The biological reasons boys suck at school

Boys are naturally worse at formal education.

I still think masculinity is the main reason boys do worse than girls in school. (I recently went through some of the reams of compelling evidence that masculinity, rather than school bias against boys, explains the gender achievement gap at all levels of formal education.)

(Also, my tiktok summarizing that post is far-and-away my best-performing, with 32k views.)

But even without gender or masculinity norms, boys and girls do behave differently. Their brains work differently.

Doing well in school requires intelligence, conscientiousness, patience, impulse control, and diligence. In other words, you need to be able to sit down, shut up, listen closely, and follow instructions for uninterrupted hours at a time.

This requirement has nothing to do with “femininization.” Back when Socrates was teaching, “school” required those skills. Why do you think most boys never went?

Girls are a lot better at these skills. Girls are better at sitting still for long periods. Girls learn impulse control earlier and faster. Girls are less disruptive in class and get suspended from school less frequently.

The other thing that strongly correlates with academic achievement is IQ. This, too, helps explain the gender achievement gap. There are a lot more very dumb boys than girls. There are also a lot more very smart boys than girls. But we’re not worried about the top half. There, girls and boys perform about the same. The gender achievement gap is a bottom-half thing.

In addition, girls’ brains develop faster than boys’.

Girls are also half as likely to receive an A.D.H.D. or autism diagnosis. Boys are more likely to develop learning disabilities. Under-diagnosis in girls is rampant, of course. But one reason we don’t catch learning issues in girls as quickly is that girls seem to be much better at masking their symptoms and performing well despite their challenges than boys.

We know that adults treat boys and girls differently starting from the moment they’re born. Even before they’re born, male fetuses are more demanding and less hardy. We punish and reward girls and boys differently for the same behavior. This makes it really hard to know what is “nature” versus what is “nurture” or socialization.

But, in terms of what to do, I’m not sure it really matters.

From a policy perspective, I’m gonna double down on my suggestion that we make it easier for boys (and girls) to quit school earlier.

It’s extremely un Blue Tribe of me to say it, but a very large chunk of boys are not cut out for formal education. I survived public K-12 in Alabama. I’ve seen things.

But also, we have studies.

As

Freddie deBoer

has persuasively argued, there’s a cohort of kids who are not suited to academic success, and nothing is likely to change that for them. We’ve never succeeded in reliably changing cohort performance. If a kid performs in the bottom 10% in kindergarten, they’re going to perform in the bottom 10% for their entire scholastic career, on average, no matter what. No program, spending level, length of school day, class size, etc. has been shown to reliably change average relative scholastic performance. You can change what a top- or bottom-level kid learns. But you can’t change their place in the distribution.

MRA-types are wrong. Bias doesn’t explain why boys do worse in school. But they have inadvertently stumbled upon something that closely resembles a valid and useful point. It is true that the K-12 public education monopoly screws low-performing boys.

That’s because most schools shortchange almost everyone who isn’t college-bound. It just so happens that bottom-half boys are disproportionately in that category.

Once again, MRA-types and conservatives are so desperate to paint bottom-half boys as victims and feminists as villains that they’ve covered up the real scandal. We should be up-in-arms about the fact that the average high schooler graduates with approximately zero marketable skills.F or a large percentage of (disproportionately male) students, school is glorified daycare.

Girls, being much more likely to go to college, tend to be okay. Even if we don’t, male breadwinner requirements create less pressure to earn a lot right away.

The status quo is a disaster for boys. It’s difficult to “be a man” without college. But a four-year degree is increasingly a bad idea with a low-ROI.

Low-performing boys know school is a frustrating waste of time, and are much more likely to drop out. But not before wasting a lot of class time. I’m fondly remembering the boy who would yell out “Milk” at random intervals during science class and the young man who would crip walk around my math classroom while my teacher tried to get him back into his seat. Disruptive boys were such a constant annoyance that I actually asked around to figure out why more of my teachers didn’t send the loud, disruptive kids to an administrator so they could get back to pretending to teach. I heard that the administrators didn’t want to deal with these kids either, and couldn’t send them home without losing state money. So they highly encouraged teachers to keep them in the classroom as long as possible.

The answer is as simple as it is classic: Put these boys to work!

“What teenagers want is not rebellion but purpose and responsibility,” Judd Baroff recently said about the boy crisis in education. “We’ve destroyed any chance for responsibility. They can’t work. They can’t build. They can’t go out on their own. They have no family responsibilities. And so the only thing open to them is this ‘bad-to-the-bone’ rebellion nonsense.”

Teens love responsibility. In the 90s, schools thought they would scare teens away from pregnancy with needy babydolls. It backfired. What worked? Researchers have causally linked the MTV reality television show 16 and Pregnant with a decline in teen childbearing. Teen girls don’t mind hard work and responsibility. They’re more put off by what shit fathers the boys and men who impregnate teenagers generally turn out to be.

As teen boy health expert

Christopher Pepper

recently put it, teenage boys desperately need to be needed somewhere. And a lot of them don’t feel needed in the classroom.

More male teachers would probably help. But, in addition, bottom-half boys need appealing, useful, easy to access alternatives to school itself. They need apprenticeships, shop classes, internships, trade schools, and certification programs. They need systems that work with, rather than against, their socialization and biology to help them get out in the world and earning enough money to support a family as soon as they’re physically and mentally able.