Barely able to write their names in the dirt with a stick

One of the areas where boys are falling behind is in their verbal skills.

And this is causing them to fall behind everywhere else, because you can't get very far in school, or in life, if you can't express a complex thought.

You have to be able to read and write well.

Steve Israel's article in the Sunday Record looks at this problem, but he accepts some contentions from one of his sources, anthropologist Helen Fisher, that I disagree with, hotly.

Think of it this way: Centuries ago, a man went out with a rock to slay a buffalo. He had to develop the physical skill to judge the distance between him and the animal. He had to learn to focus to kill the beast with one blow. This is what men did for thousands of years. They learned aggression and focus.

Meanwhile, a woman stayed home with her baby. She nursed her child. She watched for snakes. She taught her child to speak. When the man came home, she cooked the meat. She learned to do several things at once. She learned to communicate, to figure things out.

"Words were a woman's tools," says Fisher.

And a woman's tools are now needed to thrive in school and the world - a world that has changed so much, so quickly, that it relies less on physical strength and aggressiveness and more on processing information and cooperation.

Ok, in lazy, armchair Richard Leakeyesque moods brought on by a trip to the museum or an article in a doctor's office copy of Psychology Today, I'm halfway persuaded by images of silent men approaching a mastodon and convivial parties of women gathering nuts and berries that men might have learned the value of keeping your mouth shut more than women needed to.

And it's been my experience that when a group of men get together to work on a project they talk or don't talk as the mood strikes them---when they do talk the talk is about the tools being used or about past jobs like this one (men telling each other stories)---and when the group at work is predominately women (I'm talking about my experience here.  I can only experience groups of women that are only predominately women.  Every group of women I've ever been part of had at least one man in it.) the conversation is non-stop and about everything under the sun except, sometimes, the job at hand, which still gets done and done well and done right.

So from my experience I could characterize the talk of men as being laconic and mainly process-oriented and the talk of women as being more verbose, descriptive, and insight-driven, and I could conclude that I'm seeing the ancient dynamic at work still and agree that it appears that women are just naturally more comfortable, fluent, and creative in their use of words and that this translates into higher verbal skills and higher verbal scores on tests.

But I'm not a fan of evolutionary arguments to explain current cultural conditions, like the fact that American men don't tend to open up in their conversation the way American women tend to do, because we don't know.  There's not enough evidence of what people were doing before they started writing down the history of what they'd been doing.  From the point where we do have written evidence, lo and behold, most of the writing is by men!

Where did they learn that trick?

Fisher says "Words are women's tools," and rocks and sticks were men's and while women talked and invented civilization men stood around beating rocks together and hitting each other over the head with sticks and that's why boys today are having such trouble.  The primary tools of human intelligence---words---are above their biologically innate capacity to handle.

This is just the old argument that women are biologically geared not to be able to think in three dimensions and reason linearally---that is, they can't do math---turned on its head to flatter girls in a way that is actually insulting to them as well as boys.  We don't need to do math anymore.  We need to talk about how we do math.

I know a lot of women writers, poets, lawyers, journalists, bloggers, and other professionals whose success has depended on their having to be highly skilled in using words who wouldn't like to hear that they didn't have to work all that hard at it because they were evolutionarily designed for their jobs, that words are "women's tools" and they just throw them around as easily and naturally as men throw rocks.

And those hunting parties of supposedly silent men?  They did not include small boys.

The small boys were with their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and sisters learning which nuts and berries to pick and, incidentally, how to talk.

Meanwhile, back in the stone age, banging rocks together had a purpose we now call tool-making, a creative act, not an aggressive one.  And as an anthropologist Fisher must know that most hunting cultures built religions around the hunt, with a result that religion has traditionally had---art!

And this art was created by and for men.

While the women were inventing civilization over in the berry patch, men were re-inventing it around the campfire and on the cave walls.

Probably at no time in the whole of human existence could men get by with just a few grunts and by making a couple of crude drawings in the dust with a stick.

However it was back in the ice age, men did not spend all their time chasing after mastodons and women did not spend all their time gossiping.

When they weren't out hunting, men whiled away their free time doing what hunters do now to while away theirs.  They told each other stories. 

In every culture at every point in time the ability to tell a story has been as valued by men as it has been by women.  The talent for describing a process, for teaching somebody else how to do a job, has been as important a quality for a man as it has been for a woman.

And once upon time, and not that long ago a time it was, a cultured young man, that is one fit for the company of other men, needed to know how to write a decent sonnet, dash off a decent letter, tell a decent story, and give a decent speech.

All this is to say that for thousands of years, whatever our innate biological differences, the cultural pressure on boys was for them to be just as gabby as their sisters.

Something changed.
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Majikthise gets there first:  Kevin Drum linked to an article by Richard Whitmire in the New Republic that examines boys' declining literary and verbal skills in depth.  I was planning to post a reaction, and still might, but Lindsay Beyerstein beat me to the punch and she and her commenters have an excellent discussion of it going here.

Go here for Drum's take.

Comments

[coturnix]

Urg hungry for mammmoth! Silly sociobiology....

[blue girl]

Grisha emailed me the New Republic article last night and he and I thought we had it all figured out this morning at 7 a.m.! But alas, you and others have punched a million holes into the theory.

The one thing in that article that I could relate to was the boys not turning in their homework thing. My son would actually spend the time to do his homework, but not turn it in! Major problem for a few years. And he just couldn't or wouldn't grasp the concept that not turning in his homework was hurting his grades. I have friends with sons and they were doing the same thing. I don't know if girls do that or not.

That was a very aggravating situation for a long time.

[mac macgillicuddy]

"they were evolutionarily designed for their jobs, that words are "women's tools" and they just throw them around as easily and naturally as men throw rocks."

Speaking strictly for myself, I can't hit the broad side of a barn.

[Jennifer]

blue girl- my daughter has been struggling with the time issue this year along with other little details. To her knowing the stuff should be enough. Why should it matter if you forgot your name or didn't turn it in on time when you answered all of the questions correctly? I believe she is finally beginning to flash on the idea that knowing is not enough.

[ricia]

gee whiz..

which tribes on what part of the planet is she refering to? contemporary anthropology has long since discarded the old hunter / male gatherer / female stereotype - for starters. there has been far too many examples to the contrary, including many Nations within American Aboriginal history. and since when did professionals dicard the belief that cooperation / dependancy among people (regardless of gender) was responsible for the evolution of communication skills?

that woman can't possibly have earned a degree? in a school? studying anthropology..? i don't believe it.

[Redbeard]

seen Pollit's column?

[blue girl]

See Jennifer? Your daughter and my son are totally equal in that! Yay! :)

[Mickle]

"Something changed"

So, do you have a theory?

[Mike Schilling]

There's a well-known Usenet loon (I'd provide his name, but am loath to give him the publicity) who claims that verbal ability is a skill the sneaky blankety-blank Jews developed in order to enslave the true men who have important skills, like being able to beat people up.

[Anne Laurie]

Hah! I had that "timing" problem back in the 1960s... if I knew stuff, and the teacher knew I knew it, why should I have to (a) do the homework to "show my work" or (b) turn in the homework once I'd done it? Of course, I also had ADD -- a category that didn't exist back then -- and dyslexia, a category that existed, but not for girls, like me. So, since I was demonstrably "smart" enough to finish the homework and turn it in on time, it must be that I was just "stubborn", or "willful", or "defiant". And since I was attending an overcrowded parochial school (55 kids in my first-grade class, one nun, no teaching assistants), the prescribed treatment for stubborn, defiant children leaned, shall we say, heavily on negative reinforcement; my teachers believed in sticks, not carrots, and I do not use the word "stick" metaphorically, either. Getting beaten for non-compliance couldn't keep me from loving to read, because reading was not something I learned to do at school, but it did instill a permanent fear of mathematics. But, of course, it didn't matter if a girl couldn't handle numbers, because (genuine quote) "Your husband will have to balance your checkbook & handle the family finances"...

On the other hand, there were some excellent teaching tools I did pick up, precisely because I went to an old-fashioned, overcrowded, neighborhood school. For one thing, reading aloud is an very useful tool, and not just for parents reading to pre-schoolers. Every kid had to "read aloud" in front of the class almost every day, which could be fairly hellish for dyslexics, but it did improve my comprehension (& encourage me to practice the following day's selection the night before, which was almost the only homework I did unbidden). It also meant that the teacher couldn't "pretend" non-readers had the skills to pass them along to the next grade, where they'd just fall further behind. Kids in the older grades were used to tutor the smaller ones, and it's a fact that teaching someone else really does improve one's own grasp of a topic. Finally, while the basic reading program was heavily phonics-based, probably the most important part of the educational philosophy was just that some things were hard to learn, some things were harder for some individuals, and sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and gut it out! I certainly don't advocate beating kids -- it won't work, at least if the idea is to make education desirable -- but I do think that there are limits to the Learning-Is-Fun philosophy. Some learning is fun, some of the time, but perhaps some skills can't be acquired without effort. Since I don't have kids of my own, I may be biased. But perhaps a kid who'll practice shooting baskets for hours straight, or catching a baseball until his hands are blistered, or "playing" a video game over and over just to improve his scores, can cope with the concept that he may have use the same kind of focus to turn those meaningless black marks on paper into a narrative he can handle fluently... and, just possibly, even ENJOY.

But, yeah, telling stories is important. My parents not only read to us, once we started reading, we had to tell them about the books we'd read. (That must have been excruciatingly boring for them, but then, parenthood is suffering.) And having our parents read out loud to us was a great treat, even if we didn't always understand their choices (HUCKLEBERRY FINN from my dad, TALE OF TWO CITIES from my mom). I read most of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (for the second time), chapter by chapter, as a "bedtime story" when I was 15 or 16 and the "babies" were 6 or 7. I don't think the little guys understood half the words, but they wouldn't let me stop reading, either. And my reading-averse middle brothers, ages about 11 and 13, always managed to be in the vicinity each evening; the 13-year-old even broke his personal I-Don't-Read-Non-Fiction code to finish the rest of the trilogy on his own. And, while I never managed to finish my B.A., the middle brothers are a junior-high science teacher and a registered nurse, while the "babies" all have advanced degrees... so maybe my efforts did add some iota to the advance of human progress .

[Mickle]

My 7th grade English teacher had a handmade poster up on her wall about how we remember such and such percent of what we hear, read, speak, teach etc. - the essential point being that the greater the number of ways we are forced to process information, the better we understand and remember it.

I sub for a group of kindergarten and first grade teachers sometimes, and one of the things they often complain about is how early we try to teach kids to read. It's not so much that they aren't ready for the mental gymnastics, because that they can handle it most of the time; it's that they rarely have the basics of verbal communication down. Jumping straight from "abc...z" to "cat" means that there's less (or no) time for dictation, show and tell, and all sorts of other activities that kindergarteners need in order to practice organizing their verbal thoughts and learn sentence structure. What looks like simply play to most observers is actually very serious learning.

How do you try to explain to a first grader the rules regarding what a written sentence looks like if you didn't make sure he learned what one sounds like in kindergarten? You have to either spend a lot of time backtracking - which is frustrating and confusing for everyone - or you have to start letting kids slide though the cracks because there's just no time to cover it.

Re: school being fun - yeah, it isn't always going to be and we shouldn't try to make it all fun and games, but it's also important to give kids a reason to read other than just because you say so. I tell parents* who have reluctant readers to not only try to find books the kids can read, but to continue reading stories aloud to them at night so that they know that if they just push themselves a little bit harder, they'll be able to read all these fun stories themselves. It's also useful for comprehension reasons for kids to continue hearing adults read to them well into elementary school - they pick up nuances from adults' tone and inflection that they often miss because they are still struggling with the mechanics.

*not my idea: advice from my mom - one of the teachers I sub for

[Barry]

"There's a well-known Usenet loon (I'd provide his name, but am loath to give him the publicity) who claims that verbal ability is a skill the sneaky blankety-blank Jews developed in order to enslave the true men who have important skills, like being able to beat people up."

Posted by: Mike Schilling

Ah, yes - would his initials be JB? I ran into him back in the 1990's.

[Mike Schilling]

Barry is the winner (not least for having avoided Bowel-brain for at least 6 years).

[Chris Clarke]

Even if you accept the dubious notions that 1) verbal ability is somehow linked to the X chromosome, 2) only men hunted, and 3) that one aspect of the Pleistocene lifestyle had such a marked effect on human cognition, Fisher's contention is historically ignorant. With the possible exception of the giant ground sloths, the animals our grandfathers hunted were really big and nasty and dangerous. Maybe, every once in a great while, a hunter would be able to bring down a mastodon with a well-placed spear. But that would be the extreme exception. And think of who we were up against: Arctodus, the short-faced bear, which stood like seven feet at the shoulder and could run at speeds of 35 miles per hour and ate flesh. Or cave bears, or the many different species of giant cats that we only exterminated 12,000 years ago or so, etc.

The reason we were successful hunters - the reason we survived was verbal communication, the ability for a hunting party to coordinate strategies, and adapt them on the fly.

All Fisher needed to do to falsify her hypothesis was to look at the Plains Indians, a megafaunal hunting culture in which one of the primary modes of cultural expression was oratory, almost always by men.