evolution

Every news story has an angle. See if you can spot this one’s:

Colleges are beginning to study this with anxiety, though they point out the problem appears to start by the time boys reach middle school.

“It’s not just a blip, it’s growing as a continuous trend,” said Ron Matson, chairman of the department of sociology at Wichita State University.

“I see what is going on here is sort of a defection of men out of the mainstream.“

And:

Many parents now invest money and hopes in their girls, “because the boys don’t have the grades” in high school, said Su Li, a WSU sociologist who did her doctoral dissertation last year on why more women go to college.

Several WSU women said part of the reason they go to college is that they know they can’t depend on men for marriage, commitment or a double income.

It is good that women are asserting intellectual rights after centuries of suppression, Matson said. “It’s about time. We should celebrate this.”

And it’s still a man’s world: Women earn 75 cents for every dollar men make. Women are shut out of the CEO jobs of nearly all the Fortune 500 companies. College women still focus on professions such as nursing and teaching, leaving lucrative professions like engineering largely to males.

But something dark and weird is going on with young men, Matson said. Where are they?

“They are playing video games,” he said. “Or withdrawing from society, and with computers and television, you can do a lot of withdrawing.

“I look at my kids and grandkids and think, holy smoke, what kind of world will they inherit?”

And:

Sociologists, teachers, parents and the boys find plenty to blame. Laziness. Video games. Peer pressure. Pop culture. Absent fathers. Schoolwork too focused on assessments.

And:

“Let’s not go there,” Matson said. “If wiring had anything to do with it, history would have had us omit blacks and women and gays and people with disabilities from education long ago. We need to fix education; we need to fix the culture of masculinity.”

Wren and some teachers say boys really are different, although she doesn’t think they should be taught differently.

“We ought to improve education for everyone.” But she wonders whether teachers need to better understand the boys.

“Girls are more willing to sit still and do what they are told and take notes all day. I’m not sure boys have ever done that.”

“Boys fidget more, they are much more active. The very things that get them kicked out of a class — talking out of turn, not doing what they are told — are things that make them boys.”

Gosh. It sounds that, from what I’ve noted, being a boy is not such a good deal after all.

This is a particular pet peeve of mine — that people can’t seem to bring themselves to admit that men and boys really are different from women and girls — and that neither is necessarily better or worse than the other. This is the simple truth, subconsciously obvious to everyone, that dare not speak its name. It has been in evidence for many years — Christina Hoff Summers wrote her book about this phenomenon seven years ago.

How did this happen? The warrior in me wants to blame leftist political correctness, whose adherents are found in vast numbers in public schools. It is certainly a large element of the cause. But, to blame it all on that is too simplistic. There are many other things which I feel are contributing factors. Some of these, as I’ve written, can also hurt girl students as well:

• The lack of competition in schools. I was fairly successful in grade school. I remember that a strong component of that was a sense of competition — not success for its own sake, but to “beat” the people I didn’t like. Competition is something absent from public schools today. Now, I’m not talking about a social-Darwinist free-for-all. It has to be toned down in intensity — after all, not everything is a competition, and we still have to be able to reach girls. We should not, however, pretend that competition doesn’t exist in the world at large.
• Mind-numbingly dull material. Teachers are in competition as well, against the myriad forms of media — TV, Internet, video games, music — out there in which boys (and girls, though less so) participate. This takes us in two directions: one is public-school teachers are generally not allowed by districts devise appropriate strategies for their specific collections of students. “We’re USD #NNN and here we use method XXX” is something I’ve heard a lot. The flip side of that is the second thing: what’s out in the culture is so brain-dead and devoid of curiosity or passion. But, something has to fill the void left by the tedium of school, and so we’re caught in a vicious cycle.
• Constant testing. Let me tell you, nothing quite breaks the flow of a class like a standardized test. This break in flow leaves room for distractions and diversions from learning — distractions we increasingly cannot compete against. It also insures that material already covered will be recycled once again, leading to further tedium.

Sometimes I think that although boys do rebel, they will also reach out to someone who will lead them — someone to say “this is what we’re going to do, this is how we will do it, and this is what we will accomplish by doing so.” These leaders, having been drained of their life’s blood in the politically-correct era, are becoming fewer and further between.

There’s one more factor related to leadership that deserves serious consideration. I became acutely aware of this in the context of race†, but I think it holds in the context of gender as well (and so it goes double for black boys): Consider for a moment who a typical sixteen-year-old boy has dealt with for authority figures throughout his life. He has his mother — and if his parents are not among the three-fifths of married couples whose marriages end in divorce, his father. If not — maybe he has a loving stepfather (and it ain’t the same), maybe he doesn’t. If he’s extraordinarily lucky, as I was, one or more of his grandfathers is around.*

Who else does he have? For nine months every year in the last twelve, he will be more than likely to have had a seemingly unending string of (white**) female taskmasters. Who’s telling him to sit up straight, to tie his shoes, to carry the one, to share the colors, “do what he’s told”, and so forth? This is less likely to be so in high school, but is still more likely than not.

There is much more to say about this topic, but rather than be more long-winded than I already have I’ll end here. Suffice it to say that what we have here is a fairly predictable but complex problem that will require a multi-pronged solution. The continued alienation of boys is a massive societal problem waiting in the wings for us.

†: My school had, I’d say, roughly 35% black students. How many black teachers out of 112 did we have?

*: My maternal grandparents lived next door for most of my childhood. So, when I found trouble, I usually found it twice.

**: I could play the stereotypical alienated white man here. But the biggest target of this phenomenon are black men. They have been, by this point, hearing for years in the media about how black men are inadequate in school, in society, in fatherhood, and in marriage. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems in the black community to be addressed; but I think that what I’ve said here could provide insights on how to address them.