The theme of Snap-on CEO Nicholas Pinchuk’s lunchtime address at a past TMC Fall Convention tackled the issue of how technical education tended to be downgraded by both primary and secondary school educators. It’s undeniable that in the subculture of high schools, careers in technology are regarded as consolations for those who fail to qualify for callings ranked higher in the mindsets of a high school teachers and guidance counsellors. Pinchuk attributed the failing to a PR problem of our industry. Yes, there’s no doubt we fail to attract the best mechanical and technical minds into our industry, but I believe this has less to do with PR than with the way we educate our children … and more important, who we entrust with the responsibility to do this, the teachers. This is not a crisis confined to high schools. It begins at Kindergarten extends through the entire thirteen years of a child’s education.
Education Today
Education of our children prior to college falls solidly within the realm of females. Nationwide, well under one in five primary school teachers is male … and if your child’s school has a male on staff, how often is that person either the principal, vice principal, or the physical education teacher? Although the gender balance improves a little at the high school level, the overall stats come nowhere close to gender equity: Oregon (33%) and Kansas (31%) report the highest percentages of male teachers overall (primary and secondary) while Mississippi and Arkansas check in with just 18% (www.edutopia.org).
Traditionally, in the family and in the tribe, females with their genetic predisposition to nurture provided the emotional support to children. The male role was that providing, protecting and leadership. Within the family as children aged, girls learned from mothers, boys learned from fathers. As society matured into the age we live in, the roles of gender in both parenting and society became muddled. Can a couple of generations of feminism radically alter human nature?
Schools are first and foremost social environments. Never kid yourself that academic education is foremost in anyone’s mind, pupil or teacher. The female dominated society of the school sets its own standards. It seems that almost every day, a television or newspaper report surfaces of some 1st Grade boy being suspended from school for mimicking shooting one of his classmates with a gun fashioned from his fingers … or recently another, whose father was serving in the middle, for miming the throwing of a hand grenade. When I was growing up such acts were regarded as boyish behavior and no one gave it a moment's thought. Today, this type of rowdiness is interpreted differently by school disciplinary systems who ratchet up its severity ... and another confused youngster is victimized for the crime of merely being boyish by nature. According to Christina Hoff Sommers in her thoughtful book War against Boys, female teachers often confuse the rough and tumble of boyish play with pathological behavior.
The Teaching and Learning Environment
Yes, schools may be social environments, but teaching and learning do play a role. In this regard it should be noted that girls have always substantially outperformed boys in non-cognitive skills. Non-cognitive skills are primarily concerned with socialization and the top three would be eagerness, attentiveness, and the ability to strategize. Not coincidentally, it happens that those are the skills held in the highest regard by the corps of female teachers entrusted with evaluating academic performance. For three generations, boys have under-functioned academically at every level in both primary and secondary schools even though IQ testing consistently places them on par with their female coevals. In addition, it is of interest to note that when children are given non-teacher-based standardized tests, both genders perform equally. So how is it that educators are not asking themselves why such an alarming percentage of boys fail in our education system? To whom are they accountable to?
There is no doubt that many boys disengage from the classroom experience at an early age. Parents of kids of both genders will observe that boys and girls tend to learn in a different ways. Girls will more often want to understand a concept before setting a strategy for achieving a goal, whereas boys tend to be more apt to explore and do, first … and strive to understand the concept after. Perhaps in recognition of this fact, schools have established specialty programs that cater to very specific outcomes. But sadly, in the U.S. and Canada, almost every specialty school program has a female gender-bias, a fact that can only be explained by the corresponding bias for female teachers. Programs in modern dance and theater arts may fast-track a pathway to yet another liberal arts degree … but do little to service the workforce of the 21st century. And please don’t counter with the shop class elective still offered by many high schools … I have written articles on this subject in the past and I don’t want to extend the discussion here other than to say nine out of ten shop class programs function as holding stations for disruptive and dysfunctional students. Once relegated to shop class, these students have already failed and cede their plight to a male shop teacher whose primary objective is to keep his class under control.
Affirmative Action?
Feminists’ intent on promoting yet more gender-driven affirmative action often pose the argument that almost all Fortune 500 CEOs are male. This is really a non-issue. The fact is that boys finish the education process at the polar extremes of success: a handful of the highest achievers at one end versus millions of the worst failures at the other. These millions occupy a stratum of our society that are perennially unemployed, imprisoned, or performing the most basic level jobs.
According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book David and Goliath, the perception of functional level in the academic pecking order of the class plays a major role in student success. For instance, a student that achieves an initial B-grade average in a class predominated by students with average C-grades often excels and raises his/her level of attainment – while that same student placed in a class of high-level A-grade achievers becomes discouraged and at risk of drop out. This is significant because in our current school system, girls occupy the center ground of academic attainment and consequently do better at every level of education, no doubt aided by the fact that many of their male peers are shorted out of higher education by the failure of their primary and secondary school experience.
Role of Industry
I’m not suggesting that the gender bias in education can be corrected but it would be good see it properly identified and accommodated ... using syllabi that was more boy-friendly (ever take a look at your kid’s required-reading lists?) and an appreciation that males and females behave differently whether they are dogs, lion cubs, or humans, would be a good start. Most schoolteachers are hard-working and often expected to perform under difficult conditions. Politicians curry popularity by hitting on education budgets meaning that teachers are commonly underpaid and confronted with stretched resources and overcrowded classrooms. But if we truly want to fix our schools … and produce graduates that target careers in technical education rather than cede to it as a consolation, along with ‘rescuing’ some of the many who fail completely. Instead of complaining about the deteriorating quality of entry level applicants, industry must become more involved with what happens in our schools at every level. Leaving change to those already employed in education will not work, they are not required to see the big picture and are mostly resistant to change. It is up to industry. It is up to those who consider themselves leaders in industry to articulate the blunt fact that the current model of education is not providing the graduates required for a 21st century workforce … and that a failure to change, will cede our world technical leadership to those countries who better value, invest in, and manage education.
Some facts:
•U.S. world ranking (OECD) in Science: 12th
•U.S. world ranking (source OECD) in Math: 26th
•Estimated value to U.S. economy if all three rankings rose to the level of Finland the top-rated county: $103 trillion
I wrote a slightly different version of this article nearly ten years ago. Sadly, not much has changed.
Sean Bennett
(research references: U.S.A Today, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Malcolm Gladwell, Christina Hoff Sommers, and www.edutopia.org