The need for more male educators in public schools is gaining traction amid the increasing gender gap in education.
The New York Times published an article Saturday calling specifically for more male kindergarten teachers.
The piece reports that only 3% of kindergarten teachers are male. Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford University professor who has long studied the effect of teacher demographics on student outcomes, is cited as saying that more male educators at a young age could significantly improve boys’ experiences in the classroom.
Given that boys are less likely than girls to be ready for kindergarten in the first place, it’s vital that those early years feature a strong educational foundation that lays the groundwork for success going forward. Having a male role model in the classroom can go a long way for boys who need someone to model their behavior after, particularly given that one in five children grow up without a father in the home.
It’s also no secret that young boys are more active than girls and require more physical exertion throughout the day. Given an increasingly academic kindergarten curriculum that leaves less time for recess, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that young boys are disproportionately struggling.
This problem doesn’t just matter in the context of kindergarten, however, as those bad outcomes manifest themselves in later years as well.
In 2020, 9% more women between ages 25 and 34 held bachelor’s degrees than men. While 88.4% of young women graduated high school on time in 2021, that number falls to 81.9% for young men.
A 2021 report from the Wall Street Journal found that nearly 60% of all college students being female shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
Now, implicit within that statistic is not the assertion that more men need to attend college. That large gender gap in higher education speaks more to the intellectual differences between men and women than it does to some theoretical existence of systemic reverse-sexism.
And though it’s impossible not to wonder where the DEI crowd is on this one, its absence isn’t minded much given that a traditional four-year college isn’t actually the right choice for many male high school students.
Trade schools are often a better move for high school seniors, and given the diminishing value of a four-year degree, they need to become more accepted in our academic culture. We need a larger emphasis on shop classes in high school so boys and girls who are interested in woodworking, welding, metalworking, and other fields can explore the academic subjects they are actually interested in and are good at.
Boys are also disproportionately strong with spatial thinking, yet that aspect of their intellect is never included in the math curriculum. The result is generations of boys who have been unfairly convinced by educators that they’re not smart. We need to communicate to them that they are intelligent and their talent is appreciated. It’s just that their skills don’t fit into the narrow reading and math-based education system that we currently employ.
More space clearly needs to be made for boys in the context of our high school curriculums, but we also need to further empathize with the obstacles boys face in the classroom at a young age.
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Too many energetic elementary schoolers, many of whom disproportionately suffer from ADHD, have been convinced by educators that their restless behavior in the classroom is representative of their deficient character and lack of respect for authority. That tendency to misbehave and disrupt, however, is often far more biological than personal.
This is not a “boys will be boys” excuse but a call to nurture rather than scold. These boys (and girls) deserve our education system’s full sympathy and respect. Every child deserves to be treated equally in the classroom, and though awareness is a step in the right direction, further efforts need to be made to close the gender gap in education.