Boys... seems like we are mostly raising Girls nowdays where some are allowed to play a little rougher than others.
Posted on 07/27/2007 2:45:26 AM PDT by Lorianne
A growing congregation of writers have begun to argue that the trouble with boys is mostly a myth. Sara Mead is one; she was until recently a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington think tank largely funded by the Gates Foundation. Intrigued by the wave of books and articles about failing boys, Mead crunched some numbers, focusing narrowly on the question of school performance. The former Clinton Administration official concluded that "with a few exceptions, American boys are scoring higher and achieving more than they ever have before."
In particular, Mead decided that boys from middle- and upper-income families--especially white families--are doing just fine. "The biggest issue is not a gender gap. It is these gaps for minority and disadvantaged boys," she told me recently in the think tank's conference room. Boys overall are holding their own or even improving on standardized tests, she said; they're just not improving as quickly as girls. And their total numbers in college are rising, albeit not as sharply as the numbers of girls. To Mead, a good-news story about the achievements of girls and young women has been turned into a bad-news story about laggard boys and young men.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Nice way for an alleged writer to start an article.
It would help if people would quit stereotyping, thinking that all boys are alike and all girls are alike. Individualism, not collectivism...isn’t that what true conservatism is all about? I’m tired of hearing that I’m supposed to vote for the candidate with the ‘D’ by their name just because I’m a woman.
Nice way for an alleged writer to start an article.
Well, at least you know up front they planned to get together and they're all singing from the same (politically correct) hymnal.....
I, for one, hadn’t heard of any ‘myth’ about boys. Sounds like another ‘create a mountain out of a molehill so we can get credit for proposing a solution.’ And yes, I’m skeptical of anything coming from TIME magazine.
Hear, hear.
probably funded by ritalin producers.
Stereotypes are shortcuts most of us use to avoid having to think everything through all the time - so people won’t ever quit using them. Gender roles and stereotypes about behavior, like most stereotypes, are at least true enough in enough cases that we continue to use them. Of course, it would be helpful (as you note) if people were more alert to the variations in both women and men, and viewed the stereotypes as more rules of thumb (rebuttable presumptions if you will) than normative prescriptions.
Since he doesn’t know how to make subject and verb agree, a grammar check program for his computer might be a good investment.
This reminded me of book I have been meaning to read for some years now called The War Against Boys. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sommers-war.html Thanks for the reminder.
Boys... seems like we are mostly raising Girls nowdays where some are allowed to play a little rougher than others.
Especially when the woman candidate with D by her name says ‘we have to do something about this cult of the individual’.
Sadly, we’ll keep right on hearing that message day in and day out. The left is in full propaganda mode and will be relentless. They think they see way clear now to achieve their four main goals. First is the the socialization of the country. Second is the destruction of a national identity. Third is the destruction of our ability to dominate the world economy. Fourth is the destruction of our military power.
The left suffered a set back with the Bush choices for the Supreme Court. But it has achieved another of its goals and that is to politicize education and dumb down the population.
What’s really disheartening is the large number of people who are clueless one way or the other. The other day I was speaking with an otherwise intelligent and college- educated co-worker about democrat presidential candidates. He told me he was partial to McCain. I asked him if he thought McCain was a democrate and he said yes. Then I asked him why he favored McCain. He was unable to cite one specific reason.
Conserveababe, we are in the wilderness right now. Our survival as a Republic is in doubt.
Yea, I guess its a myth that only 35 % of college entrants this year are men, and 85 % of valedictorians are women and so on and so forth. 80 % of school teachers are women and the Union is very liberal, but everything is honky dory, dont believe what you read. No bias here, move along.
WTF? I think virtually this entire article is a distortion. Boys are more obese (recently in TIME), they are leaving the workforce (Govt stats), prison nos. are up especially among Blacks.
Even the one concession she makes is dishonest
Reading, however, is a problem. The standardized NAEP test, known as the nation's report card, indicates that by the senior year of high school, boys have fallen nearly 20 points behind their female peers. That's bad, not because girls are ahead but because too many boys are leaving school functionally illiterate. Pollack told me of one study that found even the sons of college-educated parents had a 1 in 4 chance of leaving school without becoming proficient readers.
Even here, though, there may be grounds for a hopeful outlook. Boys at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels are showing modest improvement in reading and now trail their female classmates by slightly smaller margins than before.
Can you spell "disinformation" ?
Interesting when you combine this with the recent article (http://health.yahoo.com/news/177766) discussing the 'socially contagious' aspect of obesity - the more you're around obese people, the more likely you are to gain weight (and become obese) yourself. As your expectations of what's acceptable change, your habits tend to change.
So it's a self-reinforcing behavior that will tend to expand until some exogenous event changes things.
It may be true enough that white, upper-middle class males are doing OK, but what's clear is that the way in which schools have changed over the past 30-odd years have made them far more conducive to female achievement and less conducive to male achievement. Personally, I see no reason schools couldn't do both - even in same sex schools if necessary. In the dark dim past, the boys who performed best often when to all boys prep schools and all boys elite public high schools, and the best performing girls went to all girl prep schools (there were few, if any, all girls elite public high schools that I know of) and all girl parochial schools.
While stereotypes are never more than rough guides to the interests and abilities of most boys and <>most girls, there are most of the time significant differences in interests and learning styles between boys and girls.
Single sex education isn't for everyone, but it should remain a viable, readily available option, both at the secondary and college levels. On the other hand, it's hard to know what to do when you have women or men who really do want the challenge of the formerly all-male or all-women's colleges. VMI represents a fair example of the former: since the government forced VMI to go coed in 1997, there have been a small, but steady, number of young women who really want the VMI experience (the women must meet male PT norms and are pretty much treated the same in the Rat Line), and who succeed. I don't think the presence of women has been good for VMI, but I have to respect and even admire the young women who've earned the right to be Brother Rats of their classes.
Translation:
Black males are complete failures and that's throwing the average of all males into the dump. Education is a White 'thang.' (remember that?)
Our 12-year-old daughter is a voracious reader, as are most of her girlfriends. Most of the sons of our friends, on the other hand, are video-game addicts.
Yes. I found myself doing this the other day. I ran into a former friend’s nine year old daughter, and I asked her how she likes being a big sister (to a 1.5 year old brother). She sighed and said she didn’t like it because he is always throwing things at her, hitting her, yelling at her and screaming no all the time. Then, I slipped into the stereotype... I said, ‘That’s pretty normal for boys that age.’ But is it really??? In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that no, that behavior is not normal for a boy that age. After my silly statement, the girl said, ‘I wish I had a sister.’. LOL.
Well, at least he got one thing right.
LOL—Yes, I guess he did at that. Ignorence is bliss as they say.
Theyre actually not, as studies by Hoff and others have shown. And even her own statistics allude to that; readung SAT scores are way down (when looking normalized to normalized) and math scores are down slightly. In fact, girl scores are pretty flat too, its just that they are so much higher than boys now (we're still talking white middle class)
The biggest stat she avoids is who goes to college nowadays.There are 80 million more people in the US today than 30 ys ago and the no. of boys attending is about the same(Black males in college is actually up)..So how good can things be really?
She needs to beat the crap out of him.
I have noticed in recent years the very top of the classes being women - largely I think because the best male students were also 2-3 sport varsity athletes as well.
The kids in your area seem to be upper upper middle class, so maybe we won't count that! :}
Actually, you suggest a good talking point. The Ivies and a few others are the schools that get the high achieving boys from your neighborhood and like places , and their ratio of boys to girls is still 50-50. But most of the other schools, even the upper part of the second tier is seeing a dearth of qualified boys attending. In fact, Boston U recently instituted reverse quotas; boys with lower SATs than girls are being let in (the ratio of girls to boys there was 67 to 33 recently)
It is in fact a real problem that the litigous "women's right advocacy groups" never take into account (and could care less about). How many top performing girls want to go to a college where they outnumber men 2 to 1 ? .. This TIME reporter and others like her can pretend everything is wonderful out there in NEA/Title9land, but the devil's always in the numbers.
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