How the Schools Shortchange Boys - In the newly feminized classroom, boys tune out.

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.

“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.

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.

“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?”

“Ah, Joseph Conrad,” he replied, consulting the frontispiece. “Can I? Huh, huh, huh?”

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. . . .”

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.

Sometimes you don't know what you like. I think it is important to teach the classics.

Reading is a recreational pastime you're trying to impart on a new audience. You don't make excuses about them not knowing what they like yet, you make it fun for them or they won't do it again without coercion, period.

Would you take someone who had never had foreign cuisine before and start them at a Japanese restaurant with raw octopus?

Or take someone who had never been camping before out in February to shiver in freezing rain eating cold canned beans for a week?

How about take a novice shooter out and start them out with a .458 elephant gun and no ear plugs?

Start a non drinker friend off with straight scotch whiskey?

So why would you ever start a novice reader off with boring classic books? It may be important to read them at some point in life, but youth is not that point.

In my opinion, if literature is worthy of being described as "classic," it will attract uncoerced readers in every generation.

Depends if you're talking about the folks in the stalls, or the "groundlings". The groundlings came for the low entertainment, Bottom, Quince, and the other "players" doing their bawdy slapstick while Lysander and Hermia, Oberon and Titania kept the educated entertained.

You would NOT approve of the way gentlemen's sons and daughters were taught in those days. Rote learning, and failure to recite letter perfect was punished most severely . . even Roger Ascham, who was considered a most humane and enlightened teacher, advocated frequent use of beating with a stick to encourage learning. Queen (then Princess) Elizabeth herself was beaten for mistakes in her Latin. Now that's "forcing". The Elizabethans recognized that kids often are too young to recognize what is good for them. They were more serious about it than anybody today -- we are contaminated by the awful Dr. Spock and "self led learning". I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that the English prose of the late 16th and early 17th century is the best that has ever been written. Your average 17th century gentleman or lady had a command of the language that isn't even aspired to in these latter and degenerate days.

The groundlings, on the other hand, were sent out to 'prentice and received no education at all, other than what they might pick up along the way themselves, if motivated.

You seem to have a visceral dislike of the classics. Must have had a REALLY bad experience.

I could not disagree with you more, however. Teenagers as a group sink to the lowest common denominator. They have to be pushed a bit, or all they'll read is trash if they read at all. In my day it was the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, now it's the Goosebumps (although that's really preteen) and those awful Gossip Girl books.

Once you get them into the good stuff, they seem to like it. Mark Twain is (I think) the best American writer, and he's perfectly accessible to kids even younger than high school age. Much will go over their heads, but much is retained and they can come back to re-read Huck Finn when they understand the gravity of that, "Well, then, I'll go to Hell!"

BTW, I was in the best prep school in Atlanta 30 years ago, and Moby Dick was NOT taught. It isn't taught in that school today (my daughter just graduated there.) I took an entire course on Melville in college, and that's about the first time anybody can begin to appreciate him . . . of course you can't appreciate The Whale fully until you're well into middle age.

You're just assuming that "classics" is some sort of fungible category. Some classics are appropriate for the younger grades, some for high school seniors. A clever teacher will assign appropriate classics for the class at hand.

And reading is not merely a 'recreational pastime'. It's necessary for the old-fashioned "liberal education" - that is, what makes a gentleman.

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.

There is a broad range of Shakespeare, from simple slapstick to deep psychodrama. The usual HS plays are Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. JC makes much more sense if you know the historical Roman period, which (of course) isn't much taught anymore now that Latin isn't. R&J is pretty simple. The musical West Side Story is a modern retelling.

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!

It sounds like you got stuck with a teacher who didn't know what she was reading, either. Seriously, now that you are an adult, pick up a play and read it. Try A Comedy of Errors. It's a simple slapstick about two pairs of identical twins, something that anybody can identify with. Ignore the line breaks and read the sentences straight. Most of the unfamiliar words, you can get by context. Just enjoy the story, worry about nuances later.

About as gloomy as a Shakespearian tragedy.

Vicious, bloody, a sense of inevitable disaster everyone can see coming but no one can stop, yes. But Shakespeare is rarely gloomy. The action is too fast for that; it's more like a train wreck.

“ ‘Why do we have to do this crap anyway?’ Right?”

Any kid, high school age or not, female or male, who would say this to an adult teacher needs serious lessons in respect--and deserves suspension, period. That this parent didn't punish the kid as well for sassing his teacher speaks volumes.

Too many parents fear their kids and never teach them the discipline of respect for adults. Our schools are full of brats, and yes, a male brat is harder to deal with than a outwardly compliant female brat.

I don't know for sure if schools make money on special ed.

I can tell you as a parent of a child with a real special need (lots of brain damage as evidenced in an MRI) that my daughter and many others like her are shortchanged

You are both correct. The schools make the money on the "special ed" kids who really aren't special need. A child with brain damage has real, costly needs. An unruly boy doesn't. Schools want few of the former and lots of the latter in the special ed programs.

The schools make the money on the "special ed" kids who really aren't special need. A child with brain damage has real, costly needs. An unruly boy doesn't. Schools want few of the former and lots of the latter in the special ed programs.

Exactly. Ever notice how they always manage to fill every funded special ed slot, no matter what? Just like when some states like Cali funded bilingual at a higher rate than regular students. They were forcing some Asian kids into Hispanic bilingual classes just to get the extra money. Imagine being an Asian kindergartner trying to learn English language skills in Spanish.

Just like when some states like Cali funded bilingual at a higher rate than regular students.

I knew a guy with a Latino last name, who was at least third generation American. No Spanish was spoken in his home, yet the LAUSD wanted to place all his kids in ESL programs. Bilingual teachers earn more. Bigger demand, more money, therefore ramrodded by the Union. That's why there was that ridiculous move a few years ago to get "Ebonics" classed as another language, up in Oakland.

Or consider M.R. James, remembering a tough master's dressing-down to a student in Ancient Greek class, in 1875:

"A boy who construes 'de' *and* instead of 'de' *but* at sixteen years of age, is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude which I tremble to contemplate!"

You can picture the whack of the stick on the desk during that tirade. James notes laconically (in his memoirs, "Eton and King's") "It was bad policy, for it unnerved one for further efforts."

Am I alone in this?

Starting around 7th grade level onward, the "classic" authors I can recall from public school:

Mark Twain
Shakespeare
Melville
Dumas
Dickens
Hardy
Hawthorne
Moliere
Conan Doyle
Thurber
Hemingway
Camus
Kafka
Sinclair
Orwell
Steinbeck
Coleridge
Poe
London
Cooper
Machiavelli

Chaucer

"Bullfinches Mythology"
Mallory
Wilde
Verne
Stevenson
Kipling
Crane
Harte
Hugo

I am sure there were others that slip my mind, plus a host of "not quite classical" that I read for school and for pleasure.

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