I'd be interested to see outcomes for girls who are redshirted. I get that this article is specifically looking at outcomes of boys and addressing an identified issue with boys' performances with respect to girls but I'd imagine that a fair proportion of girls would also benefit from starting a year later.
It seems to me that if the outcome of redshirting all boys is that girls are disadvantaged then we'll be having this conversation again in a few years trying to fix the problem we've created.
The root cause of the problem is, of course, that we have a very structured education system that can't easily cater for individual students' optimal rate of learning. Students that aren't keeping up are faced with being held back an entire year with very real social implications.
It would be great to see a renewed focus on extra support for students who are falling behind.
trod1234 · 2h ago
I'd be interested to compare the outcomes of this supposed gender gap in education prior to the adoption of the existing teaching structures and pedagogy used today.
Specifically, going back to the way in which things were taught around 1966.
Starting with Sputnik education was changed broadly given a blank check and given carte blanche to reduce hiring standards of education in attempts to increase Engineers but the resulting outcomes have only seemingly made everything continually worse since that time period. This has caused numerous problems of corruption and ruin that drive these chaotic problems forward no matter what you do.
Instead of guessing at a pie in the sky thing on what you don't know, its more rational to go back to what previously worked with higher outcomes.
Eliminate Paulo Freire based pedagogy, hold teachers accountable, pay the good teachers more, fire the bad ones (no more lemon walk in Waiting for Superman), eliminate unnecessary torture, and return to teaching by a first principled approach instead of following a "Lying to children" approach which is the by-rote teaching used today. You'll see a huge change when you actually go back to teaching instead of torture. You do those things, and you'll see dramatic improvement.
The pedagogy used today is based more in Chinese thought reform and torture (under Mao) than anything else. Very few people have actually studied torture, and as a result those people are blind unable to recognize it, and it has been used everywhere to manipulate and control. Once you know how it works you see it in everything today.
You think the dramatic increase in school violence and shootings on the rise might point to targeted unending psychological stress/trauma being inflicted on children at vulnerable stages of development? You think people just bully out of the fun of things, its induced through clever techniques indirectly by teachers and they don't even know it because they are just parroting a technique without understanding the origin which was torture.
The hot potato for example isolates the victim, asks a opinion based question, and upon expressing disapproval of the teacher works simultaneously on the the person called out, but also on the approval seeking students who then do the bullying later. Its really quite clever but diabolical push pull intended to manipulate the student towards a collectivist thought/narrative. Teachers use this often mixing equally facts one should know with fictional narrative, which are indirectly sourced from the published books. No child would notice, even an inattentive adult might miss it (when they've had the training to recognize it).
Torture is the intentional infliction of such stress in sufficient exposure to bring about physiological impacts. Reduction of reasoning capability, Involuntary Hypnosis, PTSD, disassociation, or a semi-lucid psychosis seeking annihilation (capable of planning). These are the symptoms of exposure to torture.
The things that describe it in a way that you can recognize it were known about back in the 1950s and were unacceptable for PoWs, let alone sending your children off to such reeducation camps. If you teach someone that a lie is truth through torture, they'll just mimic it moving forward blind to the consequences. That goes equally for both teachers and students.
Its a sad state of affairs.
If you want to know more, you can read an overview by Joost Meerloo (Rape of the Mind), or the actual case studies from returning PoWs written up by Robert Lifton. Robert Cialdini covers all the psychological blindspots the techniques use except distorted reflected appraisal. This is how thought reform, cult programming, and indoctrination work.
Teach yourself, Reduce to first principles, recognize, and act.
You'll be horrified when you compare these things objectively and come to the realization that you've been forcing your children to attend a surrogate that claims education but is actually regular torture since before they could think.
Its quite likely they've turned out less than their potential because of that betrayal and the result of that damaging process.
ConspiracyFact · 1h ago
I will admit to a conspiratorial bias, but I curb it by asking basic feasibility questions, one of which I'll now ask you: how many people would need to be involved, and to what degree? If the education system is torturing children, doesn't that require a large degree of cooperation from many teachers? Why would these teachers willingly torture children?
TheAceOfHearts · 39m ago
I'll play devil's advocate. There could be many explanations: maybe the teachers don't consider it torture and they're true believers. Personally, I remember growing up sometimes teachers would start complaining about having to cover certain topics in specific ways that were mandated by the department of education, and being forced to stick to a strict curriculum that was sent down by faceless figures. If teachers aren't empowered to push back and execute on their conception of the best possible lesson plan, and any complaint puts their future pension at risk, they might just gradually lose interest in being an exceptional teacher while continuing to show up for the paycheck. This is a common occurrence in other domains, so it wouldn't surprise me if it's true about some teachers. Reflecting back on some of my most exceptional teachers, they would often invest a lot of their own money, extra time, and resources in order to give students the best possible educational experience.
There is also a bit of diffusion of responsibility. Maybe no single act can be interpreted as particularly tortuous, so it's easily excused by the person doing it. But taken collectively, it adds up into a harmful outcome.
This might vary depending on where you were educated, but a lot of my education growing up was lacking in epistemic exploration. We were often just fed a ton of facts by authority figures and expected to memorize and recite them at will, without diving into how those things were known or exploring concepts of epistemic uncertainty and the framing of historical contexts. Oftentimes this would result in people memorizing a bunch of facts for a test, after which the information was discarded, because there was no effort put into integrating newly acquired knowledge. One example for me was imaginary numbers in an early pre-calculus course, where we learned that these things existed and the basic rules for how they functioned, but it wasn't until many years later that I finally got to see how this concept could be applied and used.
firejake308 · 1h ago
> The older students consistently scored higher on tests... The findings were true for children of all backgrounds, but especially for boys and for children from low-income families.
If redshirting benefits both boys and girls, it seems unfair to only offer it to boys, even if the boys benefit more than girls.
treetalker · 6h ago
Should girls start learning math and science later than boys?
clipsy · 4h ago
If the end result was that they performed better in the long run it doesn't seem unreasonable. Do you have any data on this?
ryan93 · 3h ago
People always say that but men still get most engineering degrees especially in the more traditional fields like ME and EE. So what if girls grades in high school are marginally higher
Spivak · 3h ago
Make sure to read the article before commenting because this proposed practice is specifically to close the gender gap in which girls are ahead. Parents specifically try to get their sons redshirted for the advantage it confers. The proposed policy would make it available to everyone regardless of their birthday. I think any national policy would realistically make it available to girls as well because the optics of boys only is bad. But the option would be there for the benefit of boys.
I point this out because "being held back" is seen as a bad thing but starting school later actually gives you a leg up.
I think we should move beyond the semi-rigid alignment of age and “grade”. Let people move at different rates in different areas. We should normalize a 12yo and 16yo of the same abilities in the same classes.
We do everyone a massive disservice under the current system. The worst off get passed along without help and those with the most potential cannot realize it without “heroic effort” from the parents demanding attention from the system at every turn.
Someone who struggles with basic reading comprehension needs to address that before moving on to anything more demanding.
HocusLocus · 6h ago
First year should be smartphone avoidance training with devices that deliver electric shocks.
It seems to me that if the outcome of redshirting all boys is that girls are disadvantaged then we'll be having this conversation again in a few years trying to fix the problem we've created.
The root cause of the problem is, of course, that we have a very structured education system that can't easily cater for individual students' optimal rate of learning. Students that aren't keeping up are faced with being held back an entire year with very real social implications.
It would be great to see a renewed focus on extra support for students who are falling behind.
Specifically, going back to the way in which things were taught around 1966.
Starting with Sputnik education was changed broadly given a blank check and given carte blanche to reduce hiring standards of education in attempts to increase Engineers but the resulting outcomes have only seemingly made everything continually worse since that time period. This has caused numerous problems of corruption and ruin that drive these chaotic problems forward no matter what you do.
Instead of guessing at a pie in the sky thing on what you don't know, its more rational to go back to what previously worked with higher outcomes.
Eliminate Paulo Freire based pedagogy, hold teachers accountable, pay the good teachers more, fire the bad ones (no more lemon walk in Waiting for Superman), eliminate unnecessary torture, and return to teaching by a first principled approach instead of following a "Lying to children" approach which is the by-rote teaching used today. You'll see a huge change when you actually go back to teaching instead of torture. You do those things, and you'll see dramatic improvement.
The pedagogy used today is based more in Chinese thought reform and torture (under Mao) than anything else. Very few people have actually studied torture, and as a result those people are blind unable to recognize it, and it has been used everywhere to manipulate and control. Once you know how it works you see it in everything today.
You think the dramatic increase in school violence and shootings on the rise might point to targeted unending psychological stress/trauma being inflicted on children at vulnerable stages of development? You think people just bully out of the fun of things, its induced through clever techniques indirectly by teachers and they don't even know it because they are just parroting a technique without understanding the origin which was torture.
The hot potato for example isolates the victim, asks a opinion based question, and upon expressing disapproval of the teacher works simultaneously on the the person called out, but also on the approval seeking students who then do the bullying later. Its really quite clever but diabolical push pull intended to manipulate the student towards a collectivist thought/narrative. Teachers use this often mixing equally facts one should know with fictional narrative, which are indirectly sourced from the published books. No child would notice, even an inattentive adult might miss it (when they've had the training to recognize it).
Torture is the intentional infliction of such stress in sufficient exposure to bring about physiological impacts. Reduction of reasoning capability, Involuntary Hypnosis, PTSD, disassociation, or a semi-lucid psychosis seeking annihilation (capable of planning). These are the symptoms of exposure to torture.
The things that describe it in a way that you can recognize it were known about back in the 1950s and were unacceptable for PoWs, let alone sending your children off to such reeducation camps. If you teach someone that a lie is truth through torture, they'll just mimic it moving forward blind to the consequences. That goes equally for both teachers and students.
Its a sad state of affairs.
If you want to know more, you can read an overview by Joost Meerloo (Rape of the Mind), or the actual case studies from returning PoWs written up by Robert Lifton. Robert Cialdini covers all the psychological blindspots the techniques use except distorted reflected appraisal. This is how thought reform, cult programming, and indoctrination work.
Teach yourself, Reduce to first principles, recognize, and act.
You'll be horrified when you compare these things objectively and come to the realization that you've been forcing your children to attend a surrogate that claims education but is actually regular torture since before they could think.
Its quite likely they've turned out less than their potential because of that betrayal and the result of that damaging process.
There is also a bit of diffusion of responsibility. Maybe no single act can be interpreted as particularly tortuous, so it's easily excused by the person doing it. But taken collectively, it adds up into a harmful outcome.
This might vary depending on where you were educated, but a lot of my education growing up was lacking in epistemic exploration. We were often just fed a ton of facts by authority figures and expected to memorize and recite them at will, without diving into how those things were known or exploring concepts of epistemic uncertainty and the framing of historical contexts. Oftentimes this would result in people memorizing a bunch of facts for a test, after which the information was discarded, because there was no effort put into integrating newly acquired knowledge. One example for me was imaginary numbers in an early pre-calculus course, where we learned that these things existed and the basic rules for how they functioned, but it wasn't until many years later that I finally got to see how this concept could be applied and used.
If redshirting benefits both boys and girls, it seems unfair to only offer it to boys, even if the boys benefit more than girls.
I point this out because "being held back" is seen as a bad thing but starting school later actually gives you a leg up.
We do everyone a massive disservice under the current system. The worst off get passed along without help and those with the most potential cannot realize it without “heroic effort” from the parents demanding attention from the system at every turn.
Someone who struggles with basic reading comprehension needs to address that before moving on to anything more demanding.