October 30, 2009 (Catholic education, Catholic schools)

In Ontario, eighteen retired teachers in the past 12 months turned 100 years old. At the Retired Teachers a of Ontario’s October 26^th Senate, a list of their names was displayed in a Power Point presentation. All 18 were women.

It has been known in demographic circles for years that woman outlive men. What we do not know for sure is why.

As I saw those names, the thought that crossed my mind was, “How is this situation really any different than the well known fact that boys do not score as well on reading or writing tests as girls?”

With the newspapers full of the Toronto District School Board Director’s ramblings about all-boys schools as a solution, I could not help but reflect that he was perhaps grasping at straws.

The evidence on single-sex versus mixed-sex classrooms and/or schools is all over the map, not much different than the issue over phonics/whole language as the best way to teach reading.

Do not get me wrong; I have no objection to all-boys or all-girls schools.  After all, I credit my attendance at St. Michael’s College School, the Basilian High School in Toronto, with keeping me in high school during my teen years.

I do not think, however, it had anything to do with being an all-boys school. Classes were very large. Some teachers were great and some were real duds.  The fact that they were 98% priests didn’t mean they were good or bad teachers. One had no bearing on the other.

What did matter was that I knew my parents were paying tuition for me to attend, plus the daily cost of commuting by train to Toronto to boot. That and the pride that went with attending a school like St. Mike’s did matter. When one grew up as a tiny minority (5% in Grade 2; 10% in Grade among a large Protestant majority, and attended a Public elementary school, the experience of being in a school where all the boys were Catholic was, if nothing else, invigorating.

What I remember about both elementary and high school is that I was a poor speller, poor reader, and didn’t do particularly well at mathematics. I think Grade nine was the only year when I didn’t fail at least something. But I did like to write. I remember an incident just before writing my Grade 13 English Composition examine for the second time, when I was talking with my teacher about what might be on the exam. And I asked him what topic he thought I chose the previous year. He looked at me and said, “Well I can’t tell you what one you wrote on, but I can tell you what one you didn’t write on.” And of course he proceeded to name exactly the one I had chosen.  ”Well, no wonder you didn’t pass; no 18-year-old can know anything about that topic.” And then he proceeded to ask me what I had written. The topic was marriage.

In Grade 8 I didn’t think I was very bright. My average was about 60%.  After the first set of exams the teacher reorganized the seating arrangement.  The student with the highest average mark was placed in the front seat of the first row to the teacher’s left. Each child was then positioned in descending order from there to the eighth seat in the fifth row to the teacher’s right. I sat in the eighth seat in the first row on the left. Is it any wonder that nine classes of Grade nines become a class of maybe 40 Grade 13’s five years later at the Public high school?

I share these stories to demonstrate a number of realities. First, we really have come a long way to nearly total high school retention since the forties and fifties. Second, back then boys, not girls, made up the majority of university students especially in the math, sciences of all types and law. Women’s choices were very limited.

What we didn’t have was a set of tests telling us that boys didn’t score as high as girls in reading or writing. As the Grade 8 story and the girls who sat in front of me demonstrated, I suspect every teacher pretty well knew it.  Similarly, society and teachers knew that it was males who made it to the highest ranks of the high paying professions. No one really worried about the fact that the girls wrote better stories or did better on spelling tests or read more books. After all, their parents didn’t really expect them to pursue a career once motherhood took over.

So today, what do we really have? We have more males than ever attending post-secondary education institutions. And we have even more woman attending such institutions, to the point where they now outnumber the men in the math, sciences and law degrees.

Yet we are nearly flagellating ourselves because boys do not seem to score as girls on EQAO tests. Although I don’t think we should stop trying to raise those scores, I do think that we do not really know what all the factors are that contribute to that difference. Clearly, we need more and better research.

I think the difference goes much deeper than just all-boys or all-girls schools. It is first and foremost built into all of the stereotypical images and expectations we have for boys and girls in our culture. Can we or do we even want to change those factors?

When I see data on Northern Ontario communities, and can compare one to the other, the differences are so stark as to defy analysis. The solution literally amounts to a total change in the culture of a small community, a task which is both beyond a school to accomplish and outside its proper domain to even attempt.

It  really begs the question, “Are we becoming so fixated on test scores that we are attempting to condition the next generation into some kind of uniformly educated society?” Are we in danger of aping earlier totalitarian regimes imbued with dreams of creating a perfect society?

The genius of Western society has been its ability to tolerate difference, and just as importantly to tolerate failure.  Are we on the verge of a conceit that failure is no longer tolerable in a school setting?

So what has all this got to do with 100 year old women? I suspect there is something generic to females that results in their outliving males.  Maybe it is related to differences in genetic makeup, or in the long evolution of the different cultures of women and men.  Or maybe it is a combination of both.

I do suspect that similar forces can be found to underlie the differences in test scores between boys and girls.

Just as doctors should try to create conditions which cause males to live longer, teachers should attempt to create conditions which will cause males to score higher on their literacy scores. But let’s keep it all in its proper perspective.

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