David Brooks on Gender=Fourth Stomach in Cow

Yesterday's David Brooks column on "The Gender Gap at School" ($-sorry) manages to combine three elements that are guaranteed to make me want to bang my head against a wall in frustration: sweeping generalizations about gender; gross oversimplification (and abuse) of brain research; and sweeping, non-empirically correct generalizations about public education. Goody!

To paraphrase Brooks: "Golly, isn't it interesting that men's and women's favorite books are different? Completely ignoring any social or cultural reasons why this might be the case [like, I don't know, most guys I know would be subjected to serious abuse if their friends caught them reading Jane Eyre], I'm going to blame their brains. You see, modern science has shown us that men and women are not identical!!! Unfortunately, schools are still stuck in the mindset of the seventies--the dark ages before we realized that men and women are different--and insist on subjecting boys to a girly, "sensitive" curriculum that forces them to read books about girls and their feelings. What red-blooded young American male would put up with that? Clearly our schools are forcing boys to HATE READING."

I'm not kidding. (Seriously, if you have access to Times Select, read it yourself.)

Leave aside the dubious wisdom of taking educational advice from someone who thinks that "Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer, and Twain," are the kind of books we should be using to turn boys on to reading (Tolstoy?!? Really, Dave? Have you read Tolstoy? Do you know any teenage boys?). A quick look at recommended and required summer reading lists for schools in Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, reveals that Twain, Hemmingway and other "boy-friendly" authors like Jon Krakauer or Stephen Crane have hardly been excluded from public schools. By a similar token, recent research from the Department of Education finds that, contrary to Brooks' assertions and everyone's common knowledge, recess hasn't been eliminated from public schools--nearly 90 percent of elementary schools have recess and most do so daily.

But these are quibbles. The real irritant about this piece, for me, is the way Brooks lightly tosses out some pop culture factoids about brain research and the proceeds to make sweeping recommendations for the education system based on them. Never mind that the full body of research is a lot more complicated than Brooks makes it out to be (check out this excellent book by Diane Halpern if you want an honest picture here), that the practical implications of many findings are far from clear (what would the practical implications of differences between little girls' and little boys' crayon color preferences be, anyway?), or that variations within each gender are typically much greater than the difference between the averages for each gender. David Brooks has read the pop literature on gender differences, and he is now going to pass this information (which has already been redigested from the original research more times than if it had passed through a cow's digestive system--with about the same result) on to the rest of us.

And it's not just Brooks--the basic flavor of Brook's article is the same one that permeates the current spate of articles about why boys are falling behind in school. Contrary to Brooks' assertions, plenty of people--including educators--seem plenty willing to talk about how boys and girls are different and boys are in crisis. They're just not talking about it all that thoughtfully.

UPDATE: It's come to my attention that David Brooks has a teenage son, suggesting Brooks does, in fact, know at least one teenage boy. Guess the kid must love him some Anna Karenina...