I wonder if what drives the "sit still and be quiet" approach to education is the fact that our society values those kinds of jobs. If that's the case, there's an indirect way in which society favors women. Fertility differences play a big role in why the professional world devalues women, and that's a real thing, but it's also true that when you're pregnant, it is easier/safer to sit quietly and type than to bend over and lift. (that said, with a born baby/toddler, physical work is often easier as long as it's not dangerous. I can do laundry and dishes with my toddler tagging along more easily than I can write a paper with my toddler tagging along. But if I were an electrician or plumber I wouldn't want her to be present.)
"How would you expect the puberty-years of school to be different for both sexes, if school tracked development, instead of being fairly invariant across the years?"
As in, tracked development more holistically, not just checking off average milestones and accommodating an average difference between boys and girls?
Already in our usual system, high school is where the most gifted boys start pulling ahead of the girls in STEM. Mastering an intellectual challenge can channel and benefit from aggression, and between testosterone and girls' socialization to be less-aggressive people-pleasers "good enough at everything" (instead of focusing on what they're best at), girls will be at an unnecessary disadvantage if they haven't already banked talent development during their prepubertal years.
Schooling's job isn't just to educate the whole populace adequately, but to recognize special talent and prepare it. The trend to push calculus down to high school makes sense for that preparation. But it doesn't make sense for *everyone*, since that's not where everyone's talent and interest lies.
Schooling that really tracked children's individual development through high school would be far less homogenous, far more "tracked", and hopefully also more flexible in switching between tracks. Tracking would be skill-specific, not a blanket "is honors student or isn't". There would be more age-mixing, which requires its own caution. (One reason to educate youths by age rather than ability is to limit kids' aggression, whether physical, social, or sexual, to kids more their own size.)
Such a school sounds like heaven to me, with more room to develop both boys' and girls' talent. In particular, girls likely to go on to postgraduate education have more hope of successfully juggling that kind of career with less-delayed family formation. A guy who's done with postgraduate education at 30 is still reproductively "young". A gal is not, and this matters. A girl who wants to be a mathematician, who was capable of calculus at 12, and not taught it till her late teens, suffers more loss than guys who want to be mathematicians. Over a lifespan, guys' later development is balanced out (and then some, I think) by gals who need time for motherhood.
Is this ideal achievable on a mass scale? I'm pessimistic. But I can see little shoots of hope here and there, including in after-school services like Russian School of Mathematics and in how our very ordinary local public elementary has redesigned its accelerated classes.
As a mom of a young son and two young daughters and as a public high school teacher to both boys and girls, I can offer a wealth of anecdotes on this topic! First, my son was inadvertently red-shirted. He has a fall birthday. He completed kindergarten the first time in a state where the cut off made him young for his grade. Then we moved states and a new cut-off required him to repeat K as one of the older children. He learned to read in K the second time, not the first (the first also used the Teacher's College program, the second phonics, so there's another anecdotal data point in another educational debate). Socially I am glad he is in his current grade. He needed the additional time to develop better habits of self-regulation. That said--we are still investigating an ADHD diagnosis, which runs rampant through my family. He still has immature impulse control compared to his peers, even being older than most of them. So redshirting wasn't a magic fix.
Something that has been effective at helping him modulate his energy and behavior: wrestling. He took up the sport last year. He returns home exhausted and compliant! He also follows the clear directions and meets the high standards of his coaches. They don't mess around.
As a teacher--I came into public schools with a private school ethos that assumed the delights of learning and the joys of fertile intellectual exploration. I have had to adjust my methods to meet the realities of my teaching environment. I still try to provide my students an experience of the pleasures of curiosity and do always remember that they are people of value, regardless of their interest in my subject or performance in my classroom. The public school system (and let's face it, modern life in general) is not set up to reward those virtues--finding a way to prioritize them is always a challenge. And certain realities have to be met first: kids need to be fed, safe, and present in order to be educated. Prioritizing those goals can make others more challenging to achieve. (I'm thinking about bathroom hall passes and the like--annoyingly punitive to put into execution, but the state of affairs without them is chaotic and unpleasant for everyone in the school).
So, no grand thesis here. I do sometimes fantasize about enrolling my child in a Free School and seeing what happened--or teaching in one myself. But I also see the value in a project of education shared by the members of a community, whatever that may look like. And school-based education for elite boys was always dreadful, punitive, and seat-based, at least if Dickens and Hughes are to be believed. But they managed.
I'd love to see more schools, or neighborhood cooperatives, like the one Sally Thomas's son attended in England (which she's written about here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/education/boys-arent-the-problem). For older ages, I think all-boy schools or groups, where the young men have common hands-on projects (building, farming, gardening, smithing, etc.) alongside liberal arts studies, are encouraging as well. There's something hugely formative about hands-on, creative work in the context of "comradeship," especially for boys and young men, I think (and they ought to be places where boys can be with men whom they can truly look up to, as well).
I've found Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy to be immensely helpful for thinking through how best to raise boys in particular nowadays. It seems crucial to start out with the fact that every child is a person already, and that that personhood is a sacred thing. Every other of CM's principles grows from that fundamental one, and hence, so do her practices. I think part of what's so helpful about them for me is that they really take into account the whole person—body, mind, spirit—as well as the individual child. Hence her more-famous recommendation for every kid, ideally, to have six hours outside everyday until the age of six, as well as various suggestions and methods for cultivating not only a keen attention to, but also a relationship with the world—with place (from trees to village to country), with particular trees and rivers and creatures, with siblings and neighbors, with stories and songs and books (e.g., "Education is the science of relations"). She is all about setting a "wide and varied" feast before the child, not only of hands-on experiences (hence her warning against "twaddle"), but also of intellectual and aesthetic ones.
Here's one quote from CM I love:
"Children should have relations with earth and water, should run and leap, ride and swim, should establish the relation of maker to material in as many kinds as may be; should have dear and intimate relations with persons, through present intercourse, through tale or poem, picture or statue; through flint arrow-head or modern motor-car: beast and bird, herb and tree, they must have familiar acquaintance with. Other peoples and their languages must not be strange to them. Above all they should find that most Intimate and Highest of all relationships,—the fulfilment of their being."
I also love that Mason partially inspired the scouting movement! She assigned the first scouting text to her students at her teachers' college. The story is told of a general finding his son in a tree, and the boy's governess (a graduate of Mason's college) in another tree.
"What on earth are you doing up there?" cried the general.
"Oh, I am teaching him Scouting," replied the governess.
Both my brothers experienced school differently from how I did. I loved school, overall, but it was a challenge for both of them, despite being themselves very different (one more like Esau, one more like Jacob!), and I saw them most grow and mature when they found healthy mentors and arenas outside of school (including working alongside family and friends during the summers at my grandpa's farm). (I also think my dad's dictum, borrowed from Twain, to "not let school interfere with your education," was also a healthy mindset for all of us kids!) I often think about their experience (as well as that of my boy students) as I think through the upcoming challenges of raising my own son.
Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of built in physical activity. Adults need breaks to get up and move and I would expect that children need them even more. Why not allow boys (and girls) time to "blow off steam". It would also set them up for future physical activity and improve their long term health.
A little nervous at my first foray into this rather female space. Should I present credentials by saying that I have not only two sons, but five daughters? 8-)
I think school needs more recess--a lot more. It seems that there is less and less of it each year, and I think that this hurts boys more than girls (on average--of course there are always exceptions and relative outliers).
Also-this is harder to state correctly--most teachers and administrators are women, and they may be insufficiently tolerant of behavior that seems to them overly wild and violent, but is just the way boys do things. I'm scared to say "boys will be boys," because sometimes that's a cover for truly sub-human behavior. But there are kinds of shouting and shoving that seem very objectionable to your average middle-aged woman--especially one who's been trained to say "Use your words! Use your inside voice"--but which are, in fact, just fine. If the dads were there, they would intervene less (while monitoring to make sure it wasn't getting out of hand.)
I wonder to what extent this is a class thing. Are wild boys bothersome to middle-aged women in general, or to *middle class* middle-aged women?
Of course I don't mean any of these possible generalizations to hold universally. Some women are great at handling boys. I'm just wondering about overall averages.
Finally: School problems often have non-school problems behind them. Boys need more recess and vigorous play at school, but they also (I believe) need more of it after school, including unsupervised or minimally supervised activity--i.e., not activities run by adults, but just running around in mobs, beating on trees with sticks and so on. This does carry risks, obviously, but squelching it also carries risks.
These are fascinating questions but I don't know enough to answer them intelligently. I do wonder, though, about historical approaches. Theoretically child brain development has been the same for a long time, right, so how did educators in centuries past accommodate boys' and girls' development? Or is this not a useful apples-to-apples question because of the historical devaluation of education for girls in the first place?
As a teacher, I say… smaller class sizes! It’s so much easier to plan creative, interactive activities when you aren’t trying to keep 30+ kids on track. You can pause and follow the threads of seemingly “unrelated” questions that are what the students actually want to know… you can have more in-depth conversations… you can customize what you are doing to that specific group… and there is actually enough physical room in the classroom, so that you don’t have to try to keep everyone in their seat! Smaller class sizes mean less time grading, too, so you have more time (and brain space!) to plan better lessons. I personally think that reducing class sizes is one of the best ways we could improve education, for both boys and girls.
I'm a school psychologist, and as soon as I found myself with a son began to worry about this. I see teachers and parents all of the time stigmatize boys who are just a little squirrely or impulsive in the younger grades. I do think that if we paid and trained teachers better, with the skills and resources to teach more flexible (Universal Design for Learning is one mode of this), classrooms would be better places not only to be a boy but to be disabled, neurodivergent, an EL, etc. I've seen it done well, it can be done. Like most things in education, I appreciate all of the drastic, innovative new ideas, but almost all education-related problems would be mostly solved if we treated teachers like legit professionals.
My five year old son *loves* his public school. He loves order and structure and is thrilled to be treated as a 'big kid'. That said, he's a March birthday, and at least from what I've read redshirting is most strongly recommended for the June - September crowd where they *just* turned five. I think redshirting makes a lot of sense for kids (esp. boys) in those months.
That said, as another commenter said - MORE PLAY! There are multitudes of excellent studies that the way most US public schools function at every level is outdated and goes against what we *know* about education. This includes the necessity of more play in the early years, more social skills emphasis in middle school, more team and project based work in high school. Redshirting is mostly just a bandaid to accommodate outdated pedagogy.
And its not just pedagogy that's the problem! It's our whole culture around education. I'm a big fan of the Finnish model, but as many people have pointed out on this topic, you can't just transfer the Finnish approach to the US because we have fundamental ideological differences in how we approach education. In Finland, excellent education is a *right*, in the US, it's a commodity. In Finland, teachers are revered, in the US, ridiculed (with pay to match).
So, what would it look like to redefine our social contract around education? I think we need a change of heart - people to truly understand in their bones that the poorest kid deserves the same education as the richest kid. Financial background should not determine access to high quality instruction. And then we need to stop funding schools based on the property taxes of their surrounding neighborhoods and stop relying on wealthy PTAs to elevate the experience of some kids over others. Here's a good article on those efforts here in Minnesota: https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-schools-examine-equity-in-fundraising/600072813/
But back to the point about boys/girls/differences/etc. I'm particularly wary of any approach that says single sex tracks are the way to go. Boys and girls should learn to work together, respect one another, and see each other as unique and wonderful individuals from the start. If a school can't do that, it probably can't provide quality education for kids with disabilities, kids with diverse backgrounds, kids with other particular needs. And that's also a problem.
My little brother is attending school in Slovenia, where education is split into 13 grades instead of 12 (with students graduating at 19 instead of 18 years old). From what I understand, what would usually be taught in first grade is split over the first two years, and the last year of school is fairly unstructured and focused on personal projects. For students his age (2nd grade), instruction ends at 1 PM, with optional after-school activities that are usually focused on outdoor play. Formal instruction also seems to include activities such as swimming lessons and plenty of field trips (including one to a local WINERY--not sure what the 2nd graders were supposed to be doing there!!!). In effect, they have redshirted everyone.
The part of the Atlantic article that I am most skeptical about is the claim that boys should, as a matter of normalcy, be in a school class with girls a year younger than them. It doesn't seem tested against alternatives like the one I mention above, and I do have some concerns about classroom gender dynamics for younger children if every boy was older, bigger, and stronger than every girl.
I don’t think the modern public school actually is a place where peace and silence are expected. The small group organization so popular among modern teacher prep programs makes public schools classrooms loud, controlled (if the teacher is capable) chaos. Natalie Wexler covered this in depth.
Given that boys were not behind in school in, say, the 1950s when schools were much MORE lecture oriented, I think blaming everything on “sit still” may be missing things.
I remember reading a study in the NEJM where the authors found a significant difference in ADHD diagnosis/treatment between children with August birthdays vs September birthdays in states where the cutoff was Sept 1. It reminds me of how mothers who got longer maternity leaves reported lower rates of postpartum depression - the immediate environment (and not only genes + past environments) really matters in health! For some children, the intervention for attention/hyperactivity symptoms might be pharmacological, whereas for others it might be allowing them a few more months for their brains to “catch up.” I’d like to see more mixed-age classrooms, where the differences among children in the same “grade” might be less stark.
For a while, I'd heard redshirting discussed in a way that sounded selfish and sinister, a plot to advantage boys in sports. My son was adopted from China and did OK in junior kindergarten, but his teacher took us aside to discuss having him repeat it as an option. I'm glad we did. He's now in 3rd grade, getting the work, and doing well socially, and I do think he would've been more wobbly had he proceeded. We had the choice to do it--and not everyone does. We don't get a do-over to see what would've actually happened if he had moved ahead....
Meanwhile, kindergarten is the new first grade, except that all the sitting work is developmentally inappropriate. Kids should still be learning to sit in circles, listen to adults, and play with each other rather than clocking each other over the head at 5! everyone needs more movement during the day and more exercise (she writes from her computer).
"A model of school where students sit quietly for nearly the entire day isn’t great for anyone, but it’s much harder for boys than for girls."
I'm not sure this is universally true, or at least I think we need to evaluate how easy it is for boys and girls to confirm to a desired behaviour such as sitting still in the context of the incentives and systems of control and discipline that exist to create that behaviour. That is, I think it's less that it's hard for boys to sit quietly per se, and more that it's hard to for boys to sit quietly in the feminised model of school we created as a reaction to the brutal discipline of the past. (It is striking that sport is the one subject where our schools seem to be failing girls rather than boys.)
Ultimately I am sceptical of our ability to create a model of school that is simultaneously effective for boys and for girls.
Reeves was on Derek Thompson's podcast and I thought it was a really good back and forth that teased out a bit of nuance that hasn't been quite as clear in the articles I've read:
I've been thinking about this all a lot lately, as my son just started kindergarten. He's just barely 5, and he definitely needs the intellectual stimulation of school vs. daycare but he's also pretty clearly not as well developed in impulse control or even motor skills as I would have preferred before sending him in. I don't think sending him to another year of daycare would have been a good idea, and since we both work full time it doesn't feel like there were any other options unless one of us had been able to have at least part-time at home to coordinate things. I think in the end he'll be fine, but it does feel like a third way would have ended up being better for everyone...
I wonder if what drives the "sit still and be quiet" approach to education is the fact that our society values those kinds of jobs. If that's the case, there's an indirect way in which society favors women. Fertility differences play a big role in why the professional world devalues women, and that's a real thing, but it's also true that when you're pregnant, it is easier/safer to sit quietly and type than to bend over and lift. (that said, with a born baby/toddler, physical work is often easier as long as it's not dangerous. I can do laundry and dishes with my toddler tagging along more easily than I can write a paper with my toddler tagging along. But if I were an electrician or plumber I wouldn't want her to be present.)
"How would you expect the puberty-years of school to be different for both sexes, if school tracked development, instead of being fairly invariant across the years?"
As in, tracked development more holistically, not just checking off average milestones and accommodating an average difference between boys and girls?
Already in our usual system, high school is where the most gifted boys start pulling ahead of the girls in STEM. Mastering an intellectual challenge can channel and benefit from aggression, and between testosterone and girls' socialization to be less-aggressive people-pleasers "good enough at everything" (instead of focusing on what they're best at), girls will be at an unnecessary disadvantage if they haven't already banked talent development during their prepubertal years.
Schooling's job isn't just to educate the whole populace adequately, but to recognize special talent and prepare it. The trend to push calculus down to high school makes sense for that preparation. But it doesn't make sense for *everyone*, since that's not where everyone's talent and interest lies.
Schooling that really tracked children's individual development through high school would be far less homogenous, far more "tracked", and hopefully also more flexible in switching between tracks. Tracking would be skill-specific, not a blanket "is honors student or isn't". There would be more age-mixing, which requires its own caution. (One reason to educate youths by age rather than ability is to limit kids' aggression, whether physical, social, or sexual, to kids more their own size.)
Such a school sounds like heaven to me, with more room to develop both boys' and girls' talent. In particular, girls likely to go on to postgraduate education have more hope of successfully juggling that kind of career with less-delayed family formation. A guy who's done with postgraduate education at 30 is still reproductively "young". A gal is not, and this matters. A girl who wants to be a mathematician, who was capable of calculus at 12, and not taught it till her late teens, suffers more loss than guys who want to be mathematicians. Over a lifespan, guys' later development is balanced out (and then some, I think) by gals who need time for motherhood.
Is this ideal achievable on a mass scale? I'm pessimistic. But I can see little shoots of hope here and there, including in after-school services like Russian School of Mathematics and in how our very ordinary local public elementary has redesigned its accelerated classes.
As a mom of a young son and two young daughters and as a public high school teacher to both boys and girls, I can offer a wealth of anecdotes on this topic! First, my son was inadvertently red-shirted. He has a fall birthday. He completed kindergarten the first time in a state where the cut off made him young for his grade. Then we moved states and a new cut-off required him to repeat K as one of the older children. He learned to read in K the second time, not the first (the first also used the Teacher's College program, the second phonics, so there's another anecdotal data point in another educational debate). Socially I am glad he is in his current grade. He needed the additional time to develop better habits of self-regulation. That said--we are still investigating an ADHD diagnosis, which runs rampant through my family. He still has immature impulse control compared to his peers, even being older than most of them. So redshirting wasn't a magic fix.
Something that has been effective at helping him modulate his energy and behavior: wrestling. He took up the sport last year. He returns home exhausted and compliant! He also follows the clear directions and meets the high standards of his coaches. They don't mess around.
As a teacher--I came into public schools with a private school ethos that assumed the delights of learning and the joys of fertile intellectual exploration. I have had to adjust my methods to meet the realities of my teaching environment. I still try to provide my students an experience of the pleasures of curiosity and do always remember that they are people of value, regardless of their interest in my subject or performance in my classroom. The public school system (and let's face it, modern life in general) is not set up to reward those virtues--finding a way to prioritize them is always a challenge. And certain realities have to be met first: kids need to be fed, safe, and present in order to be educated. Prioritizing those goals can make others more challenging to achieve. (I'm thinking about bathroom hall passes and the like--annoyingly punitive to put into execution, but the state of affairs without them is chaotic and unpleasant for everyone in the school).
So, no grand thesis here. I do sometimes fantasize about enrolling my child in a Free School and seeing what happened--or teaching in one myself. But I also see the value in a project of education shared by the members of a community, whatever that may look like. And school-based education for elite boys was always dreadful, punitive, and seat-based, at least if Dickens and Hughes are to be believed. But they managed.
I'd love to see more schools, or neighborhood cooperatives, like the one Sally Thomas's son attended in England (which she's written about here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/education/boys-arent-the-problem). For older ages, I think all-boy schools or groups, where the young men have common hands-on projects (building, farming, gardening, smithing, etc.) alongside liberal arts studies, are encouraging as well. There's something hugely formative about hands-on, creative work in the context of "comradeship," especially for boys and young men, I think (and they ought to be places where boys can be with men whom they can truly look up to, as well).
I've found Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy to be immensely helpful for thinking through how best to raise boys in particular nowadays. It seems crucial to start out with the fact that every child is a person already, and that that personhood is a sacred thing. Every other of CM's principles grows from that fundamental one, and hence, so do her practices. I think part of what's so helpful about them for me is that they really take into account the whole person—body, mind, spirit—as well as the individual child. Hence her more-famous recommendation for every kid, ideally, to have six hours outside everyday until the age of six, as well as various suggestions and methods for cultivating not only a keen attention to, but also a relationship with the world—with place (from trees to village to country), with particular trees and rivers and creatures, with siblings and neighbors, with stories and songs and books (e.g., "Education is the science of relations"). She is all about setting a "wide and varied" feast before the child, not only of hands-on experiences (hence her warning against "twaddle"), but also of intellectual and aesthetic ones.
Here's one quote from CM I love:
"Children should have relations with earth and water, should run and leap, ride and swim, should establish the relation of maker to material in as many kinds as may be; should have dear and intimate relations with persons, through present intercourse, through tale or poem, picture or statue; through flint arrow-head or modern motor-car: beast and bird, herb and tree, they must have familiar acquaintance with. Other peoples and their languages must not be strange to them. Above all they should find that most Intimate and Highest of all relationships,—the fulfilment of their being."
I also love that Mason partially inspired the scouting movement! She assigned the first scouting text to her students at her teachers' college. The story is told of a general finding his son in a tree, and the boy's governess (a graduate of Mason's college) in another tree.
"What on earth are you doing up there?" cried the general.
"Oh, I am teaching him Scouting," replied the governess.
Both my brothers experienced school differently from how I did. I loved school, overall, but it was a challenge for both of them, despite being themselves very different (one more like Esau, one more like Jacob!), and I saw them most grow and mature when they found healthy mentors and arenas outside of school (including working alongside family and friends during the summers at my grandpa's farm). (I also think my dad's dictum, borrowed from Twain, to "not let school interfere with your education," was also a healthy mindset for all of us kids!) I often think about their experience (as well as that of my boy students) as I think through the upcoming challenges of raising my own son.
Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of built in physical activity. Adults need breaks to get up and move and I would expect that children need them even more. Why not allow boys (and girls) time to "blow off steam". It would also set them up for future physical activity and improve their long term health.
A little nervous at my first foray into this rather female space. Should I present credentials by saying that I have not only two sons, but five daughters? 8-)
I think school needs more recess--a lot more. It seems that there is less and less of it each year, and I think that this hurts boys more than girls (on average--of course there are always exceptions and relative outliers).
Also-this is harder to state correctly--most teachers and administrators are women, and they may be insufficiently tolerant of behavior that seems to them overly wild and violent, but is just the way boys do things. I'm scared to say "boys will be boys," because sometimes that's a cover for truly sub-human behavior. But there are kinds of shouting and shoving that seem very objectionable to your average middle-aged woman--especially one who's been trained to say "Use your words! Use your inside voice"--but which are, in fact, just fine. If the dads were there, they would intervene less (while monitoring to make sure it wasn't getting out of hand.)
I wonder to what extent this is a class thing. Are wild boys bothersome to middle-aged women in general, or to *middle class* middle-aged women?
Of course I don't mean any of these possible generalizations to hold universally. Some women are great at handling boys. I'm just wondering about overall averages.
Finally: School problems often have non-school problems behind them. Boys need more recess and vigorous play at school, but they also (I believe) need more of it after school, including unsupervised or minimally supervised activity--i.e., not activities run by adults, but just running around in mobs, beating on trees with sticks and so on. This does carry risks, obviously, but squelching it also carries risks.
These are fascinating questions but I don't know enough to answer them intelligently. I do wonder, though, about historical approaches. Theoretically child brain development has been the same for a long time, right, so how did educators in centuries past accommodate boys' and girls' development? Or is this not a useful apples-to-apples question because of the historical devaluation of education for girls in the first place?
As a teacher, I say… smaller class sizes! It’s so much easier to plan creative, interactive activities when you aren’t trying to keep 30+ kids on track. You can pause and follow the threads of seemingly “unrelated” questions that are what the students actually want to know… you can have more in-depth conversations… you can customize what you are doing to that specific group… and there is actually enough physical room in the classroom, so that you don’t have to try to keep everyone in their seat! Smaller class sizes mean less time grading, too, so you have more time (and brain space!) to plan better lessons. I personally think that reducing class sizes is one of the best ways we could improve education, for both boys and girls.
I'm a school psychologist, and as soon as I found myself with a son began to worry about this. I see teachers and parents all of the time stigmatize boys who are just a little squirrely or impulsive in the younger grades. I do think that if we paid and trained teachers better, with the skills and resources to teach more flexible (Universal Design for Learning is one mode of this), classrooms would be better places not only to be a boy but to be disabled, neurodivergent, an EL, etc. I've seen it done well, it can be done. Like most things in education, I appreciate all of the drastic, innovative new ideas, but almost all education-related problems would be mostly solved if we treated teachers like legit professionals.
My five year old son *loves* his public school. He loves order and structure and is thrilled to be treated as a 'big kid'. That said, he's a March birthday, and at least from what I've read redshirting is most strongly recommended for the June - September crowd where they *just* turned five. I think redshirting makes a lot of sense for kids (esp. boys) in those months.
That said, as another commenter said - MORE PLAY! There are multitudes of excellent studies that the way most US public schools function at every level is outdated and goes against what we *know* about education. This includes the necessity of more play in the early years, more social skills emphasis in middle school, more team and project based work in high school. Redshirting is mostly just a bandaid to accommodate outdated pedagogy.
And its not just pedagogy that's the problem! It's our whole culture around education. I'm a big fan of the Finnish model, but as many people have pointed out on this topic, you can't just transfer the Finnish approach to the US because we have fundamental ideological differences in how we approach education. In Finland, excellent education is a *right*, in the US, it's a commodity. In Finland, teachers are revered, in the US, ridiculed (with pay to match).
Here's a good read on that topic: https://bigthink.com/the-present/finland-education-system/
So, what would it look like to redefine our social contract around education? I think we need a change of heart - people to truly understand in their bones that the poorest kid deserves the same education as the richest kid. Financial background should not determine access to high quality instruction. And then we need to stop funding schools based on the property taxes of their surrounding neighborhoods and stop relying on wealthy PTAs to elevate the experience of some kids over others. Here's a good article on those efforts here in Minnesota: https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-schools-examine-equity-in-fundraising/600072813/
But back to the point about boys/girls/differences/etc. I'm particularly wary of any approach that says single sex tracks are the way to go. Boys and girls should learn to work together, respect one another, and see each other as unique and wonderful individuals from the start. If a school can't do that, it probably can't provide quality education for kids with disabilities, kids with diverse backgrounds, kids with other particular needs. And that's also a problem.
My little brother is attending school in Slovenia, where education is split into 13 grades instead of 12 (with students graduating at 19 instead of 18 years old). From what I understand, what would usually be taught in first grade is split over the first two years, and the last year of school is fairly unstructured and focused on personal projects. For students his age (2nd grade), instruction ends at 1 PM, with optional after-school activities that are usually focused on outdoor play. Formal instruction also seems to include activities such as swimming lessons and plenty of field trips (including one to a local WINERY--not sure what the 2nd graders were supposed to be doing there!!!). In effect, they have redshirted everyone.
The part of the Atlantic article that I am most skeptical about is the claim that boys should, as a matter of normalcy, be in a school class with girls a year younger than them. It doesn't seem tested against alternatives like the one I mention above, and I do have some concerns about classroom gender dynamics for younger children if every boy was older, bigger, and stronger than every girl.
I don’t think the modern public school actually is a place where peace and silence are expected. The small group organization so popular among modern teacher prep programs makes public schools classrooms loud, controlled (if the teacher is capable) chaos. Natalie Wexler covered this in depth.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2022/07/18/elementary-classrooms-are-too-noisy-for-kids-to-learn/?sh=424665bb3c60
Given that boys were not behind in school in, say, the 1950s when schools were much MORE lecture oriented, I think blaming everything on “sit still” may be missing things.
I remember reading a study in the NEJM where the authors found a significant difference in ADHD diagnosis/treatment between children with August birthdays vs September birthdays in states where the cutoff was Sept 1. It reminds me of how mothers who got longer maternity leaves reported lower rates of postpartum depression - the immediate environment (and not only genes + past environments) really matters in health! For some children, the intervention for attention/hyperactivity symptoms might be pharmacological, whereas for others it might be allowing them a few more months for their brains to “catch up.” I’d like to see more mixed-age classrooms, where the differences among children in the same “grade” might be less stark.
For a while, I'd heard redshirting discussed in a way that sounded selfish and sinister, a plot to advantage boys in sports. My son was adopted from China and did OK in junior kindergarten, but his teacher took us aside to discuss having him repeat it as an option. I'm glad we did. He's now in 3rd grade, getting the work, and doing well socially, and I do think he would've been more wobbly had he proceeded. We had the choice to do it--and not everyone does. We don't get a do-over to see what would've actually happened if he had moved ahead....
Meanwhile, kindergarten is the new first grade, except that all the sitting work is developmentally inappropriate. Kids should still be learning to sit in circles, listen to adults, and play with each other rather than clocking each other over the head at 5! everyone needs more movement during the day and more exercise (she writes from her computer).
"A model of school where students sit quietly for nearly the entire day isn’t great for anyone, but it’s much harder for boys than for girls."
I'm not sure this is universally true, or at least I think we need to evaluate how easy it is for boys and girls to confirm to a desired behaviour such as sitting still in the context of the incentives and systems of control and discipline that exist to create that behaviour. That is, I think it's less that it's hard for boys to sit quietly per se, and more that it's hard to for boys to sit quietly in the feminised model of school we created as a reaction to the brutal discipline of the past. (It is striking that sport is the one subject where our schools seem to be failing girls rather than boys.)
Ultimately I am sceptical of our ability to create a model of school that is simultaneously effective for boys and for girls.
Reeves was on Derek Thompson's podcast and I thought it was a really good back and forth that teased out a bit of nuance that hasn't been quite as clear in the articles I've read:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-america-has-a-crisis-of-masculinity/id1594471023?i=1000580412547
I've been thinking about this all a lot lately, as my son just started kindergarten. He's just barely 5, and he definitely needs the intellectual stimulation of school vs. daycare but he's also pretty clearly not as well developed in impulse control or even motor skills as I would have preferred before sending him in. I don't think sending him to another year of daycare would have been a good idea, and since we both work full time it doesn't feel like there were any other options unless one of us had been able to have at least part-time at home to coordinate things. I think in the end he'll be fine, but it does feel like a third way would have ended up being better for everyone...