Leonard Sax: Influential Author, Researcher to Visit Campus in November
In just a few weeks, our campus will have the honor of hosting Leonard Sax, an expert on gender and how it has an impact on the education of both sexes. Dr. Sax completed his bachelor’s degree in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He works as a family physician, but also has published numerous articles and books. He has even been featured on “The Today Show” with Al Roker to discuss his expertise on matters related to gender:
His best-known work, Why Gender Matters, is an exposé on the biological and psychological differences between boys and girls and aims to examine the best methods for raising and educating children of each sex. Dr. Sax argues that there are distinct disciplinary and teaching techniques that work better with one gender. For instance, he describes certain auditory differences between girls and boys. He notes that girls generally hear much better than boys do, which raises a number of important issues concerning the classroom. He states that girls tend to sit in the middle to front rows when picking seats, which can have an adverse effect when a male teacher speaks. The teacher may think that he is using a normal voice, but the girls in the front rows interpret his normal volume level as overly harsh or even yelling. Meanwhile, the boys in the back rows are distracted because their less sensitive hearing makes it difficult for them to hear and concentrate on what the teacher is saying. Herein lies a serious problem in co-educational learning environments, as many teachers are unaware of or choose to deny this basic genetic difference between the children in their classroom. Dr. Sax presents a multitude of these examples of subtle variations in how the brains of the different genders are wired and offers plausible solutions to many of the problems posed by these differences. He bases his observations on proven biological facts and attempts to solve them by playing to the strengths of the different genders.
Leonard Sax
Another example that he cites regarding differences between girls and boys relates to levels of stress that they feel and how they cope with that stress. Dr. Sax claims that boys are inherently better performers when under stress, but that high levels of stress inhibit the abilities of girls. He goes on to list examples in education where these differences can be used to the advantage of the students. One such example of this is a story about how a class of all boys was motivated to do their best by having to answer questions in a group in a short span of time. He says that the boys were under duress because only a few seconds were given to the answer the questions and they were competing for pride against their peers. The boys loved the exercise and were able to learn the material better through the creative way that it was presented. On the other hand, he relates an example from an all-girls school where the girls were never given time limits on their tests. The teacher let them stay and take exams for as long as they pleased. The girls loved it because they were able to think fully through every question and work out the best answer.
Dr. Sax shows the important characteristics that define the two genders and emphasizes that it is folly to ignore them, and he provides ample evidence that pretending that these differences don’t exist only hurts the children and does little to erase the gender gap. He sees these strong and weak traits of boys and girls and inherent and not as social constructs and places much of the fault for the continuing emphasis on total equality on the feminist movement and its aftereffects. Dr. Sax does not try to place one gender as superior to the other, but rather sees them as different and also equal.
Naturally, Dr. Sax is a big proponent for single-sex education. He sees the unique ways that boys and girls are both getting let down and underserved by our current methods of education. Moreover, he is a strong supporter of the segregation of children into schools by their gender because he feels that their strengths can be better emphasized and their weaknesses more improved because of the homogeneous nature of the student body. The ability of teachers to relate to their students’ needs is greatly increased in such environments because they are able to use techniques that work in favor of all of the students in the class, rather than appealing to only half of them and possibly alienating the others.
Obviously, Dr. Sax’s ideas about single-sex education have relevance to the students and faculty at Wabash. As one of the last few bastions of all-male higher education in America, we, as members of the Wabash community, are in a unique position in regard to being able to apply his theories to single-sex college life.
In one of his articles, he examines the growing divide between the numbers of motivated young men and women who have a sense of purpose and direction in their life through their twenties. According to the article, “What’s Happening to Boys?” one in three men between the age of 22 and 34 live at home with their parents, while only about half as many women are in the same situation. The most disheartening theme that runs through the article is that these young men don’t even see a problem with having no future prospects and no path towards even leaving the shelter and comfort of their childhood homes. There is a deep problem in the way boys are being raised and educated today when such enormous numbers of men don’t even feel the drive to succeed and accomplish feats that have never been attempted in the past.
This problem of instilling the need for excellence and growth is something that even our beloved Wabash must face as we look to the future. Part of the solution may lie inside our walls, as we believe strongly in the idea that students at an all-male college are receiving an education that extends far beyond the classroom and guides young men towards happy, successful lives. In addition to our always important focus on challenging and insightful academics, the Wabash mentality has always been to prepare its students for life outside of the four years of the undergraduate experience. We pride ourselves on the fact that Wabash men can use what they have learned from the classics of Aristotle or the structure of an organic compound and be able to solve problems in all assets of life with the lessons they’ve learned. However, we can always improve upon the base that we have set up here at Wabash, and I believe that Dr. Sax will have further insights into the learning environments that men thrive in and the keys to gaining a positive outlook and drive to be successful in an ever-more competitive world. With that, I would like to welcome Dr. Sax to Wabash and hope that the men of our college will attend what is sure to be a memorable speech on gender studies.
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