In his book, The Minds of Boys, Michael Gurian writes that our sons are falling behind in school and life. According to Gurian, one of the problems lies in the way our boys are being educated. I agree.
For many years, educators have acknowledged the fact that different adults learn differently. Some learn best from lecture, some from action. While research has indicated for many years that such differences in learning style exist among children as well as among adults, our educational system has ignored the fact. One of those key findings? Boys and girls, on average, learn differently.
The impact of inadequately educating any of our children is immense. We are seeing one such impact today among our boys. Because our elementary and secondary schools treat all students as if they were female, boys are taught to sit and be quiet when they need to be learning in an active and sometimes physical manner. Because of this feminization of our schools, boys are not gaining the education that they need to be successful.
In the book, Angry Young Men, Aaron Kipnis points to research that shows:
· When boys and girls equally misbehave, boys receive more frequent and severe penalties
· Boys receive 8 to 10 times the reprimands of girls, most likely in front of the class (while girls are more often taken aside)
· Boys receive 71% of school suspensions
· Boys are victims of the majority of school violence
· Boys are referred to special education 4 to 1 over girls
· Boys drop out of school 4 to 1 over girls
· Boys have lower grade point averages than girls and fail to graduate more than girls
· Girls outperform boys in reading and writing by greater degrees than boys ever outperformed girls in math and science
· Boys are the minority of valedictorians, academic scholarship winners, new college students, and those going to graduate school
Clearly, boys are not being given the same opportunity as girls in our schools. The impact on their academic and social success is immense. But, it goes beyond that. People who are required to be in a situation within which they cannot succeed will either leave (physically or emotionally) or they engage in acting-out behavior. Both are designed to mask the sense of shame that they feel in response to their sense of inadequacy and/or incompetence. In some cases, the result is violence. This occurs much more frequently in boys than in girls.
Here is one example. In all of the incidents of targeted school violence that have been studied to date, the shooter was male. William Pollack has noted that “I believe they are all boys because the way we bring up boys in
When this happens, it is rarely a surprise. Boys who are feeling the shame and humiliation of failure resulting from an ineffective educational system show clear signs. Most have engaged in some behavior that caused concern to school staff and that indicated a need for help. Until the schools begin to address the issues causing the shame in boys they will need to be vigilant for these signs and they will have to try to manage the effects on boys after the fact. Of course it would make more sense to prevent the damage in the first place.
As I have talked to educators about this reality, most agree with what I have written here. Most offer no solution. Yet the solution is clear. Undoing the feminization of American public education would be a great start. This would require individualized educational plan for boys and girls. That would require acknowledging gender differences (something the left despises).
Therein lays the problem. The feminization of American public education has been carried out by the hand of the far left. It has been designed to weaken
