I continue to get relevant comments on posts I made a while ago. Sometimes those comments behoove me to go back and re-read that post. This is one of them well worth re-reading.
As education specialists of every ilk scramble to respond intelligently to the recently publicity about how girls are now doing a lot better than boys in school and what to do about it, I can’t help repeating what I said in my previous post: “Everything we are is in our brain.”
BUT that doesn’t mean — even if gender IS in the brain — that all of our personality traits, including learning styles, are gender based.
Like many boys, some girls are tomboys and learn better when they can move around and not have to sit still. Some boys, like many girls, get totally involved in process and are not, by nature, assertive.
It seems to me that education first has to address the kinds of intelligences that children can have, and no two children will have the same balance among those intelligences. In dealing with each child as an individual, issues of gender=based tendencies become irrelevant — or they would become irrelevant if that’s the way education was conducted. Each child would be enouraged, motivated, and rewarded for honing skills in all the various intelligences. What would eventually happen in terms of learning “styles” and gender, I’d bet, is that we’d wind up with a bell curve, with some girls all he way on one end, a whole bunch of girls and boys rising from each end toward the middle, and some boys on the other end.
And, maybe someday the advice given by a character that I quoted in that old post will resonate respectfully with both genders:
“What I have done is be a woman, with all my feminine qualities intact, in a world that was run completely by men. And you know something? They appreciated it. They didn’t exactly move over and make room for me –I had to carve out my own space among them, but that was nothing different than any of them had had to do. That’s something some women don’t seem to understand. Nobody is accepted right away. Everyone has to prove themselves. The world will never make room for you– you have to make it yourself. You have to make your own place, and stick to it. And there’s nothing weak whatever about those same feminine qualities, Haley. That’s what I want you to recognize. They are not a liability. They are a strength.”
I wonder what the male equivalent of that kind of statement would be.