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.
And some kids who are below average intelligence can overcome their inadequacies and do better than gifted kids with hard work.
My special needs daughter is one of them.
But that crazy old professor likely would offend SOME KID'S parents when they heard that it was shown in school. God knows why but, mark my words, it would. Then the irate and offended parents would march into school, to the School Board meeting, write to the local press and before you know it, all over the United States, a lot of people (lemmings) would realize that they too were offended by the crazy old professor and the NEA would pronounce that no longer would that crazy old professor ever, EVER teach another child in the public school system.
There really is a "War on Boys" in today's schools, but Brandon was not the best example to use. ;-)
That's interesting, I remember when I was first read Shakspeare at school. The Merchant of Venice as I recall. We would read and sit and discuss the various aspects of the book, and I discovered that aside from the writing style, there were lessons, timeless lessons, to be learned from some of that antiquated literature.
As such, I understand the pitfalls of pursuing my pound of flesh.
Thanks for the ping!
I'm interested in hearing what you feel about vouchers...public funding, but without strings as to where it is used. Could it not provide even more competition among private schools? (I'm thinking of it as the SOLE means of funding schools--i.e., no public schools, per se.)
You remind me of what H.W. Fowler said in Modern English Usage: "'Pleistocene, pliocene, miocene' are regrettable barbarisms."
:-)
There is a "War on Boys", and the article made some very good points... but then the writer took it all in another direction. The white victimhood excuse was over the top.
Really, I was smartmouthed, too, bored in class, and landed myself in detention over and over again in high school. And I was a girl.
There's a big difference between misunderstanding the behavior of boys and disciplining them when necessary. Any teen who says to his teacher, "Why do we have to do this crap anyway?" is simply being disrespectful. The writer seems to realize that, too, but then he goes on to make excuses for such behavior. I'm a homeschool parent who would like to see all public schools shut down, but there's no excuse for a kid to speak that way to his teacher. If Brandon disagrees with the teachings there, he should address them in a different manner. "Why do we have to learn this?" would've been an acceptable question. It was not necessary to be rude.
Schools make "war on boys" when they label boys with disorders or discipline them harshly simply because they have a lot of energy or they speak out in a forward manner. But you also have to set parameters for them; when you don't, you're misunderstanding them again. Btw, I even know some homeschool moms who make the mistake of not disciplining their boys when necessary, too.
My husband and I were just talking about how, back in the 70's, our school systems each had three different schools:
(1) One main high school where we each were tracked. You could take academic courses or mainly shop classes. You could even split your time between the high school and "tech" school to learn a trade.
(2) One "alternative school" where the kids (mostly boys) who got into trouble too often in the high school went and learned a trade. (At the time, we thought all the kids there were the coolest. Interesting, eh?)
(3) One detention school.
Today, everyone is thrown into one school and expected to take the academic track. That's the problem. We should've improved upon the '70's system, and privatized it.
>We are making sure that half of our population is coming out of school poorly educated and screwed up<
Break out the violins!
Somehow, all these poor, poor, poor victimized boys still manage to come out ahead in endeavors not dependent on physical strength!
Care to speculate how that happens? They hire each other. They give each other bigger raises. They don't have to be any good! They'll whine all the while about how all women are stupid and useless, and how none of them would be hired for anything save for affirmative action...
I get really fed up with people seeing themselves as victims--especially in the case of white males. Heck, I've witnessed groups of white males bemoaning their Cruel Fate As White Males-in groups of 10 or so with an additional 2 women (who DID belong on merit, work ethic, dedication). Poor dears.
When I went through elementary school and high school, girls were TOLD their inherently could not do math well. I could have been a victim, and gone into an area 'suited' to my soft and mushy feminine brain, like art history or womyn's studies or womon's studies (no idea what that is about, but it's laughable)but instead I went into hard sciences and went through 4 quarters of calculus for engineering.
One does not have to be a victim.
I don't recall discipline being an issue for boys in the 1950s. Maybe mum and dad should instill some manners in their kinder. Maybe they should throw them outside so they do something other than sit in front of video games all day in the summer [I've known contemporary boys who whined if they had to spend a few minutes outside of AC. Think they'll ever resemble adult men? I doubt it, and I also doubt that evil, evil, middle aged women with weird personal agendas are responsible for such attitudes. I recall authentic boys having no qualms about heat, dirt, sweat, or getting up off their rears and running around. I think the parents create faux boys who are fearful of bugs, dirt, plants, etc.]
One does not have to be a victim, or to raise victims.
You've sort of been sounding like one in your posts on this thread. I quote:
"Care to speculate how that happens? They [men] hire each other. They give each other bigger raises. They don't have to be any good! They'll whine all the while about how all women are stupid and useless, and how none of them would be hired for anything save for affirmative action..."
Listen to yourself. You are a bitter victim.
Although I'm sure you would not let your obvious bitterness cause you to victimize third grade boys, you are undoubtedly a bigger person than the women who run our school policy in the country, because they do. It is pc anger and resentment--getting even stuff--like the stuff that oozes from your posts that is at the heart of this problem in the education system.
I have suggested twice that you educate yourself about the situation by reading a well-written and informative book. You show no interest in that. Instead, you just keep spewing anger at men. Go for it. It'll only make you unhappier than you already are.
I'm out of here. Bye.
And that is probably all too true - that the teacher never heard of him, either!
Our culture seems to oppose passion about anything and I find the curious lack of ethusiasm in today's kids - even the good ones - unnerving and depressing.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I have noticed that too, where is the exuberance that was so obvious forty years ago?
I am of at least two minds about vouchers :-). As an improvement over the current situation, especially for children in the worst public schools, I support vouchers. Anything that gives parents another option for their children is positive, just for that.
However, as long as there is a "public school" system, I don't think vouchers are the solution. The problem is that, although you say, "no strings attached," it's very hard to have government money without strings. The experience of colleges in this matter is very instructive, as is the experience of "virtual schools" - public school at home - in various states. Once they give out the money, they begin making demands.
In a situation where there was no government school system, with its vested interest in expanding its funding and number of employees, a voucher program might be more conducive to genuine freedom in education. Still, philosophically, I favor private pay or private charity. Americans are generous people, and when they are allowed to spend their own money, they will do it both more productively and more charitably than the government does.
Very intersting, Kay! I understand that "Whole Language", while trendy, has a terrible record in teaching you anything. Pretty funny that trendy learning embraced Communism; perhaps this is because Communism best resembles how school systems are run. No wonder nobody learns anything nowadays!
On the other hand, your schooling did seem to motivate you to discover more, so perhaps it worked in that fashion, while my schooling felt merely dreary. Both of us seem to have learned how to read and write pretty well, so it seems like we're about even there.
I think it's very likely that Shakespeare is too deep to be absorbed properly during many of the years in which it is taught. I certainly felt nothing but bitter resentment in having to learn another vocabulary, that I would never use again, just to read his stuff. That's a definite downside to someone who invented his own vocabulary!
If I have to memorize stuff, it had better be something that will serve me in later life, not just to get through one class. (I am absolutely awful at memorization and that might have hurt me there.)
I still think that to make people love learning it has to connect to something in their lives. I find it difficult to believe that there are no contemporary writers who are not also geniuses. Have we lost all our IQ points in the last 500-odd years since his death?
I don't remember feeling that I was reading something wonderful, just something difficult to understand from my perspective. When you start reading something and the first sentence has half a dozen footnotes to words you won't understand, it tends to make appreciating greatness impossible.
Xenalyte, I will sya that you are probably right and that reading it out loud would have been more effective. But then I would have had no way to comprehend the strange vocabulary at all!
But perhaps the main thrust of my question should be "Are the late 20th and early 21st Centuries so vapid and irredeemable that we have to go to someone who died 500 years ago to find greatness in writing?"
If that's true, it doesn't speak well of us today, and is awfully sad.
About as gloomy as a Shakespearian tragedy.
D
Interesting. I had not looked at the details, but just the table of contents on the site.
The books we're using are from a Christian publisher and present conservative ideas as examples of good thinking!
You may be correct. When I suggested that more accountability in public schools was the answer, holding unions, superintendants, principals, and teachers accountable may not be achievable until the current system is scrapped.
I'm so thankful that my child is attending a private school, but I fear for our country's future that most children have no alternative other than the public school system.
If we could eliminate Federal, state and local government from the education business altogether, our taxes would be cut dramatically. Local and state by 50%. So then the education consumers (parents, students) would have the CASH in their pockets to make choices without any government voucher system at all.
A starting point would be offering your county's school "business" to private education companies. (This industry would grow fast.) They take over and bill parents. Sell school buildings to either the education company or other investors, with lease back to education company. Eliminate county and state school-related taxes, which are huge part of current real estate tax bills. Cut sales taxes, get rid of all government employees associated with these schools. (Many would probably get jobs with private companies.) An example of this is already happening, in part, as Kelly Education Services takes over substitute teacher "business" in my area.
Bump for later reading.
Having read a classic once doesn't make one educated. A book you didn't want to read leaves your head the day the assignment is done and you will never consider it again - or consider reading it again either.
Teenagers may not be good judges of merit, but they are great judges of what they don't like. Forcing meritorious art that they hate "for their own good" today at the expense of turning them off literature forever afterwards is not a win for education.
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