Education and Gender

Throughout the years, it seems as though the public has always had an ax to grind with our school systems. Why not? With the growing rate of high school dropouts, a student slipping through the creaks and even now it is said that college students can no longer read nor write a twenty-page paper. So with all of those issues at hand it is easy to understand why so many people have become so frustrated with our school systems. Despite all of these issues, what about gender and education? Are the school systems catering to learning styles or are they catering to the sexes and their “Learning tendencies”?

                The beliefs of gender education has been around for who knows how long. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the fact males and females learn differently. This is why same-sex education is an entire institution.  For instance, males develop socially much later than females. This could be attributed to the generalization that adult females staff primary schools, so with the lack of a male role model it becomes difficult for males to grow socially. (J.Woods) On the other hand females tend to stay out of the field of math and science. Once again, this could be attributed to socialization process and the social standards female generally struggle in those two particular fields. (J.Woods)  Lucky for Woods, this is a generalization rather than the rule. There are many instances where men excel in communication, that why ninety-five percent of sociopaths are men, or sales men. On the other hand, there have been many successful female engineers, mathematicians, and so on. SO the real question is here, is there really a learning curve between males and females or have we just always set them up for failure as a self-fulfilling prophecy?

                After much collaboration and deliberation, I have evaluated my educational carrier, so to say.  So, is there a difference in the treatment of males and females in the classroom? Truth be told, this will be like the blind leading the blind here. Growing up I never felt as if there was a different treat meant of males or females in the classroom. If there were, I would generally chuck it up to personality rather than sex. As I really dig deep into my memory, it did seem as though there might be a difference. If memory serves me right, there was always much more female participation in the social science classes and vies-versa in my geography, or physics classes.  This could be due to the fact of who was teaching the class and how they were reinforcing the participation.

                Personally, it is hard to tell. I am sure that if the blinders were off at the time I could have evaluated it much differently than I do now.  The fact of the matter is that the behaviors became so normative that it was not recognized as something strange. So yes, there is the possibility that the education system is catering to sex rather than learning style. So now what? We as a people have come far enough to recognize that there may be an issue, and make efforts to change the behaviors. I am confident that higher education really does knock down those generalizations. However, the real issue is learning style rather than sex, so maybe yes, teachers should be utilizing a number of teaching styles to cater to a number of learning styles and have that be the real focused.