I can't see much difference between the schools my sons attended and the school my grandsons attend now. The little kids, in kindergarten and grades one and two, are given plenty of moving-around time. No child I know is expected to sit for hours at that age or even in the bigger grades! My grandsons are doing well in school. Girls are not "favoured" in their school, nor are boys pushed aside and ignored. The teachers seem to make a real effort to deal with the kids as individuals. But, of course, there are fewer than 100 students in the whole school, grades K to 7, so it's maybe easier.
I went to elementary school in an era when we WERE expected to sit for hours every day. And we did it. That's the way it was. Yes, I daresay the boys found it hard to do. But that was the expectation. Little girls coloured nicely inside the lines, enjoyed reading, and could sit still longer than the boys. But still, it was hard! I remember the blessed sense of freedom when we could RUN all the way home.
But. No one had a TV. No one had video games. I think we all had longer attention spans, to be honest. There was no effort made to "entertain" us or cater to our "needs". Children were largely expected to be seen and not heard.
It wasn't such a bad way, really. I know that's unfashionable to say, but you know what? It wasn't worse than it is now. It suited some children and not others, exactly as the present system does.
From my own experience raising boys, I know that boys are different from girls. But then, girls are different from boys.
Yet, throughout my entire school career, boys were expected to "outperform" girls and they did. Over and over again, particularly in math and science. In grades 3 through 6 or 7 we had "ranks" in our classroom. At the end of every week the teacher announced who ranked first and so on down the line. It was nearly always boys who made up the top 5. In high school it was simply obvious that boys would be the top math and science students, and generally English as well, since girls were often funnelled into the less demanding English classes. (Business English, typing, etc.)Now, of course there were exceptions, and yours truly was one of them. I was a bright kid and learned easily. But I, and a few of my girlfriends, WERE the exceptions, and were regarded as peculiar. Our experience, in our school, was hardly unique. Most teenagers are miserable anyway, but added to the general angst and weepiness of all those hormones you had added the ghastly truth that you BEAT some boy on a math test! The horror! No dates for you, my girl. So the dateless brainy girls got together at pjama parties and read Lady Chatterly out loud and sighed and pondered what "it" must be like, what the girlier girls were learning. . . . Or, sadly, many girls simply stopped doing well at school. There was certainly no universal expectation that you were going to university. Why, girls went there only to get their Mrs. degrees.
What has happened? What has happened is that girls have come into their own. Girls could always do well at math and science, but they weren't expected to and weren't encouraged. Maybe the real truth is that girls are brighter than boys?
I mean, for how many centuries has the opposite been accepted as right and natural?I'm rather fed up with the whining and moaning. Boys aren't doing worse, girls are doing better, that's the way I see it. And when women are all the professors in colleges and universities and are chairmen of all the major corporations and are all the judges and governors and prime ministers, why, then, there might be something to bitch about. Maybe.
