Lcartting and learning Styles 1

How Boys Learn

ABSTRACT; Guirian and Stevens explore the ways in which boys learn as they discuss a
mismatch between boys and conventional education. They discuss gender and the brain and call
for an end to the gender plasticity myth. Fur' therrmore, the authors call for greater support and
research into the wavs that boys learn. They conclude by presenting a model they believe will “
help protect the minds of boys."

To respect that fury or those giddy high spirits or a body that seems perpetually
mobile is to respect nature, much as one respects the strength of a hurricane, the rush
of a waterfall.
—Sara Ruddick, author and mother

1. THE MISMATCH BETWEEN BOYS AND CONVENTIONAL EDUCATION

The image of a schoolchild as someone sitting tad reading has become the poster
image for education, especially in the past fifty years. This is not a bad image, but it
is an incomplete match with die way the minds of many of our boys work. Perhaps
you have seen the mismatch in your own homes and schools: boys struggling to learn
in the ways provided for them, teachers and families becoming frustrated, boys being
labeled “difficult” or “failures” and becoming morose with self-doubt.
In a recent Gurian Institute workshop, material on “boy energy” and the male brain
led to a spirited discussion about the issues our sons face. A teacher raised a key
question—a question that is trised in nearly every setting in which the nature- based
material is presented: “Should we keep frying to change the boys and their energy, or
should we change the educational system they find themselves in?” Another teacher
asked, “Is this just a pedagogical issue, or are we now facing a moral one?”
 Learning and Learning Styles 2
Those are questions each of us must now answer, armed as we arc with scientific
information about the nature of our sons. The authors believe that every time a
teacher wonders why boys are “trouble in the classroom,” he or she is asking a moral
question. Every time the faculty lounge becomes a place of conversation about why
boys are bringing down standardized test scores, die teachers are asking the same
question. When a mother and father agonize over whether to put their son on
medication, they are asking the question. Among our children themselves, the
question is silently resounding as the kids who are having trouble learning their
lessons look at others who learn so very well.
Should we keep trying to change our boys, or should we change the educational
system in which they are now taught? The answer to that question will require
parents, teachers, and schools to decide what parts of nature, nurture, and culture can
and should be changed, and what parts can’t and shouldn’t. It tacitly directly raises
these questions:
• Is male nature—the male brain—plastic enough to be changed to fit today’s
classrooms?
• If it is, how do we better effect change than we are now doing, so that boys no longer
get most of the failing grades?
• If it is not, how can our educational system change to accommodate the male brain
so that we can gain the positive results we all want for our sons?
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II. HOW GENDER REALLY HAPPENS IN THE BRAIN
Human nature hard wires gender into our brains in three biological stages. The first
stage has been clarified by genetics research, the second by endocrinological
research, and the third by psychosocial research.
Stage l. Chromosome markers fix gender are included in the genomes of girls and
boys at the time of conception. Researchers at UCLA have identified chromosome
markers—built into the fetal brain—for the development of a male and female.
Stage 2. Those chromosome markers compel surges of male and female hormones in
the womb that format XX brains to be female and XY brains to be male. In-utero
bombardment of hormones into the brain occurs with intense frequency' between the
second and fifth months of gestation. Researchers at various universities around the
world, including the University of London, McMaster University in Canada, UCLA,
and the University of Pennsylvania, can now trace the development of gender in the
fetal brain via bombardments of testosterone and other hormones.
Stage 3. The child is born a boy or girl, sending nonverbal and then verbal cues to
parents, the nurturing community, and the larger culture. These cues are biological—
based in the child’s genetics and hardwiring. Mother, father, and extended family,
then teachers, schools, and community members like you, like us, read the male and
female signals, cues, and characteristics. These signals and readings are now being
visually traced through SPECT and PET scan research in attachment theory,
conducted in many pare of the world, including the University of Denver and
Harvard University.
It’s important to remember that none of these researchers is involved in a nature-
versus-nurture framework. All this research recognizes the vast interplay between
genetic, hormonal, neural, and social forces. All the researchers also recognize that
maleness and femaleness are things we start out with: we are born with them.
Although it was popular thirty years ago to believe otherwise, scientific research in
our era has put to rest the idea that gender is completely a matter of nurture Gender is
inborn and then it becomes socialized by cultures.
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Why is the human genome, brain, and bonding system set up to be male and female
by nature? No

DID YOU KNOW?

• As of four days of age, girls tend to spend twice as much time as
boys maintaining eye contact with adults. Bonding chemistry and
the visual cortex of boys and girls already differ at four
days old.
• By four months of age, boys are less likely than girls to distinguish
between a known individual and a stringer. Memory centers as
well as spatial- mechanical pathways already work differently in
boys and girls. Male babies are in general more inclined than
female babies ro spend more time during a dav looking at objects
moving in space—for instance, mobiles hung from a ceiling. Girls ,
in contrast, are more likely to tum their gaze inmediately to their
caregivers.
• Infant girls also pay closer attention to the words of caregivers.
Verbal centers arc developing in the female brain more quickly
than in the male.
• Little boys, when given dolls to play with, more often than girls
pull the heads off , hit them against a table, throw them in the air,
or generally engage in some kind of physical, kinesthetic, or spatial
play with the dolls. Girls, in contrast, from very early in life, begin
to use words with the doll. Given how much earlier the female
centers for verbal communication develop in the brain, this comes
as no surprise. Because of higher level' of oxyrefrin. "girls form
bonds with objects that boys merely use as physical learning took.2
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researcher can be completely sure. People with a religious base for
understanding human nature say “ This is how God created us.” The more science-
based work in evolutionary biology suggests that the most probable cause for our
male- female brain difference lies in the millions of years of human evolution, during
which humans prima- hunted and gathered.

Because males mainly hunted, they needed to develop a more spatial-mechanical

brain. They needed to see well, but did not need fine detail sensory awareness as
much as did females, who cared far offspring The male brain was wired, therefore,
for more physical movement—with more blood flow in the brain stem than the
female bran has—but for less verbal input and output. (Words weren't needed much
during the hunt.)

Whether you choose a religious or scientific explanation, the new brain

technologies allow us to see foe differences for ourselves between male and female
in the brain. And even if you don’t have pet scan equipment in your living room—
none of us does; —you can still see what the geneticists, biologists, and sociologists
are getting at.

ENDING THE MYTH OF GENDER PLASTICITY AND SUPPORTING

III.
THE WAY BOYS ACTUALLY LEARN
Given die biological and social evidence of male- female brain difference, can a
nurturing community, a school, a family, a culture make a boy change the gender of
his brain! Can a typical room, by just talking to or reading to an average little boy,
force his verbal centers to be like an average girls? Should a school compel a boy to
become the kind of learner it has decided will be "easiest to teach"?
The new sciences now challenge all of us— moms, dads, grandparents, teachers,
policymakers to come to an informed conclusion about the relationship between a
boy’s nature, his nurtured and his cultural experience. We spend only a
few years in a close, day—today supervisory relationship with our children: how do
we want to spend those years? What kind of care do we want to give to their very
human nature, their wonderful minds?
The new scientific research merits concluding that although all children are
unique and individual, and although everyone is constantly learning new drills and
developing new modes of communication, the gender of the human brain is no plastic,
not a new skill to be learned, not a new mode of communication. It is as hardwired
into the brain as a person’s genetic personality. In the same way that you cannot
change a shy person into an extrovert, you cannot change the brain of a boy into the
brain of a girl.
The idea that not all elements of the brain— especially not gender—are plastic is
very important to our dialogue about the state of boyhood in education. Our
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educational system has bought into the idea of “overall neural plasticity.” Because of
this mythical concept of the brain as a magical, changing device, very few academic
institutions train teachers in the neural sciences of gender. This aspect of human
development is ignored, and young teachers, like young parents, are taught that being
a “boy” or a “girl” is culturally insignificant in education, that basically all kids learn
the same way and can be educated in a way that ensures gender-exclusive,
predictable results.
Research from the new gender and brain sciences begs us to move beyond this
myth. The move constitutes a second major step toward solving the crisis of male
education. As step two finds its way into schools of education, young teachers will
be shown PET scans, SPECT scans, and MRIs of the male and female braiu and be
trained to understand the gender reality we all experience. '
You as an individual—and your school as a collective—can become a leader in
making this happen. Because our biological sciences are now able to use PET scans,
MRIs, and other tests, we
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 2X0 Bases for Curriculum Leadership

can now discern how gender is marked into our genomes from millions of years of
human development and still lights up the individual brains of boys and girls You
can bring this information to homes, schools, social policies, and universities and
colleges. You can help your community notice how tough the myth of gender
plasticity is making life for our sons. When you notice males in educational distress,
you can point out that we are creating for our sons an educational system not well
suited to certain aspects of their brains; a system that claims they are defective,
disordered, or incorrigible because they can’t learn; a system that insists that they
should be able to changer- even further, that their inability to change is yet another
flaw in their character as males, one that supposedly requires medication.
If our civilization continues to buy into the myth of gender plasticity, larger
numbers of our sons will continue to do poorly in school. They will emerge from
years of waste and failure without the normal development and skills we’ve all
assumed for years that they would acquire, and, during this entire struggle and
conflict, they will continue to frustrate us by “not changing.”

IV. A BOY FRIENDLY MODEL FOR PROTECTING THE MINDS OF BOYS

If you agree with our argument that the current educational system often fails to
accommodate the hardwiring of boys’ brains and does not provide them with an
appropriate system of learning, and if you agree that our homes and schools should
do less to try to change our boys and more to help them leam naturally, then you can
become an ambassador for boys, a protector of their minds. As an ambassador you’ll
join us, not in trying to alter the nature of boys or girls, but instead in working
toward two goals:
1. Expression and development of the natural self of the child. The child’s genetic self is
most important to his or her learning, and those who aid the child are charged with helping that
self become folly expressive and developed within the frameworks of a humane society.
2. Compensation for areas of inherent disadvantage or fragility. These areas of
disadvantage emerge for any child because of particular genetic or environmentally
caused weaknesses in his or her learning brain or because the child as an Individual
carries learning characteristics that don’t fit the mass.
Our suggestions detailed in other sections of The Minds of Boys avoid joining with
any ideologies that nieasure success of the child’s education by measuring significant
alteration of the child’s mind, whatever part of the gender-brain continuum the child
is on. We believe that to base a child’s education on the hope of altering a brain’s
inherent method of self-development is an affront to freedom and ultimately leads to
suppression or disengagement of the child’s true self and potential for success.
A child who expresses himself and learns to compensate for weaknesses is
following one of the most natural instincts of our species: to adapt. We as adults
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protect the minds of children when we help the children adapt, using their own
natural skills and talents, to the needs of a society. We don’t protect their minds by
putting a generation of schoolboys on drugs or watching them gradually fail.
Breaking down the myth of gender plasticity is not necessarily a simple thing to
accomplish. But our culture has, in a few decades, successfully confronted a great
deal of the patriarchal, sexist, and industrial system that was hurting girls, and
improved the lives of girls aind women. There’s still a way to go, but there has been
substantial change. And in this process, our culture did not force girls’ brains or
nhtiirc to change in order for them to succeed in our educational system. All of us
came together to change the system in order to fit girls
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officialy, we brought more verbal functioning ur math and science classes, trained teach more
writing and group conversation in those subjects, changed our testing of bjects to include more
explanativc and essay answers, and developed new ways encourage our girls at home that fit
their natural need for verbal encouragement.
The proof of our success with girls is measurable today: the industrialized world has closed
the female-to-male math and science gaps in our schools. Girls now receive grades as good as
and better than boys in these classes. In California, girls are now actually outperforming boys in
math and science. As we noted earlier, girls are no longer shortchanged in many schools—they
are high performers. The changes we made to our educational system worked!
Cbangmg our educational system to help boys will admittedly be harder, because the changes
that have been made to help our daughters will actually make boys’ education more problematic.
Furthermore, in our consideration of girls’ needs, we never had to fight the myth of gender
plasticity—we never said, “Our girls are defective.” We always said, “The system is defective.”
Changing the system for our boys can be also accomplished—without hurting our girls—and it
must be.
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