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.

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

School in general and english class in particular were the most boring, unproductive and needlessly punitive experience I have ever been through. I have tried to pick up Shakespeare a couple of times since, and every time I have been utterly unable to enjoy it due to memories of a boring incarceration. I still enjoy reading, but not any of the material I was given at school. So to my view, they ruined those books to me for life.

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 opinion, encourage teens to read trash if they enjoy it. That will at least impart the habit of picking up a book for pleasure. Maybe they'll move on to deeper material later, and maybe they won't, but at least they'll read.

James notes laconically (in his memoirs, "Eton and King's") "It was bad policy, for it unnerved one for further efforts."

I think the case has been made before that it was the undoing of the British upper class. Carelessness in childrearing. Today, we have a different kind running rampant.

"Think about it - the long-term implications are serious!"

Of course they are. But it's unlikely to change. The unfortunate truth is that in our legal and political system, as well as in large parts of our popular culture, males are simply not considered to be as valuable as females are.

Depends if you're talking about the folks in the stalls, or the "groundlings".

I'm not aware of either of those socioeconomic groups' being coerced into attending Shakespeare performances, or any other theater.

I agree, though, that I've no interest in replicating Elizabethan education in Deo Vindice Christian School (where our model, Stonewall Jackson, certainly didn't know Ancient Egypt from a hole in the head)!

>"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. <

No, I'm a survivor. I see what goes on, and I don't pretend the world is perfect, but I don't beat individual men up over it, and I don't even try to tell them that they've never lost a darn thing.

Only a fool chirps and dances and pretends everything is perfect when it is not. I don't keep throwing books at people to wail, moan, and cry about victimhood.

Attacking me because I relate truth doesn't change the way the world works.

Yes, poor, poor boys. Isn't it awful. Maybe women should be chattel again for a few centuries...poor things...mum and dad raised them to be impulsive savages, and now they run amuck in a structured classroom...oh, their testosterone is being thwarted O WOE.

Animals will misbehave, too, if they are not 'gentled', and taught some early manners. Works with small humans, too.

The upper classes were, to some degree, moved to go there by "peer pressure". And religous issues entered into it, too - the more Puritan preachers regularly launched against "strolling players and vagabonds," so there was something of a reaction against that from the artsy types.

The groundlings just wanted to see the murders and the low comedy.

Yup, you had a bad school. You just have to rise above it, and quit letting your life be ruled by what a bunch of hamhanded adults did however many years ago. That's not Shakespeare's fault.

If I were you, I would give Tom Sawyer a try, then Huckleberry Finn. Shakespeare is not to be missed, start with one of the comedies -- Twelfth Night, perhaps, always one of my favorites. If a good local company is putting one of the comedies on, go see it first, then get a Folger edition (very reader friendly with extremely helpful notes) and read what you just saw.

Fortunately you can usually find schools that aren't like that. We worked hard learning which schools to avoid before our children reached school age. The City of Atlanta public schools are SO bad that there was never any question of our children attending them. I wouldn't send a dog to any Atlanta public school except Jackson Elementary and Morris Brandon . . . and there's a waiting list for them about four years long. Had my children not been able to get into the schools we wanted, it would have been homeschooling for us (I homeschooled my son for a couple of months while waiting for a place to open up in the school of our choice . . . )

I adored Sherlock Holmes, had read all the stories by junior high. Liked them so much I joined "The Goose Club of the Alpha Inn" at college. What fun!

I still re-read the stories occasionally, but if you haven't run across them and you like Sherlock Holmes, you really need to read Conan Doyle's historical novels. The very best are The White Company and Sir Nigel, although I also like Rodney Stone and the Brigadier Gerard stories.

My gg grandfather Long couldn't spell, but other than that his letters were splendid. He was a "common soldier", I guess, because he never got beyond private and he used to say in his old age that he met so many colonels and captains and majors that he concluded that he was the only private who had survived the War!

But he did have an engineering degree from the University of Georgia (class of 1843).

The history of Eastern Europe is certainly relevant now for current events . . . especially Lepanto, gates of Vienna, etc. . . .

But from the point of view of Western Civ., it's a little off the beaten path. ("Not that there's anything WRONG with that" . . . but for a survey course it's a bit of an outlier. A history of Eastern Europe would be a VERY good secondary course though.)

Try adventure novels (which is what I'd suggest for much of high school reading). Horatio Hornblower, Captain Blood (Rafael Sabatini), Kipling, Stevenson, etc. Try G.A. Henty, one of the most popular novelists of the turn of the century (20th century, that is), making a comeback among Christian homeschoolers.

Try "The Saint" detective stories. You need a top quality vocabulary and a knowledge of history, Latin quotes, French and German, and comparative religion to get through this stuff with full comprehension. Dang it, people used to be somewhat educated! "The Saint" is pulp magazine fiction, for heaven's sake, but the author assumed the reader knew French and German!

There is plenty of good, solid, classic fiction that is oriented toward the teen/young adult perspective. And let's be honest, adults love this stuff too. It wasn't teenagers buying the World's Great Pirate Novels in the 19th and 20th century, it was adults. It wasn't teenagers who made Louis L'Amour one of the bestselling novelists in history.

I dug the Harry Potter books, once I picked them up. (The hand of God placed one in the bathroom when I was up at 2 a.m. with Vlad, some months back.) Of course I bring a middle-aged-mom perspective to the stories. Want to hear my thesis on the essential theme of fatherlessness in the Harry Potter series?

Can you give me one way ancient Egypt is relevant to modern life, except for "Stargate" fans?

(My Patrick almost revealed his Goa'uld identity the other day, but he stopped at the last second and banged on the wall with a spatula.)

Ancient Egypt was the foundation of the Hellenistic civilization. That was one of the basic building blocks of modern culture. It's not relevant the "current events" at this moment, but it underpins most of what you read.

And of course all modern linguistic analysis began with J.F. Champollion and the Rosetta Stone. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

(I'm rather like Epimetheus in The Water Babies; I'm always looking backward. Kingsley thought Epimetheus was more important than Prometheus, and I do too.)

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