Lost boys
As girls achieve more, boys seem to be falling behind. Where are we failing them?
By Cindy Yurth
Tséyi' Bureau
CHINLE, Dec. 1, 2011
It's striking to even the most cursory reader of the Navajo Times. Week after week in the C section, the stories about career achievement, awards, scholarships and advanced degrees, seem to be about women and girls.
Sixty percent of last year's Navajo Nation scholarships went to female students, along with the majority of the coveted Gates Millennium grants.
Sixty-eight percent of Diné College students are female.
This isn't just a problem on the Navajo Nation. Across the industrialized world within the past generation, women are outperforming men in overall academics, even closing the gap that used to favor men in mathematics and the hard sciences.
So where are we losing the boys?
"Statistically, we're losing males at grade two," said Scott Trowbridge, a teacher in Edventures, an alternative program for high school kids in danger of dropping out of regular school. "That's when they start tuning out."
While Trowbridge's class of 15 is about evenly divided between girls and boys, alternative programs around the country tend to be about 90 percent male. So engaging the boys is something Trowbridge has thought a lot about.
"Education is set up to favor girls," he said. "We sit in a social group and talk about abstract things."
Boys tend to better at psychomotor skills (basically, thinking and moving their bodies at the same time) - but outside of PE class and possibly shop, kids don't get to do a lot of that in school.
"Think about it," Trowbridge said. "No place else in the world besides school do you have to sit still for eight hours and take notes. It's an artificial environment."
What boys need - in fact what both sexes need, according to Trowbridge - is less emphasis on the books and more emphasis on "affective" skills - learning to get along with other people and staying in touch with one's own emotions.
"Ask any CEO what they're looking for and they'll tell you, 'Someone who can work as part of a team,'" Trowbridge said. "And yet, nobody in education ever talks about that. It's the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room."
Use both sides of brain
Trowbridge is a young bilagaana and Anthony Lee is a middle-aged Navajo medicine man, but they sound a lot alike.
Lee doesn't think underachieving boys are a product of some kind of psychic shift in the universe toward female energy, which is what one might expect a medicine man to say.
He agrees with Trowbridge that Western education favors females.
"Navajos have always known about the left and right sides of the brain and what they do," he said. "Western education does not involve communication between the right and left brains."
Lee - who knows a little about Western education, having a doctorate and being a former college professor - says he's increasingly convinced the only true education is hands-on.
Trowbridge couldn't agree more.
"Let the kids do stuff, let them build things," he said. "The only place that happens is in CTE (career and technical education), and they're constantly cutting CTE."
Russell Goodluck, a Chinle High grad now majoring in music at Mesa Community College, thinks Navajo culture may be partly to blame for the gender gap, at least on the Navajo Nation.
"Navajo parents have much higher expectations for girls than they do for boys," he said. "That's definitely how it was in my family."
The reason, Goodluck believes, is that traditionally, girls remain part of their birth family while boys marry into another family and are expected to contribute most of their energy and resources to their in-laws.
"I know my grandparents were always telling me, 'some day you'll move away and be part of your wife's family,'" Goodluck said.
Subconsciously, parents may invest more in girls because they have a share in the returns.
Chinle High School Principal Doug Clauschee grew up in Chinle about the time the tables were turning and girls started outperforming boys. He agrees with Lee and Trowbridge that changing the education system might help, but it's not likely to happen as long as No Child Left Behind, with its rigorous requirements for "core" skills like math and reading, is in effect.
Clauschee thinks the root of most boys' troubles is the decline of the Navajo family.
"Some of these kids have no male role models at home - none," he said. "In our culture, the uncles used to fill that role of mentor and confidante, but now most guys are so busy with their jobs and their own kids, they don't pay much attention to their nephews."
Role models
Chinle High is fortunate, Clauschee said, to have men like Trowbridge, cross-country coach Shaun Martin and football coach Tim Su'e Su'e Liufau as surrogate uncles.
"Those guys really listen to the boys and help them along," he said.
But he hears other male teachers complaining that their male students come to them with family problems they feel ill-equipped to solve.
"They say, 'I'm not a counselor, I can't deal with this,'" he said. "But we as male educators may be all that kid has got. We have to step up and do our best for them."
All the men interviewed also said the boys that are foundering tend to be the ones without a spiritual foothold - but separation of church and state precludes the schools filling that void.
Edventures used to offer a voluntary sweat lodge ceremony to its students, but backed off over fears it may violate the program's secular paradigm, Trowbridge said.
"The kids really liked it," Trowbridge said. "They would write in their journals about it."
Lee said the male puberty ceremony is seldom practiced any more, and that both the male and female puberty rites have become so "watered down" they're practically meaningless.
"How I was taught, you had to run a considerable distance with a mouthful of water, and not swallow it or spit it out until you got back to where the medicine man was standing," he said. "Nobody does that any more. Most kids these days couldn't do it."
Clauschee said he has heard some teen males say they wanted a ceremony, but couldn't find any male relatives willing to put one on for them.
"We're trying to get our boys to be men, and there's a lot of grown-up men out there who are still boys," he said. "Who are they supposed to learn from?"
But there's also a broader, societal force at work, the principal believes. At one time, everyone agreed on what it meant to be a man. But these days, with women working shoulder-to-shoulder with men, becoming a presence in the boardroom, the sciences and even the military, it may be hard for boys to see where they fit in.
"I think we as a society have to decide what it means to be a man today, what we expect of our men," he said. "If we can't do that, then we can't blame boys for drifting."