Let's play a little game of make believe shall we? Let's play "house" - and pretend to be a typical American family about five years from now- say in 2014.
In this scenario, Mommy is a CEO, serves on several Boards of Directors, and had her two kids in her late thirties. Daddy is at home full time, cooks dinner, coaches soccer and helps with homework at night. He dropped out of college, after struggling through high school, and can't find a well paying job to justify their childcare costs.
In our make believe game, there are two children. The daughter is getting all A's in school. She is the teacher's pet, class president, plays sports and is in honor's classes. The son likes sports, but hates most subjects in school, struggles with ADHD, and is fumbling. Both have the same amount of attention and opportunities at home, yet the daughter is going to Harvard and the son is going to Community College.
Now, before you get hot and huffy here about gender sexism, bear with me. This scenario is not far from the truth for our upcoming leaders of tomorrow. Since the 1970's feminism has opened up unparalleled opportunity for women to move forward in education and business. Is it perfect? No, but today's daughters are breaking glass ceilings and blazing trails.
However, there are glass shards and dead end roads being inadvertently left for the men, and the boys. In the past ten years or so, the world of education has changed dramatically. The "No Child Left Behind Act" has been a disaster, and instead has turned into "All Boys Left Behind." Our nation's boys are not just slipping through the cracks, they are washing down the Grand Canyon without a paddle, and something must be done about it.
Peg Tyre is author of the book, The Trouble with Boys, a #1 best seller, coming out in paperback this summer. Tyre spent five years researching the current education system from every demographic. She has a powerful, unrelenting story of how our young men are struggling, and describes a giant education gap that will affect every level of American life, in a very short period of time, as these kids grow up.
Currently, boys are being "expelled" from preschool four times more than girls. They are 60% more likely to be held back in kindergarten, and twice as likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities. Only 43% of young men are enrolled as undergraduates in college, girls are taking more AP classes in high school, and dominating as school valedictorians. In fact, a "dirty little secret" at many colleges and universities is the unspoken "new gender gap." Boys are being admitted to colleges with lesser qualifications than girls to keep the gender balance.
Even though the IQ levels are the same, boys are disengaging from the educational process from their very first moments in a classroom, and steadily falling behind with each passing year. Today 72% of girls and only 65% of boys are graduating from high school.
For struggling families, the child who does the best in school is the one who will be pushed the hardest - nowadays it is invariably a girl. This trend is a massive reversal of forty years ago, where the academic career's of the boys was pushed at the expense of the girls. How can we keep the scales balanced?
Tyre states:
"In some ways its nice to see women on top. But we have to ask who is going to bring up the children and who are these educated women going to marry? In America there are 2.5 million more girls than boys in college, and women tend to marry men of the same level of educational attainment."
If the pipeline that is sending our boys up through the education system is damaged, the catastrophic recession is smashing the other end of the pipe as well- leaving scores of men unemployed, depressed and unsure of where to go next. Statistics show nearly 80% of those losing their jobs from the recession are men. Many of them are helping out at home, and redefining the meaning of "stay at home dad."
Does anyone see the connection here? In our recent lifestyle of 80 hour work weeks, an average father currently only spends 30 minutes a day with their sons. Maybe our struggling boys need their struggling dad's. Maybe both their lives need to be filled with a little more wrestling, games of Spiderman and comic books, instead of endless meetings and boring classroom droning.
Jeremy Adam Smith has written a new book, The Daddy Shift, just released for Father's Day. Smith, a staunch profeminist, spent a year with their infant son as the primary caretaker, and writes a very intelligent and engaging blog called "Daddy Dialectic". He offers a positive spin on the profound importance of men being at home as transforming bread winning into care giving. Check him out on this one minute video:
"Many fathers feel helpless, useless or in the way, when instead fathers can serve as a bridge between the mother and the rest of the world," said Smith. "It is time to come up with a whole new set of rules."
Smith feels that hands-on dads handle stress better when facing issues of unemployment.
"Taking care of my children is the toughest challenge I ever faced, but facing it strengthened me and enlarged my life, and critically, it has helped many of us to survive unemployment,"Smith said.
I asked Smith if he has noticed any differences in how he parents vs. his wife's style.
"Primarily, I think there is not a huge difference between men and women as parents," he begins. "However, I do think father's wrestle more, and while many assume the maternal style is the gold standard, running around playing octopus is how we have fun and relate to each other."
I have great faith that having more men at home can help bring that critical masculine energy back into the nucleus of the family- there may be more sword fighting, squirt guns, and more hours of farting than flash cards. If boys can be empowered by men at home, ideally their ability to perform in school will increase. If more men are paying attention to how their sons are being taught and the obvious deficits they are facing, motivation will occur to take action and address their specific needs.
Let's hear it for the boys. How are your boys faring in school? How are the men out there handling the juggling domestic home front? Let's start a dialogue and your comments are warmly welcomed!
Follow Kari Henley on Twitter: www.twitter.com/karihenley
Also, No Child Left Behind is a failure for all children. Just because girls are doing a little better than boys doesn't mean the girls are recieving a quality education. I particularly found alarming the statement about boys being expelled from preschool - why would any child be expelled from preschool? Is it because the early pushing of academics and boys can't sit still as well as girls? Maybe we shouldn't be expecting 4 year olds to sit at desks and preform academically. Maybe they should be playing! And socializing! Getting fresh air and exercise! Learning about the world by being in it and being active! Art and music and skipping rope! We need creative thinkers and our public schools do not nurture that, unfortunately.
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By the way, just because the teacher is a male, he doesn't necessarily command more respect. It isn't about what sex they are.
I also have a disagreement with ADHA/ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. When a young boy doesn't sit still and remain quiet for hours on end it is now a disorder. So we force the active curious ones to sit still and learn from the boss of their daytime world and then become balanced adults. If we made litle girls run around and wrestle all day, would we expect them to develope feminine attributes? Of course this is a gross generalization, but it does express a valid perspective.
For example, playing online video games isn't really different from my penchant during my youth for spending hours upon hours playing pickup baseball and basketball. But then I would go home and finish the book I was reading from the stack I had brought home from the library or from my dad's bookshelves.
TV has been a babysitting tool since it was invented, too.
I read copiously since elementary school but yet my grades in junior high and high school were lackluster. Some of my teachers even confronted me about this because they knew that by ninth grade I could read at college level. But I just couldn't be bothered to do my homework and I often just tuned out what was going on in class because I wasn't interested. Ironically, I was asked to join my high school's Kiwanis Bowl team, which cracked me up because all the other members of it had 4.0 GPAs. I declined.
I was smoking lots of pot and drinking, too.
College was when I buckled down, graduating with honors and just short of a second BA in the bargain because I enjoyed the college environment and could actually study what interested me.
So different kids have different agendas that aren't served by the factory approach to education.
FWIW.
His life, and our lives have been negatively impacted due to the attitudes and practices described in this article and the war on boys had only just begun when he was in elementary school. Exactly as you described he "disengaged from the educational process" and we could never get him back on track. He has made some positive strides but the current situationis not so rosy. Maybe he needs to find a nice middle class career girl who's looking for a house husband & baby caretaker? I pray that things can change for boys coming up, especially boys coming from disadvantaged backgrounds - the prognosis is even worse for those boys as you can well imagine.
Sadly, in my son's case the damage has already
most comments questioning the conclusion of the article either don't have sons, or their sons have done well in the system or believe that parents are to blame or it's girls' turn or .... Here is the point that seems to be missing - when any child fails to reach their educational potential they are not the only ones to suffer a consequence - we as a society suffer. THAT is the point.
We as a society need to have educational models that encourage, support, prod each and every child to identify his and her gifts and talents and interests and feed their capabilities. Our schools are NOT automats where a child goes puts in his or her time and receives the meager offering. Teaching is a title that means aiding learning.
I am a teacher. If a child does not get it then I have failed along with that student. If a child testing in the 80th or 90th percentile is at the bottom of the class then I have failed.
When large numbers of children, male or female, are not functioning at their academic potential something is wrong with our schools. Period.
1. A changing classroom culture:
Discipline has become stricter (sit, down, shut-up, no recess, 12 minutes for lunch, no toys to school) followed by Afterschool Care/Sports teams with much the same rules
-Boys have more energy and trouble following rules so this is harder on them
2. A changing perception of women:
Females are now valued for being smart, so boys and girls compete in the classroom
-Until 90's being an intelligent woman was not actually a good thing, often it still can make you an outsider.
In my opinion, giving kids more time during the day to play might help. Parents spending more time with them might help too. But that won't do anything for teenagers and college age kids. Right now men still have the lead in graduate school, but I don't think they'll keep it, because I said, they aren't competing (woman feel like outsiders when they get pHds). Maybe women are inherently better at school.
The idea that school doesn't give enough recess, that boys' energy isn't being released...It's boggling my mind. In the 60s and 70s, we sat ALL DAY in my Catholic school classrooms. We even ate lunch at our desks, in the classroom! And the math and grammar skills I came away with in 8th grade are better than what most kids graduate high school with today.
I'm not advocating a return to that hellish treatment, but the idea that our poor boys aren't doing well because girls are being catered to is just nonsense. First of all, girls like to play too. The sexual stereotypes here are making my head spin. Girls don't all love sitting down and playing princess games. And guess what? Lots of boys (most) aren't very good at sports and want to be involved in other (sit down type) activities.
If anything, this jihad against the schools and the underpaid, underappreciated teachers is just a convenient place for angry men and disappointed parents to pass the blame.
Really? wow.
I went to Catholic school in the 60's and 70's myself. We went home for lunch, walking home under our own steam All students in both public & private schools did.
Moms didn't work back then.
The only students who didn't go home for lunch were those who took a school bus and lived too far away to walk home. In fact, my neighborhood public school was still sending kids home for lunch in the late eighties, well after the rosy old days of stay at home moms had ended.
We did not have daily recess at the Catholic school I attended but we did have recess about twice a week weather permitting, we also had time to run around and play in the schoolyard when we returned from lunch if we got there before the bell - our lunch period was an hour long. Although strict, the nuns always treated us with dignity, and they had high expectations for our academic success. Most of us rose to their expectations. Few of the public school teachers I've come into contact with as a parent can hold a candle to even the "worst" nun from my Catholic school days.
Holding teachers and schools accountable to those they serve is not a "jihad" - aren't you being just a bit melodramatic?
I also fly airplanes, build things, repair and restore cars, coach sports, and lots of other guy things. If the instruction manuals, training materials, parts lists, tool catalogs, I use in my life were written by education professionals, nothing would ever get done as I burned every one. I see the irony of a lawyer crabbing about jargon, but we have been eliminating it from our profession for years and it is nearly gone. Teachers need to do the same.
Teaching is now completely dominated by women. This is not a good thing for boys. There is evidence in the results. And for video games, my son will drop his as soon as he has something more interesting to do. And right now, that is certainly not school.
But I certainly do agree that the education a teacher receives is a joke. It's all jargon. An MBA without the networking. That's why the Teach for American program is so successful -- bright, enthusiastic, well-educated students from top colleges spend a few years teaching in the worst schools imaginable, with more success than those who have been trained as teachers. This is important because the data show that the single greatest determinant of kids' success in school is the teacher. So it's important that we learn to identify teaching talent, and figure out how to develop it.