Posted on 12/31/2005 5:35:13 PM PST by Coleus
IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys.
Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at these words - this is not really who I am."
That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda items" at Howard. "We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."
Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.
The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"
It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry - men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and George Bushes - and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.
But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their 30s, by which time the world has passed many of them by.
Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women, and more likely to engage in crime. He'll be more likely to develop substance abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, since men who don't attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock, and are more likely not to pay child support.
When I worked as a counselor at a federal prison, I saw these statistics up close. The young men and adult males I worked with were mainly uneducated, had been raised in families that didn't promote education, and had found little of relevance in the schools they had attended. They were passionate people, capable of great love and even possible future success. Many of them told me how much they wanted to get an education. At an intuitive level, they knew how important it was.
Whether in the prison system, in my university classes, or in the schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem with how we teach and mentor boys that I call "industrial schooling," and that I believe is a primary root of our sons' falling behind in school, and quite often in life.
Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids). For many kids, this system worked - and still works. But from the beginning, there were some for whom it wasn't working very well. Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for them.
Now we're seeing what's wrong with the system for millions of boys. Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn't see it 100 years ago. We didn't have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a lot of boys "in line" - competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child's education.
Now, however, the boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly clear. Many families are barely involved in their children's education. Girls outperform boys in nearly every academic area. Many of the old principles of education are diminished. In a classroom of 30 kids, about five boys will begin to fail in the first few years of preschool and elementary school. By fifth grade, they will be diagnosed as learning disabled, ADD/ADHD, behaviorally disordered, or "unmotivated." They will no longer do their homework (though they may say they are doing it), they will disrupt class or withdraw from it, they will find a few islands of competence (like video games or computers), and overemphasize those.
Boys have a lot of Huck Finn in them - they don't, on average, learn as well as girls by sitting still, concentrating, multitasking, listening to words. For 20 years, I have been taking brain research into homes and classrooms to show teachers, parents, and others how differently boys and girls learn. Once a person sees a PET or SPECT scan of a boy's brain and a girl's brain, showing the different ways these brains learn, they understand. As one teacher put it to me, "Wow, no wonder we're having so many problems with boys."
Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male, yielding statistics such as these:
The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.
Boys and men constitute the majority of high school dropouts, as high as 80 percent in many cities.
Boys and young men are 1½ years behind girls and young women in reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the workplace).
Grasping the mismatch between the minds of boys and the industrial classroom is only the first step in understanding the needs of our sons. Lack of fathering and male role models take a heavy toll on boys, as does lack of attachment to many family members (whether grandparents, extended families, moms, or dads). Our sons are becoming very lonely. And even more politically difficult to deal with: The boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the last 20 years (an emphasis that I, as a father of two daughters and an advocate of girls, have seen firsthand), has muddied the water for child development in general, pitting funding for girls against funding for boys.
We still barely see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change from an industrial culture to a postindustrial one. We want them to shut up, calm down, and become perfect intimate partners. It doesn't matter too much who boys and men are - what matters is who we think they should be. When I think back to the kind of classroom I created for my college students, I feel regret for the males who dropped out. When I think back to my time working in the prison system, I feel a deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys whom we still have time to save.
And I do think we can save them. I get hundreds of e-mails and letters every week, from parents, teachers, and others who are beginning to realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and need help. These teachers and parents are part of a social movement - a boys' movement that started, I think, about 10 years ago. It's a movement very much powered by individual women — mainly mothers of sons — who say things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't know anyone who doesn't have a son struggling in school," or, "I thought having a boy would be like having a girl, but when my son was born, I had to rethink things."
We all need to rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting, and overly medicating our boys, as if we can change this guy into the learner we want. When we decide - as we did with our daughters - that there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in college again.
We must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system - realize that boys are struggling and need help.
You folks are in denial if you don't realize how the video games have taken over our young men. I know young adults who were taught the correct work ethic from their father/families and still want to get paid to play video games. The decline in work ethic is only one area.
Pity the universities. Whatever shall they do? Too many white males in any institution is completely racist. Now they have too few. Can they openly recruit white males and remain self-respecting leftists?
Can you imagine telling an auto mechanic that before he can learn about transmissions that he first has to subject himself to "literature, writing, psychology...?"
Plumbers, Electricians, Heating and Cooling etc. are just desperate for people, so its not like these young men are filling all these jobs.
In fact, I just had a water heater replaced awhile back by a young lady plumber who was making a very nice living, and did a fine job.
Everybody's been belly-aching about WalMart, but I listened to one of their commercials today. Some store manager was talking about how he started as a stockboy and worked his way up.....said that over 70% of WalMart managers were promoted in-house.
Hands-on training tends to reduce the bullshit your kid was referring to.
I just read a great book, "Why Gender Matters". Read it and you will completely understand why our boys are getting clobbered.
The white male is probably better off starting a business or going to work for himself somehow. In the corporate and government job world, there is extreme prejudice against the white male to succeed, in the name of the diversity agenda.
Though there may be statistical correlation between the two, I doubt that there is causal correlation between going to college and beating your wife.
A friend of mine who is the president of a mining company got his first job hodding bricks for a bricklayer when he was fifteen.
The contractor dogged him all day screaming at him that he didn't get it, he didn't know how to work and he would amount to nothing if he didn't shape up.
This even though he showed up for work at 6 AM in the morning for a twelve hour shift.
The contractor was his BROTHER.
People have forgotten what hard work is all about.
BTW there is no such thing as an unemployed bricklayer.
This is a profound point. I certainly did not deal well with a traditional classroom growing up. John Taylor Gatto has down some great work in this area. Hisbook The Underground History of American Education is well worth anyone's time. It can be read for free at www.johntaylorgatto.com
Can anyone blame them? Hell, if I would have had to listen to crap like the Vagina Monologues, I wouldn't have shown much interest either.
""Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?" "
Aye, there's the rub! Men have always made more money at the same job than women. Women will, eventually, make that a thing of the past.
But are the college's real complaints about the lack of male students, or is it really about the drop in numbers that' forces them to raise tuition? Personally, I wouldn't pay two cents to go to some of these liberal colleges.
EXACTLY RIGHT. The current issue of National Review has an excellent essay making exactly that point.
idiot.....!!!
Add me to the missing list (although I'm a latestarter to begin with). Finished about 69 hours but I have no incentive to go back. I'm currently working and attending a technical school at night.
I think part of the problem is that the issue has not yet hit the ruling elite. They still expect every child who is not retarded to go to college, preferrably a highly selective one, and then on to law, MBA or med school.
Nor do the highly competitive schools have any trouble getting equal numbers of boys and girls. There are so many applicants who are so good that they don't need to worry. Same thing with the grad schools, top law firms, investment banks, and brokerage houses.
Freepers might say that everything that goes on at these places is tainted by political correctness. However, those who have money and rule, although they apply these prinicples to others, are not dumb enough to apply them to themselves. Ruthless competition and the 80-hour week still apply to those who wish to be at the top of the chain.
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