The Problem With Boys

What changes would you recommend if you were told that African-American children were:

• four to eight times as likely to be drugged with Ritalin and other stimulants, which pediatrician Leonard Sax, calls “academic steroids.”
• reading much more poorly than are other students.
• three times more likely to commit suicide.
• 2 1/2 times as likely to drop out of high school.
• severely underrepresented in college and even more so among college graduates, thereby locking them out of today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, knowledge economy.
  
  You’d likely invoke such words as “institutional racism” to justify major efforts to improve African-Americans’ numbers.
  
  All of the above statements are true except for one thing: those statistics aren't about African-American children. They're about children of all races, indeed half of all children, half of our next generation: boys.
  
  When a disparity hurts females or minorities, major efforts are implemented to redress the situation. Why not with boys? In our politically correct world, if you point to an inequity against women or a minority, you’re considered heroic, but dare you point out a deficit suffered by men, you’re demonized as a whiner or anti-female. Today’s media leaders, when in college, were relentlessly told how oppressive men are, so now, these media gatekeepers usually refuse to publish male-positive pieces. So, except for a few minimally influential books and articles, all we continue to hear is an endless, often unfair drumbeat about how girls and women continue to be shortchanged. For example, there’s that ubiquitous bogus statistic that women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. Meanwhile, the media, when it mentions boys at all, insist that boys are doing just fine. For example, a Time magazine cover story, The Myth About Boys, declared “Boys are all right,” implying that those horrifying statistics cited above are somehow outweighed by tiny recent gains in test scores (which, by the way, are dwarfed by girls’ gains.)
  
  And our schools continue to get ever more feminized. Competition, one of boys’ favorite motivators, has largely been excised in favor of “cooperative learning,” (which, in the real world, usually means that the bright do the dull’s work.) Stories of heroism and bravery are replaced with tomes about relationships and female heroes. Recess, the only opportunity for active boys to release pent up energy is increasingly replaced by yet another round of phonics. Girls are told they can accomplish anything while boys are taught that masculinity is an anti-social trait that must be extinguished.

The percentage of female K-12 teachers has risen to an all-time high: 76.3 percent. In elementary school, it’s well over 90 percent. The main role model boys see in school is the custodian. And when boys get home from school, the male role models get worse. Whether watching a sitcom, movie, cartoon, or commercial, the odds are good that the male is a buffoon or sleazebag while the female is savvy and confident. Males are primarily responsible for creating the cars we drive, the buildings we live in, the computers we use, and the medical discoveries that save our lives, yet if a Martian descended upon earth and watched TV, he’d conclude that men are disposable. If role models matter, how do you imagine boys are affected by all this?

What to do? Children’s mindmolders are the media, schools, and family. Each has a role:

The media now takes inordinate care to ensure that women, minorities, and gays are not disproportionately portrayed negatively. Equal care must now be given to boys and men.

Schools claim to celebrate diversity yet insist on providing one-size-fits-all education. Whether in co-ed or single-sex classes, boys need boy-friendly instruction: more  male teachers who have not been trained to de-boy boys, more competition, praise for boldness, more active learning (for example, drama and simulation) and less seatwork,  less relationship-centric fiction and more stories of adventure and heroism,  teachers’ accepting that boys will, on average, wiggle more than girls--and that does not require ongoing criticism, which, not surprisingly, leads to more oppositional behavior, to the school psychologist, to the little yellow bus of special education, and even more often to Ritalin.  Now, by high school age, according to a report in the New York Times, one in five boys have been diagnoses with ADHD.