A recent article in Newsweek [1] describes this national crisis well. Here’s one symptom: “At many state universities the gender balance is already tilting 60-40 toward women.” The problem starts well before college, though:
By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn’t like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they’re a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, “has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy.”
Then again, there are many dysfunctional grade schools and high schools out there, where boys (and girls) are forced to sit still all day and where the teachers teach to standardized tests. To the extent that boys go to those many schools, isn’t it rational to rebel against the system? I’d like to find an article about how boys are doing in good schools.
Print this post [2]
[3]