[Izzy Dunne]

A growing congregation of writers have begun

Nice way for an alleged writer to start an article.

[conserveababe]

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.

[SueRae]

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.

[Dixie Yooper]

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.

[Chode]

Boys... seems like we are mostly raising Girls nowdays where some are allowed to play a little rougher than others.

[Nonstatist]

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.

[Nonstatist]

in the late 1970s, roughly 1 boy in 20 was obese; today 1 boy in 5 is.... fewer boys today are deadbeats. The percentage of young men between 16 and 19 who neither work nor attend school has fallen by about a quarter since 1984...Justice Department statistics show that the population of juvenile males in prison is only half of its historic high....

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" ?

[blam]

"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."

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?)

[srmorton]

According to the new report, fewer than half of all high school boys and girls in 2005 were sexually active. For the boys, that's a decrease of 10 percentage points from the early 1990s. Boys who are having sex report that they are more responsible about it: 7 in 10 are using condoms, compared with about half in 1993. As a result, teen pregnancy and abortion rates are now at their lowest recorded levels.

Abstinence education, anyone?

Actually, I thought the article, which I read in its entirety, was pretty good. The conclusion was:

All these reforms shared a common impulse to return to the basics of boyhood--quests, competitions, tribal brotherhoods and self-discovery. There was a recognition that the keys to building a successful boy have remained remarkably consistent, whether a tribal chieftain is preparing a young warrior or a knight is training a squire or a craftsman is guiding an apprentice.... Boys need mentors and structure but also some freedom to experiment. They need a group to belong to and an opponent to confront. As Gurian put it in The Wonder of Boys, they must "compete and perform well to feel worthy."

Pretty sound advice.