Boys and American Education

Hello Troops,
Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D. is director and senior fellow at The Beverly LaHaye Institute. In a recent article she discusses a growing problem with boys and schools. I've seen this trend myself and am concerned that we, as educators, should find ways to reengage boys in learning.

Your Thoughts?

Mr. Williamson

What's Happening to Boys in our Schools?

More and more men are lagging behind women in educational attainment and thus lack the credentials to compete in the marketplace. Take college graduation: 34 percent of women (ages 25 to 34) have earned degrees compared to 27 percent of men. This fact alone leads to fewer men in graduate schools and in the high prestige and high salaried jobs. Even in areas typically dominated by men -- like law, medicine, and business -- women are excelling and their numbers and proportion are growing in comparison to men. Clearly, in our eagerness to level the playing field for women we have seriously destabilized the balance between the sexes to the detriment of males. Kathleen Parker was right when she challenged our culture to "save the males." As Christina Hoff Sommers said in her book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, the fact that "women are significantly more literate, significantly more educated than their male counterparts" is likely to create a "lot of social problems;" the lack of enough well-educated men does not "bode well" for anyone, particularly the growing numbers of sophisticated women.

Increasingly, men are finding their identity in their hobbies (fishing, hunting, racing, sports, etc.) instead of their careers (where they are falling behind women in achievement and status) or their roles as family providers and protectors -- both categories scorned by feminists. Previous generations of men had clearly identifiable roles and opportunities to show their physical prowess and courage -- through providing for and protecting their wives and families both at home and against the nation's enemies at war. Men knew that they were needed; today, young women are told that they "don't need a man" for anything. Males used to become "men" when they "took a wife" and assumed adult responsibilities. Now, instead of serious, dignified, and decisive male role models in the movies -- like Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper -- males today are more likely, as Kay Hymowitz observes, to identify with and to emulate "overgrown boy actors like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen."

As a society, we must revive those values and ideals that provided strong incentives for young men to pass the tests of adulthood. The first steps of a solution are quite simple: we must begin by (1) scorning and ostracizing those men, no matter how rich and famous, who fail to take up the responsibilities of being a husband when they father a child and (2) demanding that our public school teachers unlearn those pernicious myths absorbed in college and graduate school and start re-creating an environment, starting in kindergarten, that respects masculine traits and behaviors: that is to say, stop demanding that little boys act like little girls and punishing or medicating them for acting like little boys. Less than this is, on the one hand, to continue to accept what is unacceptable, and on the other to continue to discriminate against our sons and brothers.

We will not succeed in making a new start until we stamp out the myth that young women can do just as well without a man. Unless we change that thinking, our society will be the poorer. As long as the male half of the population is disparaged, denigrated, and infantilized, they will lack the motivation to "man up" and become responsible and accomplished men.