No way to raise a boy

MercatorNet.com ^ | Friday, 3 August 2007 | Kevin Ryan

[monomaniac]

Kevin Ryan | Friday, 3 August 2007

No way to raise a boy

Do boys have to be bored, fat and dumber than their sisters?

The first in a series about educating boys today.

A ten year old boy, whom I watch with an eagle’s eye, is reading The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden. The book is teaching him how to play poker, build a go-cart from scratch, how to fold a paper glider so that it really flies, to makes a paper water bomb and much, much more. He has found his Holy Grail. Wedged in between the book’s black arts are spirited short essays on heroic battles, good manners and, yes, girls. Be forewarned, gentle reader, this book is definitely not politically correct, and worse, it could turn around a boy’s life.

The 10-year-old I have in my sights is a busy home-schooler whose days and heart are torn between pitching in the town baseball league and his beloved violin. While a leader on the ball field and popular with his mates, I have to admit, he is sort of "out-of-it." When the talk moves from the ballgame to video games, the kid is a wash-out. When the conversations moves on to television, as it does regularly…(television and movies being the lingua franca of boys from six to that ever-moving outer boundary of adolescence)…, the boy is a dunce. He thinks "24" is the definition of a day. He wouldn’t recognise Paris Hilton if she tried to run him over. He’s focused on learning how to step into a pitch and to do something with his violin that I don’t comprehend.

He is clearly out of step with modern boydom. But how and when things changed for boys is hard for me to pin down. Somewhere not too long ago, boys went indoors. When they don’t have their eyes glued to some screen, whether computer, TV, movie or even, yes, cell phone, they are shuffling along alone or in sullen groups at the mall. Building tree huts and shooting at squirrels with beebee guns lost out big time to the latest version of Xbox and the newest action-adventure fantasy at the Cinaplex.

And they look so bored! How can a 12-year-old boy be that bored… unless he has been made so passive with canned pleasure that he doesn’t know what else to do. He has never learned to do anything other than turn on his toys. He doesn’t have the reading habit because DVDs are easier. He doesn’t play outside in the neighbourhood. First, the other guys aren’t there. They are indoors and are stuck to their own screens. Second, he and his peers’ parents are convinced that if he is outside, he’ll be kidnapped, beaten up by bullies or meet a recruiter from the North American Man Boy Love Association.

Our modern boy doesn’t get much exercise which you can tell from his rounded shoulders and the baby fat which he should have been shed years earlier. But how could he. He is driven or bussed to school for safety reasons. When he gets exercise it is part of an adult-saturated, over-organised sports world where physical contact between boys is only allowed when they are covered head-to-toe with enough protective gear to make movement barely possible. Arguments about whether a referee [yes, of course, they have to have referees] made the correct call is strictly verboten. A scuffle with another player could get him banned from the league and his anxious parents in the grandstands would be forced to live in infamy.

Other than manipulate the "on" and "off" switches, the volume controls and a few other knobs, modern boy doesn’t know how to do much. He has never had to do much and the men in his life have conveniently disappeared or are too busy with their work or their own pleasures that they have never taught him to do anything. He doesn’t know how to wash a car, saw wood, hammer a nail, trim a hedge, weed a garden [let alone raise a vegetable garden], bait a rat trap, or repair a punctured bike tire. Maybe with sufficient nagging, he can make his bed [sort of], take the dishes out of the dishwasher and put out the garbage, chores that in another day would have been the province of his sister.

Then there is school. In recent decades, no part of society has become more feminised, more boy-unfriendly. First of all, for young boys to sit quietly in desk seats for six or seven hours a day has long been contrary to the laws of nature. However, in the past, children walked to school in the morning, walked or run home for lunch and did the same at 3:00, only to get their ball and glove and work off the pent-up energy from the school day.

Second, there are fewer and fewer male teachers. The principalship, once the province of men, is now more and more the province of the fairer sex. Those male teachers that are left live in fear of intimacy or even putting a hand on a boy’s shoulder, lest they become a tort lawyer’s meal ticket.

Third, the academic ante has been raised in our schools. The stakes are higher and there is more and more pressure to get the children ready to compete in the global economy. That can be translated into students becoming more and more skilled at the manipulation of symbols, tasks at which our boys are not genetically endowed and, thus, are falling behind.

Most educators are scratching their heads at what is now called the "crisis of boys." On the other hand, girls are doing well. They outshine boys in all aspects of the symbol-driven world we live in. They get better grades and have higher aspirations. Girls outnumber boys in Advance Placement programs, in most math and science courses and in all extracurricular activities except sports. In 2006, girls represented 58 per cent of the student bodies at US colleges and universities.

It is little wonder that junior is in a funk. He is not living according to his nature, and while he may not know it, he can feel it. Somehow we have changed the way we live and while there appear to be many benefits, the way we are living is having disastrous effects on our boys. Given all the other crises facing the world, getting excited and making serous changes in how we raise our boys may not vault to the top of our collective priority list. But think about it. A nation without men, with only pleasure-saturated, spineless screen-watchers is a truly frightening prospect.

Kevin Ryan founded the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, where he is professor emeritus. He has written and edited 20 books. He has appeared recently on CBS's "This Morning", ABC's "Good Morning America", "The O’Reilly Factor", CNN and the Public Broadcasting System speaking on character education. He can be reached at kryan@bu.edu .

[television is just wrong]

this is why Boy Scouts of AMerica exists. BOYS NEED IT.

[Kirkwood]

There is irony in that these “indoor” boys need to read a book about things that should come as second nature to them, or at the very least be passed down to them. Where are their fathers? The very existance of this book suggest a failure by fathers to teach their sons (and daughters) basic skills. Are there any real men around or are they all metrosexuals who can’t even change a flat tire for fear of getting their hands dirty?

[Red Badger]

When I was a kid, what “toys” I had, didn’t need to be “turned on.” To keep me in the house would have required ropes. An ad hoc game of baseball was a near as the next street. To read was the “rainy day” solution to every “I don’t got nuthin to do!” It infuriates me, no end, to know that there are children right here on my own street are being held captive by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile.

We moved here to our present home in July of 2002. It was a really quiet neighborhood. I assumed there were no children within a 2 block area of my home, even though we live right across the street from an elementary school, with open playground and field area.

Then in 2004 we had hurricane Ivan. Power was off for a week or more here in our neighborhood. All of a sudden the streets were full of chubby children of all ages! Everywhere we saw kids riding bikes and playing over at the schoolyard! The whole neighborhood was alive with the sounds of laughter and screams of the joy of effervescent life! Then the power was returned al all was quiet in the ‘hood once more...........

[DuncanWaring]

Where are their fathers?

Maybe they see their sons one weekend a month now that Mom took a fancy to Pablo the Pool Guy.

[metmom]

ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL

This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. If you want on/off this list, please freepmail me. The main Homeschool Ping List by DaveLoneRanger handles the homeschool-specific articles.Not quite your classic *Another Reason to Homeschool* but it is.

[LiteKeeper]

ABSOLUTELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[chae]

Or maybe the fathers just walked out.

[Brad’s Gramma]

BTTT!!!!!!!!

[steel_resolve]

this article is frightening. really.

[flaglady47]

I’ve made comments on other threads about this very same subject, how we are making 90 pound weaklings, both physically and psychologically, of boys in our society. The feminization of manhood, and it ain’t pretty. Some more of the adverse affects on our society of “women’s lib”. This has got to stop, and one way to stop it is to have more of our adult men stand up for themselves, get into the political arena, take jobs that are traditionally held by wimp liberal men and feminazi women, which allow this feminization to continue. This includes teaching positions,lawyers and judges, and in the MSM, so that we can fight fire with fire. We have ceded too much territory in areas of power, such as in the courts, to the liberals, and have thus allowed the downhill slide of our social mores and our very civilization to occur.

Conservatives have got to fight back or we lose our very way of living, will become a third world country, and will not have the means to defend against this occurring. It’s time for our men (what’s left of them) to stand up and fight for the intangibles that make the U.S. what it always was, even if the fight shifts from the physical arena to the political, cultural, legal, and learning institutions. We must fight on all fronts, to save our way of life.

[TChad]

They may call it the "Dangerous Book for Boys," but from what I have read, the activities described are not really dangerous. When I was a boy, real danger meant real fun. I somehow survived with only a few fractured bones and permanent scars, and I somehow avoided arrest.

I wouldn't change a minute. I had a real childhood, very unlike the current extended feminist castration ritual.

[samiam1972]

This book is wonderful. We just bought it for my nine year old son. My husband is looking forward to sharing in the activities with him. Yes, he probably could have done these things without the book but it’s kind of a nice, handy reference!

[badbass]

his peers’ parents are convinced that if he is outside, he’ll be kidnapped, beaten up by bullies or meet a recruiter from the North American Man Boy Love Association.

The bully thing can be taken care of relatively easy (if the teachers would allow it), but the kidnapping and NAMBLA dangers are very real. All of which can be blamed on a bunch of limp wristed judges, who release these creeps to prey on our children. Along with the fact that their now importing creeps from Mexico to prey on our children. It's all a vicious cycle (circle), people have just adapted the way they raise their children to the situations they find themselves in. If the d@mn politicians, judges, and lawyers would act in a sane manner, some of these problems might disappear.

[Ben Chad]

A good start would be to fire school administrators who ban the game of tag.

[flaglady47]

“A good start would be to fire school administrators who ban the game of tag.”

Sounds good to me. There are a lot of school administrators that should be fired and replaced by “real men”, not socialist utopians.

[Finny]

What an incredibly good read. Wow.

The book is teaching him how to play poker, build a go-cart from scratch, how to fold a paper glider so that it really flies, to makes a paper water bomb and much, much more. He has found his Holy Grail. Wedged in between the book’s black arts are spirited short essays on heroic battles, good manners and, yes, girls.

One of my favorite Calvin & Hobbs strips comes to mind, where Calvin is on the phone to the library to ask if they have books there that will tell him how to build bombs. Shocked, they tell him no. He wonders, "What good is the library, then?"

Maybe C&H strips should be included in a boy's book. My husband loves the one with Calvin flying an F-14 (or some such fighter jet) fighting off tyranusaurus rexes and other horrific dinosaurs. For a boy, that's got to be the ultimate!

[Finny]

There is irony in that these “indoor” boys need to read a book about things that should come as second nature to them ...

Boy's books are nothing new. My husband has a superb boy's book from the early 1900s with incredible illustrations. There are instructions in this book for everything from making a winged sail for when you're ice skating, to "Taxidermy for Boys."

[geopyg]

The only reason I avoided arrest is because it was 30+ years ago! The stuff I got caught for (let alone DIDN’T!) would I think be dealt with pretty severely to any kid today. And looking back, there are a couple things that I would take back, but all in all lots of good “boy things”.

At the corner drug store we’d buy those confetti poppers, go outside and have the popper inside the door with the string hanging outside - pull the string and run. (We were there every day buying stuff - mostly- so I guess they didn’t mind too much!?

Or buy their smoke “bombs” and lie in the ditch by the road and toss the smoke bombs in front of cars and laugh while staying hidden. (Glad no one ever had an accident).

Or the time some guy gave us a whack at a car with a sledge hammer for a quarter. We ended up giving him so much money he just let us have the hammer and go to it. But then the cops showed up (and where did that man go?) and said the car was registered to some lady! Luckily we were young enough that they just asked us a few questions and no problem! (4th grade or so).

I could go on and on.

[Finny]

The kidnapping and NAMBLA dangers are very real. All of which can be blamed on a bunch of limp wristed judges, who release these creeps to prey on our children.

In post 11, flaglady47 says:
It’s time for our men (what’s left of them) to stand up and fight for the intangibles that make the U.S. what it always was ...

Someday the men in our neighborhoods will vigilante-style take care of the problem created by limp-wristed judges. When the going gets tough and the fight is mortal, men -- and only men, not women, but men -- alone will save the day, as they always have.

Just because a male is a sissy doesn't mean he isn't a man. That's God's truth. And it's why I'm eternally optimistic with regard to boys and men.