School Discipline - Destroying Male Education

While I was at Stevens Institute of Technology studying engineering, I came to understand there was a real difference between how guys and girls responded to discipline within education. This lesson was taught to me by Professor Chang who taught Statics. Professor Chang was not like the normal professors who would spend the whole lecture talking to the blackboard. He expected the student to have read and understood the material before class. When the clock noted the first second of class, he would write a problem on the board and expect the students to solve problem. The students did not try to solve the problem privately, but in front of the class. He would start with one random student and start working his way around the room. “Draw the problem. What are the equations? What do you mean you don’t know. What is wrong with you! What did the chapter teach you. You call home and tell mommy you don’t want to be engineer…” He laid down the law and no one who attended pretended to be immune. His teaching style had an interesting effect. The guys came alive. They were motivated, prepared and ready. The females tended to be terrorized by his approach and did not perform up to their normal ability.

















Well, you can’t keep the Washington Post down. They have come to some of the same understandings in today’s paper called “Self-Discipline May Beat Smarts as Key to Success”. The story notes a study in a North Eastern school where IQ and discipline were noted in the overall student body. The study followed the achievements and success of the students and concluded that discipline was a better indicator of success than IQ.

What the report failed to note in detail is how the lack of discipline within the US school system punishes males disproportionally. In general, females tend to have a strong sense of inherent discipline even amid chaos. Males desire to have a strong structured environment where they can respect the authorities. Few guys have any respect for our school systems where the weakness of the administration is only surpassed by the feeble teachers. Within the current educational system male students will continue to fail unless a different approach is attempted.

I ask myself the following questions:

Why don’t we allow boys to succeed by putting them in an environment where they can be disciplined and excel?

Does co-ed education by its very nature lead to a change in how discipline is administered?

Why is our society so threatened by any institution which is male only and where men have the greatest capability to succeed? Why the big uproar over a program like the Citadel?

Let me know your thoughts!