![]() ![]() It is so they will be a year older when they get to middle school and high school.” Such a statement not only undermines the argument for starting boys earlier it overlooks the importance of the early years in child development. ![]() But Reeves asserts that “the main reason for starting boys later is not so that they will be a year older in kindergarten. One of his principal recommendations: boys should start kindergarten one year later than girls. Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, recently published his book Of Boys and Men, where he reviews the avalanche of literature showing that boys are now doing much worse than girls at school and in college. That means that the boy who decides at the end of the kindergarten year that he hates school is likely still to hate school years down the road. And those attitudes, once formed, are global, stable, and non-contingent. Professor Stipek has shown that kids develop attitudes toward school very early, by the end of the kindergarten year. When I met with school leaders to promote the idea, I cited the work of Deborah Stipek, the long-time Dean of Education at Stanford. In view of the research (which has since been updated) showing that boys lag substantially behind girls in brain development, I advised that boys start kindergarten at six years of age, while girls continue to start at age five. So in 2001, I wrote a paper for the American Psychological Association entitled “ Reclaiming Kindergarten: Making Kindergarten Less Harmful to Boys.” I began the paper by noting, correctly, that many American kindergartens as of 2001 were now deploying the traditional first-grade curriculum, with a focus on reading and writing. I became convinced that the acceleration of the early elementary curriculum, beginning in kindergarten, was part of the problem. We all applaud the rise of girls in school and at university, but why didn’t we level off around 50/50? Why are boys now greatly under-represented among university students? Women now outnumber men at four-year colleges in the United States by 59 to 41 and women are now substantially more likely than their brothers to graduate from a four-year-college. Nationwide, 70% of high school valedictorians now are female. Today, my high school still has an honors ceremony, but now almost all the awardees are girls. Sadly, there were very few girls who won any academic awards. The valedictorian and the salutatorian were both boys. The editor of the student newspaper was a boy. The winner of the poetry prize was a boy. Almost every student whose name was called was a boy. I recall the honors ceremony at my public high school in 1976. By 2010, 80% of teachers expected their students to be able to read. As late as 1998, only about 30% of kindergarten teachers expected their students to be able to read by the end of the school year. By 2010, researchers found, the trend was pretty much complete. But as I researched the topic, reaching out to colleagues regionally and then nationwide, I learned that this trend was sweeping the country. “What are they thinking? Don’t they know that boys that age aren’t ready to sit for an hour and learn about diphthongs?” I wondered. That’s why it surprised me in the late 1990s to learn that our local kindergarten was now all about learning to read and write. It was primarily experiential: singing, playing tag, doing arts and crafts, and splashing in ponds. Nobody expected us to-kindergarten wasn’t about learning to read and write. By the end of kindergarten, I couldn’t read a word. We went on field trips to the Shaker Lakes, where I splashed in ponds with my friends as we chased after tadpoles. ![]() I was surprised because when I was a little boy in kindergarten in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in the 1960s, we weren’t taught to read and write at all. As I learned more about each boy’s situation, I was surprised to find that our local public school kindergarten was now requiring children to learn to read and write. Parents were asking me why their sons hated school so much. Beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s, I began to notice a growing cohort of young boys who were not doing well in the classroom, who said they hated school, beginning in kindergarten. psychologist, my practice soon attracted parents who had concerns about how their kids were doing in school. Because I am both a medical doctor and a Ph.D. I launched my medical practice in Montgomery County, Maryland, in March 1990. ![]()
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