Be careful about reading health books.  You may die of a misprint.

- Mark Twain
 

Unforeseen hazards abound...

From a school-trip permission form sent in September 2005 to parents of 8th-grade pupils at the Queen Elizabeth Junior and Senior High School, in Calgary, Canada. Originally from Harper's Magazine, December 2005

Potential Hazards May Include but Are Not Limited to the Following:

Bus travel to and from site: Motion sickness, injury from other person’s motion sickness, injury from being thrown during sudden massive negative or positive acceleration, tripping hazard when entering or exiting vehicle or moving down the aisle, overheating during transit, objects coming through open windows, injuries from vehicle being involved in accident, chill hazard from open windows, injury from student putting head or limbs out of window, injury caused by own or other student’s inappropriate behaviour.

Entire trip: Slipping or tripping getting on or off the bus, slipping while climbing stairs or pathway on the trail, exposure to pollens, food, dust, or other materials that might induce allergic reaction, dehydration, exposure to environmental conditions including cold, damp, warm, dry, hot, and sunny, tripping on sidewalk or paved pathways, attack or injury from wild animals, food-borne organisms in own or other students’ lunches, snacks, or drinks, electrical storms including lightning strikes, landslides on hills.

Viewing indoor exhibits at site: tripping hazard on stairs, bumping hazard from other viewers, pinching hazard from doors, slipping hazard on wet floor or pavement, injury from collapsing exhibits.

Viewing outdoor section at site: Slipping on wet ground, excessive dust from dry ground, exposure to various fungi, bacteria, or viruses in the air, soil, or rocks, falling down small hillside or trails, chill from exposure to wet or cool weather conditions, exposure to excessive heat or sunlight, falling in pond and getting hypothermia, falling in pond and drowning, drinking water from pond and developing giardiasis (beaver fever) or ingesting other potentially harmful organisms, rash from touching some plants, infection from skin puncture from some plants, risk of getting lost or harmed if student sneaks away from group, risk of injuring foot, leg, or body by stepping into animal-made or erosion-created holes, risk of tree falling and landing on student.

Source: harpers.org/SchoolOfHardKnocks.html 15 February 2006

Dear College Applicant, So Sorry to Hear You're a Girl ...

by Sarah Karnasiewicz

Last month I wrote a feature for Salon that asked whether, given the growing gender imbalance on college campuses, schools might soon start instituting sex-based affirmative action.  While reporting that story, I spoke with college admissions officers and high school guidance counselors around the country, most of whom confirmed that such policies were already informally in use at many universities and spoke at length about the unease that they, and their colleagues, felt concerning the educational gender gap.  But - and this was frustrating, though predictable - most admissions officers stopped short of admitting that the sex of an applicant was ever grounds for evaluation behind the closed doors of their own conference rooms.

So, it was validating - if also troubling - to read an Op-Ed in today's New York Times, "To All the Girls I've Rejected" by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College in Ohio.  In it, Britz - who has a college-age daughter of her own - apologises to girls she's had to reject, despite their "passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place."  She explains how complicated the college admissions climate now seems in comparison with her own youth, 30 years ago, when "applying to college was only a tad more difficult than signing up for a membership at the Y."  And she confirms that more often than not it is extremely talented, eminently qualified young women - simply because of their swelling ranks - who will find skinny envelopes waiting in their mailboxes this spring.

Britz is quick to reassure the reader that she and other admissions officers weigh their decisions with gravity.  And given that she comes out of the highly secretive, elite world of college admissions, her candor is admirable.  In the end, Britz has more questions than answers: "We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.  How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement? ... Should [gender balance] trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? ... What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options?"

No doubt, this is a conversation that is only beginning.  But Britz's questions are ones that everyone in education would be wise to consider.  "In the meantime," Britz writes, "I'm sending out waitlist and rejection letters for nearly 3,000 students.  Unfortunately, a majority of them will be female, young women just like my daughter.  I will linger over letters, remembering individual students I've met, essays I loved, accomplishments I've admired.  I know all too well that parents will ache when their talented daughters read the letters and will feel a bolt of anger at the college admissions officers who didn't recognise how special their daughters are."

Source: salon.com

The New Gender Divide: At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust

by Tamar Levin

Nearing graduation, Rick Kohn is not putting much energy into his final courses.  "I take the path of least resistance," said Mr Kohn, who works 25 hours a week to put himself through the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.  "This summer, I looked for the 4 easiest courses I could take that would let me graduate in August."  It is not that Mr Kohn, 24, is indifferent to education.  He is excited about economics and hopes to get his master's in the field.  But the other classes, he said, just do not seem worth the effort.  "What's the difference between an A and a B?" he asks.  "Either way, you go on to the next class."  He does not see his female classmates sharing that attitude.  Women work harder in school, Mr Kohn believes.  "The girls care more about their GPA and the way they look on paper," he said.

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment.  Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees - and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in 4 or 5 years.  Men also get worse grades than women.  And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialised more than their female classmates.  Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and UCLA and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honours degrees.

It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago.  Still, men now make up only 42% of the nation's college students.  And with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish.  "The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better," said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.

Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her 3 years at American University in Washington.  She has a dean's scholarship, has held 4 internships and 3 jobs in her time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus women's initiative.  And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's degrees next year, Ms Smyers will be finishing her master's.  She says her intense motivation is not so unusual.  "The women here are on fire," she said.

The gender differences are not uniform.  In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education, whose report on these issues is scheduled for release this week.  Young men from low-income families, which are disproportionately black and Hispanic, are the most underrepresented on campus, though in middle-income families too, more daughters than sons attend college.  In recent years the gender gap has been widening, especially among low-income whites and Hispanics.  When it comes to earning bachelor's degrees, the gender gap is smaller than the gap between whites and blacks or Hispanics, federal data shows.  All of this has helped set off intense debate over whether these trends show a worrisome achievement gap between men and women or whether the concern should instead be directed toward the educational difficulties of poor boys, black, white or Hispanic.

"Over all, the differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, dwarf the differences between men and women within any particular group," says Jacqueline King, a researcher for the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis and the author of the forthcoming report.  Still, across all race and class lines, there are significant performance differences between young men and women that start before college.  High school boys score higher than girls on the SAT, particularly on the math section.  Experts say that is both because the timed multiple-choice questions play to boys' strengths and because more middling female students take the test.  Boys also score slightly better on the math and science sections of national assessment tests.  On the same assessments, 12th-grade boys, even those with college-educated parents, do far worse than girls on reading and writing.

Faced with applications and enrollment numbers that tilt toward women, some selective private colleges are giving men a slight boost in admissions.  On other campuses the female predominance is becoming noticeable in the female authors added to the reading lists and the diminished dating scene.  And when it gets to graduation, differences are evident too.  At Harvard, 55% of the women graduated with honours this spring, compared with barely half the men.  And at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a public university, women made up 64% of this year's graduates, and they got 75% of the honours degrees and 79% of the highest honours, summa cum laude.

Of course, nationwide, there are young men at the top of the class and fields like computer science, engineering and physics that are male dominated.  Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum - students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.  "My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students," said Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.  "But the range among the guys is wider."

From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed.  As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated.  Such difficulties can have echoes even in college men.  "They have a sense of lassitude, a lack of focus," said William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.  At a time when jobs that require little education are disappearing, Mr Mortenson predicts trouble for boys whose "educational attainment is not keeping up with the demands of the economy."

In the 1990's, even as women poured into college at a higher rate than men, attention focused largely on their troubles, especially after the 1992 report "How Schools Shortchange Girls" from the American Association of University Women.  But some scholars say the new emphasis on young men's problems - recent magazine covers and talk shows describing a "boy crisis" - is misguided in a world where men still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money and wield more power than women.  "People keep asking me why this is such a hot topic, and I think it does go back to the ideas people carry in their heads," said Sara Mead, the author of a report for Education Sector, a Washington policy centre, that concluded that boys, especially young ones, were making progress on many measures.  It suggested that the heightened concern might in part reflect some people's nervousness about women's achievement.  "The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys,  I'm troubled by this tone of crisis.  Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honours that matter, or something else the boys may be doing?"

Women in the Majority

What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing.  Women now make up 58% of those enrolled in 2- and 4-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.  Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60 - 40 ratio.  Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.  "The class we just admitted will be 52% female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.  While Harvard accepts men and women in proportions roughly equal to their presence in the applicant pool, other elite universities do not.  At Brown University, men made up not quite 40% of this year's applicants, but 47% of those admitted.  Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College.  And they make up particularly large majorities among older students.

The lower the family income, the greater the disparity between men and women attending college, said Ms King of the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis.

Thomas diPrete, a Columbia University sociology professor, has found that while boys whose parents had only a high school education used to be more likely to get a college education than their sisters, that has flipped.  Still, the gender gap has moved to the front burner in part because of interest from educated mothers worrying that their sons are adrift or disturbed that their girls are being passed over by admissions officers eager for boys, said Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor who has created the Boys Project ( boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys' troubles.  "I hate to be cynical, but when it was a problem of black or poor kids, nobody cared, but now that it's a problem of white sons of college-educated parents, it's moving very rapidly to the forefront," Dr Kleinfeld said.  "At most colleges, there is a sense that a lot of boys are missing in action."

Beyond the data points - graduation rates, enrollment rates, grades - there are subtle differences in the nature of men's and women's college experiences.  In dozens of interviews on 3 campuses - Dickinson College; American University; and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro - male and female students alike agreed that the slackers in their midst were mostly male, and that the fireballs were mostly female.  Almost all speculated that it had something to do with the women's movement.  "The roles have changed a lot," said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at American University, a private school where only 36% of last year's freshmen were male.  "Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society.  I don't think guys' willingness to work and succeed has changed, it's more that the women have stepped up."

Ben Turner, who graduated from American this spring, said he did not believe that work habits were determined by gender - but acknowledged that he and his girlfriend fit the stereotypes.  "She does all her readings for classes, and I don't always," Mr Turner said.  "She's more organised than me, so if there's a paper due a week from Monday, she's already started, and I know I'll be doing it the weekend before.  She studies more than I do because she doesn't like cramming and being stressed.  She just has a better work ethic than I do."

Ms Smyers, also at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games 4 hours a day.

"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.'  That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games.  It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

Many male students say with something resembling pride that they get by without much studying.  "If I take a class and never study, I can still get a B," said Scott Daniels, a 22-year-old at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.  "I know that if I'd applied myself more, I would have had better grades."

On each campus, many young men concluded that the easy B was good enough.  But on each campus, some had seen that attitude backfire.  Michael Comes arrived at Dickinson two years ago from a private school in New Jersey where he had done well, but floundered his freshman year.  "I came here with the attitudes I'd had in high school, that the big thing, for guys, is to give the appearance of not doing much work, trying to excel at sports and shine socially," Mr Comes said.  "It's like some cultural ADD for boys, I think - like Bart Simpson.  For men, it's just not cool to study."  So when he no longer had parents and teachers keeping after him, or a 10:30pm lights-out rule, he did not do much work.  "I stayed in my room a lot, I slept a lot, and I messed up so much that I had to go to summer school," Mr Comes said.  "But I'm back on track now."

On each campus, the young women interviewed talked mostly about their drive to do well.  "Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about," Ms Smyers said.  "But they also want a family, and that probably means taking time off, and making dinner.  I'm rushing through here, taking the most credits you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and establish myself as a career woman, before I settle down."  Her male classmates, she said, feel less pressure.  "The men don't seem to hustle as much," Ms Smyers said.  "I think it's a male entitlement thing.  They think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they'll still get a good job.  They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they'll be fine."

Such differences were apparent in the 2005 National Survey of Student Engagement.  While the survey of 90,000 students at 530 institutions relies on self-reporting, it is used by many colleges to measure themselves against other institutions.  Men were significantly more likely than women to say they spent at least 11 hours a week relaxing or socialising, while women were more likely to say they spent at least that much time preparing for class.  More men also said they frequently came to class unprepared.

Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found similar gender differences in her study of 17,000 men and women at 204 co-ed colleges and universities.  Using data from UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute annual studies, she found that men were more likely than women to skip classes, not complete their homework and not turn it in on time.  "Women do spend more time studying and their grades are better," Professor Sax said, "but their grades are better even more than the extra studying time would account for."  Researchers say such differences make sense, given boys' experience in their earlier school years.  And some experts argue that what is being seen as a boy problem is actually maleness itself, with the noisy, energetic antsiness and high jinks of young boys now redefined as a behaviour problem by teachers who do not know how to handle them.  There is also an economic rationale for men to take education less seriously.  In the early years of a career, Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania has found, college increases women's earnings far more than men's.

"That's the trap," Dr Kleinfeld said.  "In the early years, young men don't see the wage benefit.  They can sell their strength and make money."  At Greensboro, where more than 2/3 of the students are female, and about 1 in 5 is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick money and seeking the long-term rewards of education.  "A lot of my friends made good money working in high school, in construction or as electricians, and they didn't go to college, but they're doing very well now," said Mr Daniels, the Greensboro student, who works 25 to 30 hours a week.  "One of my best friends, he's making $70,000, he's got his own truck and health benefits.  The honest truth is, I feel weird being a college student and having no money."

Mr Kohn said it was, literally, an accident that he landed at Greensboro.  "In high school, I had a GPA of 1.9 and I never took the SAT's because I knew I wasn't going to college," he said.  "If you don't have goals, you don't set yourself up to be disappointed."  But soon after high school, Mr Kohn was in a serious car crash, and discovered in rehabilitation that the state would pay for community college.  To his surprise he did well enough to transfer to Greensboro, where he now plans to pursue a master's degree.  But when Mr Kohn overheard a freshman woman describing her plans, including 4 summer school courses to help her get a master's in education a bit earlier, he was bemused.  "For a freshman to be in such a hurry, it seems a little obsessive," he said.

Many of the young women studying at Greensboro have older brothers without college degrees, or younger brothers with little interest in college.  The 7 children of the Thompson family of Oxford, North Carolina embody the gender differences regarding education.  There are 3 men and 4 women in the family, ranging in age from 36 to 23.  Christina and Lynette, the two youngest, are both at Greensboro.  The two oldest daughters went to college, too.  But none of the sons got college degrees: one is a truck driver, one is autistic and living at home and one is a floor manager at a Research Triangle company.  "I think women feel more pressure to achieve," said Christina Thompson, a political science major who plans to go to law school.  "Right," said her youngest sister.  "In the past, black women in the South couldn't do much except clean, pick cotton or take care of someone's children," Lynette Thompson said.  "I think from our mother we got the feeling we should try to use the opportunities that are available to us now."  They and many other women at Greensboro say it is not bad to be on a campus with twice as many women as men because it encourages them to stick to their studies without the distraction of dating.

Maybe, said Ashleigh Pelick, a freshman who is dating a marine she met before college - but she teased a friend, Madison Barringer: "You know you'll go crazy if you never have another boyfriend before you graduate."  Ms Barringer, a 19-year-old whose parents did not go to college, laughed.  But she did acknowledge the gender imbalance as a possible problem.  "I know it sounds picky, but I don't think I'd marry someone without a college degree," she said.  "I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation."

Creating a balance of men and women is now an issue for all but the most elite colleges, whose huge applicant pools let them fill their classes with any desired mix of highly-qualified men and women.  But for others, it is a delicate issue.  Colleges want balance, both for social reasons and to ensure that they can attract a broad mix of applicants.  But they do not want an atmosphere in which talented, hard-working women share classes with less qualified, less engaged men.  The calculus is different at different institutions.  By administrators' accounts, American University has been relatively unconcerned to see its student body tipping female, faster than most others.  The admissions office said that its decisions were gender blind, and that it accepted a larger share of female applicants.  In an interview, Ivy Broder, the interim provost, seemed surprised, but not bothered, that American had a higher proportion of women than Vassar College, which formerly admitted only women.

American has no engineering school and no football team.  The faculty is attracting more and more women: a majority of the professors now on the tenure track are female.  Women on campus say there is great female solidarity.  What there is not much of, said Gail Short Hanson, the director of campus life, is a dating scene.  Said Ms Hanson: "If there's a dance, like the Founder's Day dance in February, do the women get their hair done?  Yes.  Do they get their nails done?  Yes.  But do they have a date?  Probably not.  So who do they dance with?  Whoever wants to dance."

If American University is comfortable being largely female, that is not the case on Dickinson College's charming but isolated campus in central Pennsylvania.  At a time when most colleges are becoming increasingly female, Dickinson has raised its proportion of men.  Even rarer is that Dickinson has publicly discussed its quest for gender balance.  Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment, began campaigning for more male students shortly after he arrived at Dickinson in 1999 and discovered that only 36% of the incoming freshmen were male and that the college had accepted 73% of the women who applied, but only 53% of the men.  Dickinson adapted to the growing female majority by starting a women's centre, adding a women's studies major and offering courses on Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.  In his effort to attract men, Mr Massa made sure that the admissions materials included plenty of pictures of young men and athletics.  Dickinson began highlighting its new physics, computer science and math building, and started a program in international business.  Most fundamental, Dickinson began accepting a larger proportion of its male applicants.  "The secret of getting some gender balance is that once men apply, you've got to admit them," Mr Massa said.  "So did we bend a little bit?  Yeah, at the margin, we did, but not to the point that we would admit guys who couldn't do the work."  Longtime Dickinson administrators say that at isolated campuses with their own social worlds, gender balance is especially important.  "When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women," said Joyce Bylander, associate provost.  "When men were so highly prized that they could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators.  It was an unhealthy atmosphere for women."

In education circles, Mr Massa is sometimes accused of practicing unfair affirmative action for boys.  He has a presentation called "What's Wrong With You Guys?" in which he says that Dickinson does not accept a greater proportion of male than female applicants, and that women still get more financial aid.  "Is this affirmative action?" Mr Massa said.  "Not in the legal sense."  He says that admissions to a liberal arts college is more art than science, a matter of crafting a class with diverse strengths.  Mr Massa reshaped Dickinson in one year.  Of the freshmen admitted in 2000, 43% were male, and in recent years Dickinson's student body has been about 44% male.  This year, Dickinson admitted an equal share of the male and the female applicants.  In the Dickinson cafeteria on a spring afternoon, the byplay between two men and two women could provide a text on gender differences.  The men, Dennis Nelson and Victor Johnson, African-American football players nearing the end of their junior year, teased each other about never wanting to be seen in the library.  They talked about playing "Madden," a football video game, 6 hours a day, about how they did not spend much time on homework.  "A lot of women want a 4.0 average, and they'll work for it," Mr Nelson said.  "I never wanted it because it's too much work to be worth it.  And a lot of women, they have everything planned out for the next 3 years."  Mr Johnson jumped in: "Yeah, and it boggles my mind because I don't have my life planned for the next 10 minutes.  Women see the long-term benefits, they take their classes seriously, and they're actively learning.  We learn for tests.  With us, if someone calls the night before and says there's going to be a test, we study enough for a C."

His female friends offered their assessment.  "They're really, really smart, and they think they don't have to work," Glenda Cabral said.  But they do.  After two years of good grades, Mr Johnson this year failed Spanish and Arab-Israeli relations.  "He called me the night before the test and asked who Nasser was," Julie Younes said, rolling her eyes.  At Dickinson, as elsewhere, men are overrepresented among the problem students.  Of 33 students on probation this year, all but 6 were male.  They account for most disciplinary actions, too.  "If it's outside-the-line behaviour, boys are pretty much the ones doing it," Ms Bylander said.  "This generation, and especially the boys, is technology-savvy but interpersonally challenged.  They've been highly structured, highly programmed, with organised play groups and organised sports, and they don't know much about how to run their own lives."  Men are underrepresented when it comes to graduation and honours; 83% of women who were Dickinson freshmen in 2001 graduated 4 years later, compared with 75% of the men.  Dickinson women, who made up just over ½ of last year's graduates, got slightly more than 2/3 of the cum laude, magna and summa degrees.

Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college.  The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures.  Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of "hikikomori" - young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.

At Dickinson, some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills.  Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.  This spring, Rebecca Hammell, dean of freshman and sophomores, counseled one such young man to withdraw.  "He was in academic trouble from the start," Ms Hammell said.  "He was playing games till 3, 4, 5 in the morning, in an almost compulsive way.  From early in the year, his teachers reported that he was either not coming to class or falling asleep once he was there.  I checked with the Residential Life office, and they said he was in his room all the time."

Of course, female behaviour has its own extremes.  In freshman women, educators worry about eating disorders and perfectionism.  But among the freshman men, the problems stem mostly from immaturity.  "There was so much freedom when I got here, compared to my very structured high school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just finished his freshman year.  "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo.  I didn't know how to wake up on time without a mom.  I had laundry problems.  I shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."

Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them.  Whether the male advantage will persist even as women's academic achievement soars is an open question.  But many young men believe that, once in the work world, they will prevail.  "I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power, the status, the CEO job," Mr Kohn said.  "And maybe society holds men a little higher."

Source: nytimes.com 9 July 2006

British School to Offer Happiness Lessons

In need of happiness lessons...

One of Britain's leading fee-paying schools is to offer classes on happiness to combat the malaise in society caused by materialism and celebrity obsession, its headteacher announced.  "We are introducing classes on happiness," said Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, west of London.  "We have been focusing too much on academics and missing something far more important."

A psychologist will oversee a pilot project teaching "happiness lessons" - or "well-being" as it is being called - from the start of the next academic year.  Pupils aged 14 to 16 will be given one lesson a week, learning skills such as how to manage relationships, physical and mental health, negative emotions and how to achieve one's ambitions.  The college's religious education staff will teach the course as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, conventional RE classes, said Seldon, who is also a political commentator and author.  "To me, the most important job of any school is to turn out young men and women who are happy and secure - more important that the latest bulletin from the Department for Education about whatever," he explained.  "Celebrity, money and possessions are too often the touchstones for teenagers and yet these are not where happiness lies.  Our children need to know that as societies become richer, they don't become happier - a fact regularly shown by social science research."

Wellington school was founded in 1853 and currently has 750 boys aged 13 to 18 and 50 girls aged 16+.  Fees range from £6,132 (€8,850 or $10,800) per term for day pupils to £7,665 per term for boarders.

Source: breitbart.com 17 April 2006 © AFP 2005

Schoolchildren to Be Given Lessons in Money Management

School children are to be given lessons to help them beat debt

School children will be taught about money in an attempt to halt the spread of financial incompetence, the Government has said.  The £11.5million 3-year My Money programme will show pupils how to draw up a budget, such as buying furniture for a new home without spending over a certain amount of money.  Other lessons could include how interest can quickly balloon on a credit card and how different types of mortgages work.

The scheme is part of a wider initiative from the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority, called the Financial Capability Action Plan.  It will also make legal advice for families at risk of repossession free at all county courts in England and increase awareness of debt advice charities.  Financial incompetence is a subject of growing concern, amid growing levels of unsecured debt.

In 2006, the FSA warned that there was an entire generation with no savings, no pension and huge debts.  In the worst examples, adults could not understand a basic bank statement or were buying building insurance on a rented property.  And the availability of ready money to children is on the rise.  Lloyds TSB recently came under fire for mailing debit cards to children as young as 11 without telling their parents.

Yvette Cooper, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: "Many families are feeling the pinch as a result of high fuel and food prices, and the impact of the credit crunch on mortgage lending.  But when people are facing money worries, they often don't know where to turn.  We need to make it much easier for people to get access to information, help and advice."

Source: dailymail.co.uk 7th July 2008

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