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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38195 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Redshirt the Boys

The value of a later start, which many teachers and administrators call “the gift of time,” is an open secret in elite circles. And it’s a gift overwhelmingly given to boys. In the past few months, I’ve interviewed dozens of private-school teachers, parents, educational consultants, and admissions officers, largely in the D.C. metro area. I learned that a delayed school entry is now close to the norm for boys who would otherwise be on the young side. One former head of an elite private school who now consults with parents on school choice and admissions told me, “There are effectively two different cutoff dates for school entry: one for boys and one for girls.”

On almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates. The trend is so pronounced that it can result only from structural problems. Affluent parents and elite schools are tackling the issue by giving boys more time. But in fact it is boys from poorer backgrounds who struggle the most in the classroom, and these boys, who could benefit most from the gift of time, are the ones least likely to receive it.

there was a discussion on ssc a while back about why boys underperform relative to girls in school. the most common explanation was that school is simply 'feminized', but maybe boys simply mature slower; the article certainly doesn't shy away from nature over nurture

The problem of self-regulation is much more severe for boys than for girls. Flooded with testosterone, which drives up dopamine activity, teenage boys are more inclined to take risks and seek short-term rewards than girls are. Meanwhile, the parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, and future orientation are mostly in the prefrontal cortex—the so-called CEO of the brain—which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.

Other relevant centers of the brain follow suit. The cerebellum, for example, plays a role in “emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,” according to Gokcen Akyurek, an expert on executive functioning at Hacettepe University, in Turkey. It reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. Similarly, there are sex differences linked to the timing of puberty in the development of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that contributes to memory and learning.

this seems like a simple enough way to perhaps help boys stop falling behind in education.

Has it been considered that this is because of sports? Plenty of dads I knew didn't want their boy to be the smallest one on the team.

Sports usually include an age cutoff. There is a bit of room for finagling there, but usually less than a year, which isn't going to swamp the intra-year variance in size. That said, I literally made this decision for my son, keeping him in preschool an extra year to make him one of the oldest in his grade instead of the youngest, against the outraged squawking of the teacher's on his mother's side, and I am very happy with that decision.

I was born right at the cutoff and thankfully my parents held me back. I was more than a full year older than three or four of my classmates, which in retrospect, I think definitely gave me a leg up.

The true takeaway from that chapter in Freakonomics was to get pregnant February-May if your school cutoff is in September, and pray you don't have a very premature baby. Getting pregnant in August-October is the worst.

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