Battling For Boys (How Schools Stifle Our Sons)
In the early 1980s, men and women earned an equal proportion of college degrees. Today, however, women attain 135 degrees for every 100 that men do, the National Center for Education Statistics recently reported. By 2016, it’ll be 162 to 100.
Since good jobs increasingly require a degree, that disparity portends disaster for men. And a disaster for half our population is a disaster for everyone.
Why the lack of male college graduates? One main reason is that K-12 education has been made girl-friendly at the expense of boys:
*Competition, a prime motivator for boys, has largely been replaced by “cooperative learning.”
*Readings about adventure and heroism are giving way to tales of relationships and heroines.
*Social studies now stress men’s ill-doings and women’s (and minorities’) contributions.
*Today, 91 percent of elementary-school teachers arewomen, the highest level on record. The main male role model most boys see in school is the custodian.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that a University of Michigan study found that the number of boys who say they don’t like school rose 71 percent from 1980 to 2001.
When boys get home, the lack of positive male role models and the assault on their self-esteem continues: TV portrays most men as buffoons or sleaze bags shown up by wise, confident women.
So is it any surprise that boys, more active than girls from birth, misbehave more in class? In decades past, they were simply called “active” and allowed to work off energy as the blackboard monitor or sent on an errand. Today, they’re more likely to be put on Ritalin. Over the last 20 years, the number of boys drugged with stimulants to control “hyperactivity” has risen 3,000 percent.
It hasn’t done much good. Boys’ reading achievement has fallen well behind girls’. Boys are 21/2 times as likely to drop out of high school, 51/2 times as likely to commit suicide and, as mentioned, far less likely to earn a college degree. In the ’60s, when more men than women obtained degrees, massive efforts were undertaken to redress the imbalance. Yet now, when men suffer the deficit, little is being done.
What should be done?
The media now take inordinate care to ensure that women and minorities are not unfairly portrayed negatively. Equal care must now be devoted to boys and men.
Schools claim to celebrate diversity yet insist on providing one-size-fits-all, girl-centric education. Whether in co-ed or single-sex classes, boys need boy-friendly instruction: more non-feminized male teachers, more competition, praise for boldness, more active learning (for example, simulation and drama) and less seatwork, less relationship-centric fiction and more how-to books.
Importantly, teachers must accept that boys will, on average, wiggle more than girls – and that it doesn’t require ongoing criticism – which, not surprisingly, leads to more oppositional behavior, to the school psychologist, to Ritalin or to special education.
Ironically, educated parents often do especially badly by boys. The college curriculum and the media consumed by the intelligentsia stress women’s’ accomplishments and men’s evils. So these parents too often feel justified in squeezing the maleness out of boys.
Of course, I’m not advocating that parents or teachers allow junior to become a savage. But we must realize that aggressiveness, bravery and competitiveness, channeled wisely, can be the stuff of which greatness is made.
We can refine but rarely remold, so we must honor males’ ways of being, just as we’ve been urged now for decades to honor females’. Apart from the effect on society, so many unnecessarily unhappy and underperforming children is, in itself, most sad. Over the past 20 years, I’ve noticed a dramatic shift in the boys I’ve counseled.
Twenty years ago, most were confident and ambitious. Now, disproportionately, they’re despondent or angry. The girls, by contrast, more often feel the world is their oyster. And they’re right – but it should be both genders’ oyster.
Boys advocate Joe Manthey reminds us that “when girls were behind in math and science, we said there’s something wrong with the schools. But now, when boys don’t do well in school, we say there’s something wrong with the boy.”
Let’s stop blaming the boy and start fixing our media, parenting and schools.
Marty Nemko, co-president of the National Organization for Men, is a career and college adviser. Visit his blog at www.martynemko.com
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Stumble It!
January 24th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
The boys can most certainly be saved. This will happen by the post-Baby Boomer generation of men. The Baby Boomer men are the worst generation of “men” this country has EVER produced. History is destined to be very unkind to these “men”. They sold out their own sons….their sons sons…and on and on. This country desperately needs a new generation of real men to make right all the wrongs right again. I for one am more than willing to fight for our boys.
January 24th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Denis, i think you hit the nail right on the head. Men/fathers prior to the baby boomer generation of men still looked after their boys. Then all the sudden they were conditioned to focus there attention on girls.
Focusing on the girls is fine, but not at the cost of near abandondment, and in some cases even hostility towards our boys!!
January 24th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Marty I just re-read you’re piece and will check out your web site. It notes you are a college advisor, god bless you sir!!
We are in desperate need of any males at all that are willing to discuss these issues in an Academic setting!!
January 24th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
denis: i agree 100% with you. i am 59 and my generation let itself get steamrolled by feminism. not me however. i kept looking and ended up with 3 divorces. gave up the search10 years ago. it is almost impossible to carry on an intelligent conversation with any women over 40 anymore. and it gets worse. nov08 will be the death of us all. cackle cackle cackle.
January 25th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Help! I’ve never seen such responses: Males bashing males.
How can Dennis blame men for the current state of disenfranchised young men? Central to radical feminism is the self-centered female that places her interest above that of family and children. Subsequent to the attempted ERA, radical feminism politically has controlled this nation. In a democracy composed of a majority of females, it is little wonder that women rule and politicians, male or female cater to the majority will be it feminine emotion and wishful thinking or male reason and logic.
“Is feminism a cure for which there is no disease, or a disease for which there is no cure?” – Richard F. Doyle
The last time men were nationally celebrated was 9-11 and until another national disaster of far greater magnitude occurs, nothing is going to change.
Modern technology promotes PC androgyny. Men have created our latest carrier based stealth aircraft that a trained orangutan can fly with full computer aids and in a PC photo op the Navy features a female test pilot. Only when the computers fail, and the male mathematical and spatial ability are necessary, will society again value men and forget political correctness. High technology supports apparent androgyny, but it doesn’t make men equivalent to women any more than a 44 mag makes a nerdy little Radar a Rambo when it comes to war.
As long as the female controlled academics can write articles like the December ‘07 Scientific American article “Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement ,Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?” concluding that we need to encourage girls rather than promote the white and yellow boys with IQ’s over 160 to cover our nation’s future technical needs. Ignore the reality that there are 30 males for every female with 160 IQ’s.
It is child abuse to subject our very intelligent young men to the female school teachers with hopefully and average IQ’s that insist on making them act like little girls.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Lloyd said:
“The last time men were nationally celebrated was 9-11 ”
Even then feminist groups were trying to distract from what men did. They wanted equal representation in any memorial erected to those who were going INTO the WTC when everyone else was coming out. That is, if they had a fireman, they also wanted a fire woman shown. To be truthful, before they showed one woman, they would have to have a memorial with about 300 to 500 men.
Of course we have seen that before, I remember the screams to reconize the women who died in Viet Nam equally with the men. If I remember that correctly, there were EIGHT female combat deaths…and 58,000 MEN.
I sure do not hear them screaming to pay the ultimate price at an equal rate.
January 25th, 2008 at 6:47 am
It is a very, very, very bad time to be a boy in America, and currently at least, their prospects when they become men are worse still. Fatherless, shamed, belittled and begrudged for being born male, it will get even worse for them in adulthood. Why should they have to suffer just because flaming liberals/feminists need somebody to hate?
January 25th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Quoting from my comments to the Scientific American article “Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement”:
What young children know from experience, supposedly educated elite tacitly deny. It’s ultimately Orwellian.
“Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.” – George Orwell, 1984
Western feminism promotes a belief that all men and women are equally endowed with a desire for dominance and control and possess an aptitude for same. All can be uplifted, and all brought to see that sexual equality is the one true path to peace in our world. In androgyny lies our salvation. Nothing could be more misguided.
No amount of wishful thinking or ideological zealotry is going to reverse the natural complimentary nature of men and women and make them identical.
“It may readily be conceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded, and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831
The genders are not equal in their innate ability to learn English or math, as they are not equal in their ability to play sports, music or chess any more than all males or females are equal. Clearly some of each gender has greater mental abilities, moral character and more pronounced physical attributes than others.
A second-grader knows that, but our “intellectual” elites reject it as bigotry and blasphemy against the egalitarian dogmas that define who they are.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:31 am
[...] It’s (still) a man’s world Published May 20, 2008 racism , sexism Tags: “boys’ crisis” Amy at Appetite for Equal Rights calls out Lionel Tiger for pushing the myth of the “boys’ crisis.” I’d like to add that most of the people pushing the idea of a “boys’ crisis” aren’t actually advocating for “boys” in general so much as they are lobbying for comfortably middle-class white boys. I say that because, well, there’s been a “boys’ crisis” in African-American communities for quite a while now, which is not even on the radar for most “boys advocates.” [...]