Education and Gender

In the 2008-2009 school year, women received the majority of the U.S. doctorial degrees for the first time. This should not be a huge surprise because women have received the majority of BS and MS degrees since the 1980s, and women received 49% of doctorial degrees in the 2007-2008 school year. Men continue to earn approximately three-fourths of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) doctorates.

According to BBC, girls believe they are cleverer, better behaved, and work harder than boys. Boys believed they were equal at the ages of 4-6, but then agreed with the female students by age 8. Researchers questioned 238 students at two primary schools in Kent, England. This research was presented by Bonny Hartley at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association.

I don’t want to accidently offend someone by summarizing this from my point of view, so please read, and let me know what you think: Geek-aversion May Explain Lack of Women in Computer Science

12-Year-Old Takes the Initiative to Run a School in her Village

At the age of 12, Bharti Kumari, is the head teacher at her school in Kusumbhara, an Indian village. Each morning and each evening after Bharti Kumari attends her school that is a 2-mile walk away from her home, she teaches the English and math learned during her school day to 50 village children who are not enrolled in school. The children at her school are between the ages of 4 and 10 years old, and they are among the 10 million Indian children that are not able to attend school because of poverty.

As an infant, Bharti Kumari was abandoned at a railway stations in Bihar, India. Her adoptive father, Rampati, encourages his daughter to continue her learning in school rather than continuing the rural tradition of pushing young girls into marrying.

Dr. Sugata Mitra: Unsupervised Learning

Most people would agree that there is no replacement for a good teacher, but what happens when the good teachers do not want to go where they are needed the most? In this TED Talks video, Dr. Sugata Mitra argues that every country on earth has regions where good teachers are needed but are not available. He also has suggestions for improving these situations.

Mitra says, “Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.” He experimented with the ways children will drive their own education by placing computers (without instructions) in various areas of the world such as embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi, India; then observed the students' interaction with the devices and the students' ability to identify and make use of its resources. Mitra found that the children’s interest in the computers allowed the students to work together to educate themselves in using the hardware and software and in navigating the Internet to find the answers to both simple and complicated questions.

I encourage you to watch the video and check out Hole-in-the-Wall , a learning methodology created by Dr. Sugata Mitra .