Posted on 08/03/2006 11:38:51 AM PDT by neverdem
Since I started teaching several years ago, after 25 years in the movie business, I’ve come to learn firsthand that everything I’d heard about the feminization of our schools is real—and far more pernicious to boys than I had imagined. Christina Hoff Sommers was absolutely accurate in describing, in her 2000 bestseller, The War Against Boys, how feminist complaints that girls were “losing their voice” in a male-oriented classroom have prompted the educational establishment to turn the schools upside down to make them more girl-friendly, to the detriment of males.
As a result, boys have become increasingly disengaged. Only 65 percent earned high school diplomas in the class of 2003, compared with 72 percent of girls, education researcher Jay Greene recently documented. Girls now so outnumber boys on most university campuses across the country that some schools, like Kenyon College, have even begun to practice affirmative action for boys in admissions. And as in high school, girls are getting better grades and graduating at a higher rate.
As Sommers understood, it is boys’ aggressive and rationalist nature—redefined by educators as a behavioral disorder—that’s getting so many of them in trouble in the feminized schools. Their problem: they don’t want to be girls.
Take my tenth-grade student Brandon. I noted that he was on the no-pass list again, after three consecutive days in detention for being disruptive. “Who gave it to you this time?” I asked, passing him on my way out.
“Waverly,” he muttered into the long folding table.
“What for?”
“Just asking a question,” he replied.
“No,” I corrected him. “You said”—and here I mimicked his voice—“ ‘Why do we have to do this crap anyway?’ Right?”
Brandon recalls one of those sweet, ruby-cheeked boys you often see depicted on English porcelain.
He’s smart, precocious, and—according to his special-education profile—has been “behaviorally challenged” since fifth grade. The special-ed classification is the bane of the modern boy. To teachers, it’s a yellow flag that snaps out at you the moment you open a student’s folder. More than any other factor, it has determined Brandon’s and legions of other boys’ troubled tenures as students.
Brandon’s current problem began because Ms. Waverly, his social studies teacher, failed to answer one critical question: What was the point of the lesson she was teaching? One of the first observations I made as a teacher was that boys invariably ask this question, while girls seldom do. When a teacher assigns a paper or a project, girls will obediently flip their notebooks open and jot down the due date. Teachers love them. God loves them. Girls are calm and pleasant. They succeed through cooperation.
Boys will pin you to the wall like a moth. They want a rational explanation for everything. If unconvinced by your reasons—or if you don’t bother to offer any—they slouch contemptuously in their chairs, beat their pencils, or watch the squirrels outside the window. Two days before the paper is due, girls are handing in the finished product in neat vinyl folders with colorful clip-art title pages. It isn’t until the boys notice this that the alarm sounds. “Hey, you never told us ’bout a paper! What paper?! I want to see my fucking counselor!”
A female teacher, especially if she has no male children of her own, I’ve noticed, will tend to view boys’ penchant for challenging classroom assignments as disruptive, disrespectful—rude. In my experience, notes home and parent-teacher conferences almost always concern a boy’s behavior in class, usually centering on this kind of conflict. In today’s feminized classroom, with its “cooperative learning” and “inclusiveness,” a student’s demand for assurance of a worthwhile outcome for his effort isn’t met with a reasonable explanation but is considered inimical to the educational process. Yet it’s this very trait, innate to boys and men, that helps explain male success in the hard sciences, math, and business.
The difference between the male and female predilection for hard proof shows up among the teachers, too. In my second year of teaching, I attended a required seminar on “differentiated instruction,” a teaching model that is the current rage in the fickle world of pop education theory. The method addresses the need to teach all students in a classroom where academic abilities vary greatly—where there is “heterogeneous grouping,” to use the ed-school jargon—meaning kids with IQs of 55 sit side by side with the gifted. The theory goes that the “least restrictive environment” is best for helping the intellectually challenged. The teacher’s job is to figure out how to dice up his daily lessons to address every perceived shortcoming and disability in the classroom.
After the lecture, we broke into groups of five, with instructions to work cooperatively to come up with a model lesson plan for just such a classroom situation. My group had two men and three women. The women immediately set to work; my seasoned male cohort and I reclined sullenly in our chairs.
“Are the women going to do all the work?” one of the women inquired brightly after about ten minutes.
“This is baloney,” my friend declared, yawning, as he chucked the seminar handout into a row of empty plastic juice bottles. “We wouldn’t have this problem if we grouped kids by ability, like we used to.”
The women, all dedicated teachers, understood this, too. But that wasn’t the point. Treating people as equals was a social goal well worth pursuing. And we contentious boys were just too dumb to get it.
Female approval has a powerful effect on the male psyche. Kindness, consideration, and elevated moral purpose have nothing to do with an irreducible proof, of course. Yet we male teachers squirm when women point out our moral failings—and our boy students do, too. This is the virtue that has helped women redefine the mission of education.
The notion of male ethical inferiority first arises in grammar school, where women make up the overwhelming majority of teachers. It’s here that the alphabet soup of supposed male dysfunctions begins. And make no mistake: while girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male-related disorders in this world, females diagnosed with learning disabilities simply don’t exist.
For a generation now, many well-meaning parents, worn down by their boy’s failure to flourish in school, his poor self-esteem and unhappiness, his discipline problems, decide to accept administration recommendations to have him tested for disabilities. The pitch sounds reasonable: admission into special ed qualifies him for tutoring, modified lessons, extra time on tests (including the SAT), and other supposed benefits. It’s all a hustle, Mom and Dad privately advise their boy. Don’t worry about it. We know there’s nothing wrong with you.
To get into special ed, however, administrators must find something wrong. In my four years of teaching, I’ve never seen them fail. In the first IEP (Individualized Educational Program) meeting, the boy and his parents learn the results of disability testing. When the boy hears from three smiling adults that he does indeed have a learning disability, his young face quivers like Jell-O. For him, it was never a hustle. From then on, however, his expectations of himself—and those of his teachers—plummet.
Special ed is the great spangled elephant in the education parade. Each year, it grows larger and more lumbering, drawing more and more boys into the procession. Since the publication of Sommers’s book, it has grown tenfold. Special ed now is the single largest budget item, outside of basic operations, in most school districts across the country.
Special-ed boosters like to point to the success that boys enjoy after they begin the program. Their grades rise, and the phone calls home cease. Anxious parents feel reassured that progress is happening. In truth, I have rarely seen any real improvement in a student’s performance after he’s become a special-ed kid. On my first day of teaching, I received manila folders for all five of my special-ed students—boys all—with a score of modifications that I had to make in each day’s lesson plan.
I noticed early on that my special-ed boys often sat at their desks with their heads down or casually staring off into space, as if tracking motes in their eyes, while I proceeded with my lesson. A special-ed caseworker would arrive, take their assignments, and disappear with the boys into the resource room. The students would return the next day with completed assignments.
“Did you do this yourself?” I’d ask, dubious.
They assured me that they did. I became suspicious, however, when I noticed that they couldn’t perform the same work on their own, away from the resource room. A special-ed caseworker’s job is to keep her charges from failing. A failure invites scrutiny and reams of paperwork. The caseworkers do their jobs.
Brandon has been on the special-ed track since he was nine. He knows his legal rights as well as his caseworkers do. And he plays them ruthlessly. In every debate I have with him about his low performance, Brandon delicately threads his response with the very sinews that bind him. After a particularly easy midterm, I made him stay after class to explain his failure.
“An ‘F’?!” I said, holding the test under his nose.
“You were supposed to modify that test,” he countered coolly. “I only had to answer nine of the 27 questions. The nine I did are all right.”
His argument is like a piece of fine crystal that he rolls admiringly in his hand. He demands that I appreciate the elegance of his position. I do, particularly because my own is so weak.
Yet while the process of education may be deeply absorbing to Brandon, he long ago came to dismiss the content entirely. For several decades, white Anglo-Saxon males—Brandon’s ancestors—have faced withering assault from feminism- and multiculturalism-inspired education specialists. Armed with a spiteful moral rectitude, their goal is to sever his historical reach, to defame, cover over, dilute . . . and then reconstruct.
In today’s politically correct textbooks, Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens, even though both women are second-raters at best. But even in their superficial aspects, the textbooks advertise publishers’ intent to pander to the prevailing PC attitudes. The books feature page after page of healthy, exuberant young girls in winning portraits. Boys (white boys in particular) will more often than not be shunted to the background in photos or be absent entirely or appear sitting in wheelchairs.
The underlying message isn’t lost on Brandon. His keen young mind reads between the lines and perceives the folly of all that he’s told to accept. Because he lacks an adult perspective, however, what he cannot grasp is the ruthlessness of the war that the education reformers have waged. Often when he provokes, it’s simple boyish tit for tat.
A week ago, I dispatched Brandon to the library with directions to choose a book for his novel assignment. He returned minutes later with his choice and a twinkling smile.
“I got a grrreat book, Mr. Garibaldi!” he said, holding up an old, bleary, clothbound item. “Can I read the first page aloud, pahlease?”
My mind buzzed like a fly, trying to discover some hint of mischief.
“Who’s the author?”
“Ah, Joseph Conrad,” he replied, consulting the frontispiece. “Can I? Huh, huh, huh?”
“I guess so.”
Brandon eagerly stood up before the now-alert class of mostly black and Puerto Rican faces, adjusted his shoulders as if straightening a prep-school blazer, then intoned solemnly: “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ”—twinkle, twinkle, twinkle. “Chapter one. . . .”
Merry mayhem ensued. Brandon had one of his best days of the year.
Boys today feel isolated and outgunned, but many, like Brandon, don’t lack pluck and courage. They often seem to have more of it than their parents, who writhe uncomfortably before a system steeled in the armor of “social conscience.” The game, parents whisper to themselves, is to play along, to maneuver, to outdistance your rival. Brandon’s struggle is an honest one: to preserve truth and his own integrity.
Boys who get a compartment on the special-ed train take the ride to its end without looking out the window. They wait for the moment when they can step out and scorn the rattletrap that took them nowhere. At the end of the line, some, like Brandon, may have forged the resiliency of survival. But that’s not what school is for.
Boys who are inclined toward the military are reasonably sure that there is a 'point' to what they are being commanded to do. Granted, there are sometimes tasks that could be considered pointless, but they are toward an overall goal. The same cannot be said, necessarily, for assignments given in schools. You're also dealing with young men in the military, not middle school aged boys.
That's like comparing apples to oranges.
Ever hear a kid say "well yeah, and what are YOU going to do to me?" In school, they can't do very much anymore. In the military they can throw your arse in jail.
Generally young boys won't understand the concept, but it's drilled into your head very very quickly in the military.
Just your friendly neighborhood ping. :-)
Read the book. Your view of what is going on in the education system may once have been the real world. It is no longer. Christina Hoff-Sommers "The War Against Boys." The stats and information presented are chilling and compelling.
It is no longer an attempt to help girls, who today succeed in the education system today at a far greater rate than boys by any measuring stick you can use. It is an attempt to push boys down and make them fail and to make them start behaving like girls. If you think my previous sentance is a good idea for public policy, then don't read the book. It won't convince you.
It's the principal reason we homeschool our boy. I don't want to let him anywhere near the education establishment.
Interestingly, a recent study found a persistent gap at virtually every grade level between boys and girl--this applied across public and private schools. In one subject, for one year out of 12, the boys were equal. The only case for which that is NOT true is homeschoolers (and the homeschool girls did at least as well as their public or private school compatriots).
What does that tell you about the education establishment's treatment of boys?
Finally, I agree "we should not throw away any of our talest." I would suggest that is exactly what we are doing. We are making sure that half of our population is coming out of school poorly educated and screwed up. We are doing that to satisfy the anger of women who make decisions about how to educate our children who resent men for good or bad reasons. Bottom line, you are talking about a lot of middle aged women working out their revenge fantasies on 3rd grade boys. It sucks.
A lot of the homeschoolers on our state board decided they could do a much better job with their kids than the public schools, and they can work with their kids in a more relaxed atmosphere.
Oh, really? Then where's my cash? I've had classes where there were more SpecEd kids than non-SpecEd ones, and my paycheck was exactly the same as when I taught all honors classes. Don't confuse a (stupid) local policy with general ones...
Because Ancient Egypt is directly in the Classical line of Western civilization (see the Ptolemies, Hellenistic culture, the Rosetta Stone), and the medieval Serbs, interesting as they may be, are not.
They could probably come in in a survey of medieval culture, but what specifically was their contribution to medieval scholastic thought?
You can't study everybody, so historians tend to concentrate on the main trunk of the tree, not offshoots and remote twigs. Unless of course you want to make a study of a particular group out of personal interest (my ancestors the Highland Scots are pretty darned far off the beaten path, but I took Gaelic just because.)
Forcing antiquated, uninteresting books on captive teenagers leaves such a bad taste in the mouth as to ensure that most of them will never pick up a book again.
I disagree -- "classics" are called "classics" because there is a core body of literature that every educated person MUST know. Shakespeare is woven into the fabric of the English language, the best playwright of the age that wrote the most beautiful English ever produced (they also brought you the King James Bible.) Dickens and Hardy each illuminate a time and a place in English history. Like it or not, that is important. Tolstoy is essential to understanding the Russia of his age (just as I would submit you can't understand the 19th c. French without Stendhal and Dumas).
And teenagers are not the best judges of what is meritorious reading. My daughter thought she was going to hate Paradise Lost . . . once she got through the first book, she was hooked. She also didn't care for All the Kings' Men at first, but changed her mind about half way through. (We both still hate Catcher in the Rye, but that's one you have to read to get the flavor of a particularly depressing period in modern American literature.)
Well, I went to a school in the 70's where they dispensed with all that outdated stuff. We never did Shakespeare, or read classics. We did a lot of 'creative' poetry writing; we read science fiction, we read some other strange stuff. We did the "who to throw off the lifeboat" exercises over and over, studied communist countries, and the 'culture of poverty'. This was all supposed to prepare better for the real world than all those old, stale lessons that those older than us had. We never had to memorize math tables, never had grammar (we got brand new books in 5th grade, but never opened them). My understanding of history was woefully inadequate to put current events in any context (WWII was never mentioned in any of the years I was in school, because it wasn't 'current events', wasn't 'social studies' and wasn't far enough back to be history to any of my teachers).
Science worked out pretty well, as we did a combination of labs and studying the scientific method.
Foreign languages weren't required, but I was interested so I learned enough spanish and russian to understand the similarities in language. Incidentally, in Spanish class I learned english grammar.
In english I've found that there are often references to literature that I don't understand, having never read the books that most other people have. I learned to write on my own more than I did in english class, where we did more True-False and multiple choice exercises than we did actual paragraph writing.
In summary, as a student of the 70's in a college town, where we were the guinea pigs for many of the things you see in public schools today, I don't see them as that positive. I didn't get a great education (even though the school district then and now considers itself "world class"), but I did learn to read well enough to learn whatever I needed to catch up on for myself. Of course, that probably wasn't because of the 'whole language' reading we got. It's more because my older sister (having the older teachers who weren't trying all the latest methods) came home from school every day when I was 3 and 4 and had to play school, where she was the teacher and I learned to read and add...
Metmom,
I agree with you that it's important for us to keep up with what's happening in schools today.
You didn't ping me to this one. No one asked me to send a ping. The topic itself was ping-worthy. I have three sons, so it's a hot topic for me especially.
I didn't notice the foul language until later. I'm no saint myself, but the writer could've made his point without the foul language.
And I don't know why he twisted it all at the end into a story of white victimhood, either. It doesn't fit in with the whole idea of the first part of the article. All boys are affected by the "feminized classroom."
I'm going to try to read through the thread now and comment further.
The bonus is for the special ed teachers and the special ed administrator. They were mightily pissed off when our son was pulled out of special ed.
Well, we'll never know.
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I guess the teacher never read Joseph Conrad, either:
My mind buzzed like a fly, trying to discover some hint of mischief.
“Who’s the author?”
“Ah, Joseph Conrad,” he replied, consulting the frontispiece. “Can I? Huh, huh, huh?”
“I guess so.”
AND some kids are smarter than others. They too will rise to the top. You cannot have equal outcomes -- too many variables in humans. And some kids just sit there like dumbheads.
you da man - keep em coming....
maybe you could just post a DAILY post like pookie18 does, and call it
Neverdem's Reading List
ping to it once a day and add to it all day long....
'My brother in law majored in "english", yet avoided all the classics and ended up with an entire library filled with postmodernist nonsense about transexuals and queer theory (whetever *that* is). I have also never seen anyone so young, become so angry and bitter.'
"A Confederancy of Dunces" has replaced
"The Scarlet Letter"...........
We were seriously looking at homeschooling. However, I really wanted my daughter to have a certain reading program. When we found the private school with the reading program, we did the math and it basically came out the same price: homeschooling and hire a reading tutor or private school with the reading program. I think the private school must subsidize some of the reading program from the other kids tuition.
Anyway, after having such a bad year last year, I am all set to homeschool my kids if the private school doesn't work out. I have ISPs that I can join. I have researched curriculum. I am all prepared. Last year, I was in such shock about school problems.
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