Down, Down, Down (Reflections On The Boy Crisis)
One hears often now that boys flounder in school, drop out, generally perform less well academically than girls, and don’t go to college. A certain amount of this commentary comes from women who seem quietly to enjoy the spectacle. Given that women control the schools, this might suggest that, if they are not actually causing the problem, neither are they in a hurry to do anything about it. Other people worry that the comparative superabundance of female college graduates will have no one to marry: While men will marry down, women won’t. Regarding all of which:
The cause is not that boys are stupid. Boys have higher average scores than do girls on standardized tests, for example, and at the high end are far ahead of the girls. Putting it straightforwardly, the very smart are predominantly male, particularly in mathematics, and the exceedingly smart, almost entirely so. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to think it fair. But it is a fact, and everybody in the field knows it.
Consider. The maximum score on each half of the SATs, both verbal and mathematical, is 800. You have to be, or had to be until the tests were recently dumbed down (“recentered,†I meant to say,“recentered.â€), quite bright to score an 800. In 1999, when I checked because I was writing a column, 1611 girls in the country scored 800 on the math section; 4815 boys did. Verbal? Girls, 2828; boys, 3087. The male average on the math SATs was 531. The female was 495. That’s not a trivial difference. Verbal scores? Males 509, females 502. The latter difference is slight and probably attributable the larger numbers of girls taking the test. The difference in math scores isn’t..
This embarrassing disparity has been widely known at least since the publication of Camilla Benbow’s paper in 1980 from Johns Hopkins. It remains despite alteration of tests (for example, National Merit) specifically to improve the scores of females, despite “recentering†of the SATs to make women and minorities look better at the high end. So what is the problem?
Whatever it is, it is new. I graduated in 1964 from a mediocre high school in rural Virginia. Demographically it was a bit of a curiosity. Many of the students were children of scientists and navy officers from Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory, and the rest rough country kids. There was no discrimination by sex in the curriculum, incidentally: All in the college track took two years of algebra, a year of plane geometry, and a year of solid and trig, for example. If your parents had gone to college, you went to college, regardless of sex. All the kids of educated parents graduated, and almost all of the others. The exceptions were a few truly witless boys (boys predominate at the low end of intelligence too).
There was no “boy crisis.†The girls made better grades, the boys better scores on standardized tests. There was no yawning gap.
In short, girls haven’t come up. They have always done well in school. Boys have gone down. Why?
I can guess. Boys are churning wads of energy. They are physical and competitive. They want to climb things, test themselves, jump off of things, explore, drive fast, fight, behave like damn fools, and sack cities. In later years this energy may serve them well, but not yet. School is hellish for them, with its year after year of sitting, bored out of their skulls, while some drone babbles. It is worse for the bright, verging on child abuse. They hate it. I did.
Girls are more orderly, patient, accept rules with less resistance, and do their homework. They have better handwriting and cut pictures from magazines to paste into projects. They finish assignments on time. In general girls are easier to deal with, certainly for the female teachers who now are almost the only teachers.
Now, 1964 was very different from today. Families were intact. I do not remember a single kid whose parents had been divorced. There was therefore a man in the house. Adolescent boys are wild men. A man can control them. A divorced woman often has a hard time controlling daughters.
There were men in the schools. We had a hard-eyed male principal, Larry Roller or, as we called him, Chrome Dome. You did not screw with Roller. He could, and would, expel on the spot any boy who seriously transgressed. (Girls just didn’t commit expellable offenses.) This of course meant that he almost never expelled anyone: We were teenagers, not suicides.
Discipline was not harsh. The boys clowned in class and engaged in pranks (I may know somewhat of this), but we knew where the limits were. There were a goodly number of male teachers, which helped us know the limits.
Further, parents would back up the teachers without question. If I had said, “Fuck you†to a teacher, the French Foreign Legion would have been my only choice. Facing my father would have been—how shall I put it?—unproductive.
Boys need someone who can control them until, in a few years, the internal controls are in place. Women can’t do it. Therefore we have police in the schools, and we drug boys into somnolence with amphetamines. Parents, instead of even trying to control their kids, will litigate.
Boys cease to be students and become problems, so teachers don’t like them.
Further, in the schools today we have feminization, feminization, feminization. Instead of treating girls like girls, and boys like boys, all are expected to be girls. It doesn’t work. Boys by their very nature like to roughhouse. They like contact sports. You don’t have to force them to play football. They are competitive. Women don’t understand this, and what they don’t understand, they outlaw. Today estrogenated school after estrogenated school bans dodge ball as too dangerous, outlaws tag (“They get too rough,†meaning too rough for Mrs. Teacher), and insists on “groups games led by a caring adult.â€
It is hideous for boys. Everything they are, it isn’t. “Ohhhhh, let’s have a caring non-competitive game….†If he is really bright, with an IQ north of 150, he will decide that his teachers are idiots, which most of them are, and withdraw. There will be a price for this one day.
You want to end the “boy crisis� Easy. Give boys male teachers who understand boys and care about them. Women do neither. Let them compete. It’s how they are. Encourage them to burn off energy in the gym. Reward achievement, not pretty projects. Turn them into men, not transvestites.
Nahhh, never happen.
More Scurrilous Commentary by Fred Reed is available at http://www.fredoneverything.net | More from Fred Reed
Stumble It!
July 9th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
I bow down and pay homage to the Intellect of the Common Sense Genius that is Fred Reed.
July 10th, 2006 at 12:07 am
Bravo…the only thing you might add is that insidiously, they are saying the more active boys are hyper, or autistic, and put them on drugs.
And if they are really intelligent from a young age, they are doomed.
July 10th, 2006 at 2:09 am
Why is the obvious so deluding to the people that are currently destroying boys and their education.
I sincerely hope that sometime in the future, the current educators, the people responsible for this will be held accountable for their actions and jailed.
July 10th, 2006 at 6:05 am
For those who can . . .home school.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:44 am
I’d love to home school, it’s not an option. But,
I do buy books Titled “What your child needs to know in (fill in the blank) grade”. We do it over the summer. It gives them a leg up. I could complain all day about the teachers but it’s counterproductive. So I do what I can to ensure they know what they need to know. My oldest is thrilled, he’s going into the 6th this year, this is the first time he’ll have a Man teacher. My middle is going into the 5th, he’s brilliant. so naturally he’s in Special ed. They pretty much get a new teacher every year, last year he had an exellent teacher(she’s a science wiz) they didn’t ask her back because the principal didn’t like her. Why get rid of a teacher that can hook boys?
Makes no sense.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:46 am
“Why is the obvious so deluding to the people that are currently destroying boys and their education.”
Perhaps destroying boys and their education is intentional by the educational establishment.
In 1992 the report “How Schools Shortchange Girls†was released by the American Association of University Women. This coincided with girls and women pulling ahead of the boys and men, academically, in enrollment, and graduation. It also coincided with a dramatic increase in political correctness and hostility towards men, and favoritism towards women in colleges. And it also coincided with a dramatic increase in the use of Ritalin for boys. (Funny how this boy problem requiring Ritalin never existed when I was a kid, and in fact never existed at anytime before. The use of Ritalin during a boys physical growing, and intellectually and emotionally developing years is, in my opinion, dangerous and damaging to boys (who will become men). It is a state-sanctioned chemical attack.)
You can’t have it both ways: 1.) either you are shortchanged, or 2.) you are being treated with unfair favortism. Pick one.
The problem is not a non-existent (and NEVER-existent) patriarchy. The problem is a matriarchy with an agenda at high levels.
Perhaps what is happening to boys has been engineered by the educational establishment, and in particular, by the American Association of University Women.
July 10th, 2006 at 9:08 am
I haven’t read anyone addressing the obvious fact, that over the same time period the atheists have stripped all references to a Christian world view from the text books, and from the classrooms. There is nothing more mind-numbing for the students than atheism, possibly even more boring for boys than for girls.
July 10th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Public schools are very much like federal prisons. There are activities to keep everyone busy, books to read and chores or time-outs for non-conformity or conflict. Every inmate/student must fit very precise behavioral parameters or be medicated or punished.
It is the system and the people who run the system who have turned education into nothing more than a daytime holding center for children. Of course the boys hate control more than girls. This is why they are more often on lockdown in prison, and more often on medication or time-out in school.
Boy crisis? Yes, but it’s only a symptom of a social reality that is constantly trying to regulate anything masculine out of existence. When will the work be done? When all women are masculine and aggressive, and most men are either girly-men or locked up. From the behavior of children and adults in the USA, it looks like we are getting closer to the goal.
July 11th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Public school is a government agency. A teacher is a government employee.
The U.S. government has been promoting the new liberal feminist agenda since the 1960s. The feminist rule is man bad, woman good.
For elementary school teachers and administrators (read government employees), the general rule is boy bad, girl good.
Feminism cause of the 1870’s moved from equal rights and opportunities for women to women are superior today.
I suppose this was caused because the group achieved their goals, but did not want to disband. I expect that their leadership, like NOW’s group, are paid well.
Also, our government continues to hire feminists to identify, process, and “help†all the bad men and boys. This helps expand government and their role in our lives.
The feminists put the government as head of the household and as boss in the workplace, and if boys or men do not agree, then they will end up in detention or worse jail.
The conservative cause is not helped, as the government’s feminist rule is promoted and glamorized by the liberal media and Hollywood.
Happily standardized test results are not controlled by the government, feminists or the media, however, they are mostly ignored now, with the exception of this article. Thanks.
July 11th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
By the year 2020 the percentage of U.S. population ages 55 and older is projected to be about 45% of the total population. Currently, our secondary schools nationally are nearing 50% Black & Hispanic nationally. The majority population of Caucasian is reproducing at a rate lower than for Blacks and Hispanics. In the Black community 70+% of families have no father. In second and third generation Hispanics this number is even higher. Communities without fathers have higher poverty and crime rates. Very few in the Black and Hispanic communities will be graduates from college. The population demographics are shifting so that the country as a whole is becoming significantly older.
In 20 years roughly half of the working population will be underemployed, in the undergound economy, or in jail. Out of wedlock births will be widespread. The other half will be
paying higher taxes due to social costs associated with this huge underclass plus the costs associated with an aging population. This half will also have to compete with very competitive workforces and much greater in size in India and China.
America’s overall world GNP and standard of living will drop. America will resemble the malaise of the U.K. in the 1970s.
Feminism and government policies that have discriminated against men and fathers are literally destroying America before our eyes. 20 years is not far away. Look at Europe and it’s feminist/secularist society. They do not compete well and have lost their entrepreneurial spirit decades ago. We are following their decent.
Feminism will not prevail because it will destroy
America as it has been doing for 40+ years.