Again with the books…still obsessed. Go Dr. Sax! Primarily these books focus on the issues that young boys and girls face. However, I am amazed at how the concerns you and I face as adults, are merely the offspring of unresolved issues we developed in our youth. It makes me think that if we were to address these concerns a little earlier in life things would be so much easier. Throughout the entire books, Dr. Sax mentioned problems that are closely related to the problems I hear weekly from matchmaking clients.
Let me try to highlight one. Kenntnis vs. Wissenschaft (German words…no idea how to pronounce them). Dr. Sax talks a lot about these words in “Boys Adrift.”
“…knowledge about a person or a place that you’ve actually experienced is Kenntnis,..;knowledge learned from books is Wissenschaft…”
Dr. Sax is a big believer of gender differences and gender specified learning. (Makes total sense to me…I actually think the concept is brilliant and wish I’d known more about gender differences in this regard while I was teaching Kindergarten!) He brings up this concept in the boys book because research shows that
“for boys in particular, emphasizing Wissenchaft [learning just from reading about something in a book] while ignoring Kenntnis [learning by more real world experience, hands on…] may seriously impair development – not cognitive development but the development of a lively and passionate curiosity,” resulting in a sort of “cultural autism.”
(Tell me you don’t think that half the people you have to choose from in your dating pool suffer from this??!!) And without boys having that passionate curiosity they lose motivation. Do you have any idea how many times I hear women classifying the majority of adult single men as lazy? I hear it daily. Maybe a man’s lack of drive can be adjusted with some real hand’s on experience? (No…not in that way you perverts!) It seems they may need to physically see and experience for themselves all that a women has to offer. Just because his mom saw her potential and hidden beauty does not mean it’s going to increase his motivation to pursue her. In a way maybe girls could help the situation out by sort of ‘proving’ themselves to a guy. (Girls don’t go getting all feminist on me…that’s a privilege we get to show ’em what we got! – and it seems to me it’s a part of our role.) Girls have to give them something to want through real life experiences! So that means it’s time to be out and about ladies, putting our best foot forward, helping increase a man’s motivation to ask us out!
Ok – that was one strong correlation that screamed out at me in this book. I realize I may have confused you…my bad. But I got more…
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