I’m going to attempt to square some of your (very interesting) claims with some work I’m currently doing. I hope it’s fruitful for the both of us. Unlike plenty of other contemporary feminists, Luce Irigaray works to maintain sexual difference. (This is in stark opposition to, for example, Judith Butler who calls into question biological difference. Social (and socially-constructed) gender is her focus. And this is in keeping with lots of contemporary work in feminism.) Irigaray asks us to consider the following in order to work out how sex (indeed, biology!) might determine the structuring of our subjectivity: (I’m taking this from her excellent essay “A Two-Subject Culture” in a collection called democracy begins between two.) “-being born of the same gender or of a different gender from one’s own: being the daughter of a mother or the son of a mother;
-whether or not one can conceive a living being in one’s own body;
-whether one procreates within oneself or outside oneself;
-whether one can nourish another living being from one’s own body or only through one’s own labour.
Events of this kind, which are differently organized in the life of a woman or of a man, create two identities, two ways of looking at the world, which cannot be reduced to one.”
Although Irigaray is responding to contemporary feminism, her work has serious repercussion for the sort of thing you’re working on. If young girls and women can literally and figuratively conceive other living beings in their own bodies, they’re radically capable of being-for-an-other in ways that young men are not. (This, I suspect, is part of what we mean when we say that young men are not emotionally mature. Though there’s certainly more to it.) As such, young women privilege intersubjective relations and succeed in environments (read: school) where young men struggle. To put it crudely, young women are able, then, to “read” others, to be whatever an other (teachers, fellow students) may need them to be, to nourish wholly other things (ideas, equations, relationships with authorities) within their own bodies. Young men can’t (yet) do this. I think plenty of men learn what it means to be-for-an-other (when they have children, when they enter into a true relationship, when they’re called on to exist, quite literally, for something other than themselves), but until they do, they cannot succeed in an environment that requires this of them. Attention span has something to do with this. To pay close attention to something (anything) else is to be-for-it. You give yourself over to it. You allow yourself to be held captive by it. If you are uncomfortable doing this, or have little practice with it unless it’s an object of your attention that you’ve chosen, you’ll likely do poorly in school. I’ve just begun thinking this out here, and I recognize that this does not yet address why it is that young men succeeded in school in the past (in fact, it was created for them, as we all know).

I think you’re on to something with “milennials” (I mean the word and the concept)–we are nothing but products of our world, and what we call modern technology has of course radically shaped us. But I also think there’s something important happening in Irigaray’s assessment of what shapes our subjectivity. The bizarre irony here is that a system that was created FOR men and young men, BY men, has somehow failed to succeed for them.

Thoughts?

Cheers.

I graduated from a University 11 yrs ago and it was the case then. Not all classes, but a VERY large portion. My degree program was cut to make room for a lecture hall with over 300 seats.

This was pre-internet, and universities are still paying for those kind of outdated classrooms. It will be years before they catch up, if they ever do. It isn’t just the Universities doing this, it’s in middle schools and high schools too, just on a smaller scale.

I have one teenager who spends most of her time on the internet. Her skills, at age 14, already far surpass mine. This IS the future and the now.

Sitting in a classroom is not a child’s job, as parents like to say. It’s a holding place, to keep them from being in the workforce. This thinking is way outdated, and a waste of unused and untapped, creative, young energy!

Obviously you are not the only person thinking about these important issues. You might enjoy a white paper I wrote this summer that explores some of these issues. References to other studies are included. I just got the PDF copy up on my site today:

http://es21c.okstate.edu/resources/SecondMillenium.pdf

#3 – Max, you raise some very valid and powerful points. I think they’re definitely an issue that is having an impact, but that it’s one of several major factors, all pushing young males in the same direction.

#4 – Whitney, if you look at your average class length which I’d put at about 115 minutes for a T/TH class usually less than 10 minutes is open/dedicated to Q&A. That’s less than 9% of the total class period. For obvious reasons, the smaller the class the higher the degree of student teacher interaction. Unfortunately, brick and mortar universities typically rely on 200-500 person classes for a lot of their fundamental coursework and 60-150 person classes for intermediate coursework. The size, organizational structure, and social pressure not to look stupid in these larger classes result in minimal class participation, and greatly reduced Q&A/interactive elements.

You’re right about smaller class size, but even those can be improved upon. I know I got my best grades in what should have been my more difficult classes while getting significantly poorer grades in large, auditorium styled classrooms.

Something like 70% of University students have laptops. More and more of those are bringing them to class. You can ban the machines, you can yell at the students, or you can utilize what would otherwise be a distraction and use it to engage the students. Allow them to post real time chat questions, allow them to post and research other relevant side data. What if students were able to do real time research while listening/watching the lecture and use that to answer their own questions – enrich the material the professor was teaching?

I’ll never forget my 9:15 freshman economics class. We were in a basement auditorium with an elderly professor who had written the book and was no doubt a brilliant business mind. Despite it all, 5 minutes into the 400 person class the lights dimmed, the powerpoint went up and he started reading. By 10 minutes into the class 1/4 of the class had dozed off. By 15 minutes 2/4 were gone and by 30 minutes into the class a good 3/4 of the class was out. It wasn’t because people didn’t care. They did, hell they came to class. It was because the experience was so miserable, so off base, staying awake was nearly impossible.

As far as how do we fix it? I’m not 100% sure right now. Some of the technology exists, but most does not, in large part because we have to re-frame our view of the system and acknowledge it’s deficiencies before we can truly work to correct them.

I am aware of a few projects looking at similar problems. Unfortunately, all of the information I have about those projects is strictly confidential.

For my part, I’m currently working through my company – FusionVirtual – on a virtual world/remote conferencing solution which I believe will revolutionize the way online classes, collaboration, homework and lectures are carried out. That said, the project won’t do much for actual B&M education and is currently in the conceptual stage (currently working on locating a gaming studio or remote conferencing company to develop it).

Simply put though, there’s an opportunity here for observation and innovation. The difficulty won’t be creating the technology – the market will take care of that, the trick is realizing and acknowledging the potential and that there’s a need.

I guess I’m still unclear on what exactly you’d like to see done. In both this post and the last, you’ve only made vague suggestions to use “21st century technology” in the classroom, but how? What is a “multi-level delivery system,” in the context of education?

This distinction is paramount to understanding why so many young men are socially retarded entering higher institutions of learning. While most females already have a biological advantage via puberty at that age–that is, girls tend to mature faster than boys in their teenage years–many girls entering college have a stronger family connection than their male counterparts. This often leads to an overall improvement in emotional maturity, which can lend itself to greater intellectual maturity as a result.

In almost all custody cases, the mother winds up with the children. When you factor that nearly 50% of marriages end in divorce, that leaves a gross disproportion between the number of boys growing up without fathers vs. the number of daughters growing up without mothers.

As a young man, how do you learn how to be a man without a strong, male role model? How can you measure up when there is no one to measure up to?

So, what happens as a result? Why, escapism, of course, which can be in the form of video games or other types of activities. Gangs, sports, bands, etc. In their desperate search for a role model, oftentimes young men will latch onto anyone, no matter how trivial the personality, in the hope of gaining some kind of identity, some sense of belonging.

Mothers are great, of course, but it’s not quite the same in the long run. The truth is the young men of the Millenial Generation are growing up stunted, malnourished, mistreated, abandoned, and alone, by the legions.

Pop culture likes to portray men as simplistic, idiotic sexbots. But men are actually quite complex, and require a greater delicacy in their upbringing. Get the programming wrong, and you have a psychopath. Get the programming right, really right, and you’ve got your self a world class citizen.

With their programming screwed up, is it any wonder so many young men look at college and wonder “Why bother?”

Based upon real-life experience and while garnering 2 four-year and one two-year degree with an accumulated GPA of 3.9 our of 4.0.