learn differently.
The stories cannot help but charm, showing us the general through the particular. Giving one boy errands to do helped to positively rechannel his action-seeking troublemaking. A second overly aggressive boy became healthier after he was allowed to lead a burial service for a dead squirrel. A teacher who one day decided to give a ride home from school to a girl student troubled by her father's death helped to transform her feelings and school performance by giving her badly needed attention.
Teachers need to be educated on brain development and gender differences in brain function. Currently, girls constitute 60% of university admissions, have far fewer learning and behavior disorders, and are a full 1.5 years ahead of boys in reading and writing. Gurian and Henley focus on boys due to their greater problems today but do not forget about girls' own troubles such as sometimes being overlooked, often being abandoned by the teenage fathers of their children, needing suppor with self-esteem, risk-taking, and with finding a place for themselves in challenging subjects such as math and physics. (The authors note that self-esteem is great in itself but must be grounded in "hard values" such as respect, honesty, and integrity, and thus advocate character education.)
Our schools seem to be creating overt depression in girls and covert depression in boys. Through violence, male hormones and brains cry out for a different school promoting closer bonding, smaller classes, more verbalization, less male isolation, better discipline, and more attention to male learning styles. Most of all, boys need men in their schools. (90% of elementary teachers are female.) They need male teachers, male teaching assistants, male volunteers from the parents or grandparents, and older male students. Peer mentoring across grades helps everybody involved.
Gurian and Henley collect a number of fascinating facts. Female brains excel at memory and sensory intake, while boys do better at spacial tasks and abstract reasoning. Boys tend to move emotive material "down" in the brain to the more primitive brain stem, while girls move it up to the most advanced upper regions of the brain. This means that boys, whose brains are more task-focused and who actually are more fragile than girls, are more likely to become aggressive or withdraw and are more subject to being overwhelmed by stimuli. They cannot as easily overcome problems and move on to learn effectively. By contrast, girls can respond more flexibly to stimuli and are more prone to processing pain and seeking help from others. The danger for girls is that they may become overwhelmed due to the number of emotive functions they may be running simultaneously. A resting female brain is as active as an activated male brain and thus has a learning advantage. Six times as many girls as boys can sing in tune. Males and females see differently, with boys doing better in brighter light and girls excelling in dim light. Males and females even taste differenlty, with females more sensitive to the bitter and preferring sweet tastes while males prefer salty foods. Intriguingly, hormonal differences between male and female were not as sharp a million years ago as they are today, since population growth calls for more testosterone in men to equip them for the greater competition required.
Gurian and Henley are dedicated to helping society tailor education to boys' and girls' needs. Movement helps boys to stimulate their brains, to manage and relieve impulsive behavior, and to engage their whole body in emotional processing. Thus eliminating recess or cutting back on physical education are profound mistakes. Troublesome boy behavior can often be transformed and rendered useful by allowing the child to play with a nerf ball while learning or by putting him to work handing our papers or sharpening pencils. The authors note that boys' physical aggression often follows girls' verbal aggression, and also provide an extended analysis of "aggression nurturance," how boys use aggression to help boys and girls to learn how to build strength, focus, and attentiveness.
It is the practical suggestions and stories which make the book shine. Multi-generational classes, teaching teams and teacher-to-teacher supports will help boys, girls, and teachers alike. Bonding rituals such as high-five games or songs can reach even problem boys. A great list of bonding tips is provided: be genuine, learn about the child's world, use "I noticed..." statements, attend events in the child's life, listen and listensome more, admit mistakes, give the child two choices to encourage healthy decisionmaking. Specific discipline techniques are tabulated, such as showing a child the effects of an inappropriate action, redirecting hitting to inanimate objects, making things into games whenever possible, and ignoring a child's refusal and not making the mistake of engaging in a power struggle with it.
The authors suggest, "When in doubt, become an alpha," as children crave authority figures. Give children, especially boys, 60 seconds to respond to a question about their behavior. Peer mediation, peer conflict resolution, and peer-driven discipline councils help to give teens responsibility for self-discipline while ensuring adult oversight and instruction. Particularly effective lessons for both boys and girls will integrate arts, geography, social studies, and even mathematics into a study of a particular topic such as the Cherokee or Asia.
The authors trenchantly note that many if not most learning disorders can be "cured" by rethinking our expectations regarding a child's learning. Overprescription of Ritalin to boys and Prozac to girls may "fix" a "problem" but also interrupts the flow of brain development and may allow disengages parenting to continue. What may be needed is simple: more love.
Unafraid of sounding unfashionable, the authors eloquently promote character education for all grades, a judicious mix of same-sex and coeducational classes, and uniforms for high school students to assist their brains by imposing order to reduce the bewildering, even overwhelming onslaught of sensory information. They also remind us of the need to institute several age-appropriate rites of passage for boys and girls. They counsel us to spend more time with adolescents than the youths seem to be asking us for.
Gurian and Henley also do not fear bringing in larger issues, asking if we as a culture withhold from boys the love they need. Are troubled boys trying to draw our attention to how unloved they currently feel? Adolescent males are set up for high risk behavior and are begging the community to set limits for them. Stop the insanity of mixed-gender wrestling, the authors implore, and add gender training to the curriculum so boys and girls can hear each other speak and can start to demystify that wonderful other sex. Many difficult children have been saved through arts programs.
Gurian and Henley are careful to repeatedly stress that many exceptions to gender brain trends exist, as do boys and girls with bi-gender or "bridge" brains. The authors provide a number of useful tables, including a seven-page table exhaustively listing, for each part of the brain, the corresponding functions, gender similarities and differences, and the impact of these differences on behavior. Later we get an equally useful five-page table summarizing developmental gender differences from prebirth through infancy, toddlerhood, and middle school, right up through high
school years. Each chapter in Part Two ends with a highlighted summary of the principal educational strategies for boys and for girls as well as a detailed list of tips for parents.
I would have appreciated some discussion of economic and practical barriers to reducing the student-teacher ratio and involving more males in education as well as ideas as to how they might be overcome. The book could have benefitted from more attention to the needs of gay children. But these are mere quibbles. Gurian and Henley have penned a masterwork; regardless of whether you have children of your own, it speaks to us all as human beings. Ignore it at your peril!
©2000 J. Steven Svoboda
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