Posted on 01/23/2010 3:19:42 AM PST by Scanian
The headline from The Washington Post cele brates yet another milestone: "University of Virginia picks its first female president." Meantime, the data continues to mount that our educational system is massively failing one gender: boys.
In a new book, "Why Boys Fail," Richard Whitmire points to a study that tracked every graduate of the Boston public schools in 2007. For every 167 women in a four-year college, there were only 100 men. Gender even beat race as a predictor of college attendance: Black women were 5 percentage points more likely than white men to be in college.
And it's not just Boston: Nearly 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees in the country go to women.
Do we care about our boys?
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“Do we care about our boys?”
As the father of two boys its quite obvious there is no concern. We still see more decisions pushing it even further towards women.
Why should college or university attendance be the yardstick for measuring success?
Maybe some boys/men realize there is no substitute for real, down-to-earth experience.
My nephew is very, very intelligent. He wants to be a mechanic. I figure he can go to college later when he feels he has a need for the education.
But college isn’t about job training. It should be about learning how to think, but unfortunately today’s colleges and universities seem to be mainly about indoctrination - teaching students what they can’t do.
Pardon the pet peeve moment here —
Dear Maggie,
Words/language have gender, people have sex.
Sincerely,
T-Bird45
— Please carry on with the thread. —
Ms. Gallagher’s point is well made, but her piece seems to ramble—not necessarily in a bad way—and it’s difficult to see this for anything more than a “bitch piece.”
If you want to bring up men again, Ms. Gallagher, consider dialing down the pro-women anti-men rhetoric thrown at us by every facet of the media. Consider the promotion of “maleness” in a non-misogynistic way. Knock it off with this bra-burning 1960s mentality where men are cultural and social neanderthals. I take extreme exception to that considering I’m in the minority of all of your statistics (white, male, well-educated).
I’ve seen the way that women are promoted over men when the male candidates are oftentimes better qualified. In the name of political correctness, a job is given to a black woman while a white man with a family and a mortgage two months overdue would outperform your new ghetto queen in every task. This isn’t about fairness; this is about productivity. Men are stereotyped as construction workers, truck drivers, plumbers, roofers. Yet when one of those motivated construction workers decides to study project management in night school, studying for hours while keeping food on his family’s table, and applies for a job in construction project management, all of his experience in the field is trumped by a woman who has a Masters degree in a similar field but has never set her pretty little fingers on a shovel. Guess what? You fail! I’ve seen it happen time and time again: the woman is promoted or hired over a man because they have to fill some imaginary quota. She’s pretty, sharp, witty, and dresses well. She’s mildly indignant of men, and she wears her education on her lapel. She speaks eloquently and is socially attractive.
Contrast that with a man who’s gritty, colloquial, and “buttoned up” sans the boobs. He’s knowledgeable of his field, can talk about how Peyton performed, but his depth of knowledge is confined to AM sports talk radio and hauling rocks. He’s perfect for the position, but you’re more worried about appearances. You’ve subverting practical knowledge for a pretty face. I’ll say it again: you fail.
I appreciate that women are subjectively unhappy, and they can thank the militant feminist movements, the NOW women, the bra burning, crop haircut, butch bull dyke feminists who want to feed their baby boys soy and keep them from playing cops and robbers lest they become serial killers. How many countless generations of men spent weekends shooting cans with their 22s? How many countless generations of men with cap guns and played cowboys and indians, cops and robbers? Yet, our jails aren’t overflowing with serial murderers, rapists, or sociopaths who say that little plastic cap gun or that .22 turned them into a criminals. Quite the contrary, most of the jails around here are full of drug dealers who came from families without fathers. They had brothers and sisters from other men, ate government cheese while mom was out gallivanting in her leased Mercedes that she could afford because she was hired at the DMV over a qualified white man, and learned about life from the streets and gangs.
When women and the complicit media stop putting down men, stop showing us as bumbling oafs in sitcoms, stop over-sexualizing women, stop feminizing men, stop bastardizing good fathers and promoting divorce, stop promoting the degradation of the family and the homosexual agendas, and stop pushing this militant feminist agenda down the throats of schoolchildren, maybe then, and only then, will boys again be boys and maybe, just maybe, they’ll learn how to grow into men.
If it were easy, women and kids would be doing it.
bump for bookmark
Excellent points all
“The nation’s schools are failing boys”
Oh it’s a hell of a lot worse than that. Our culture has lost the control it one had of male aggression. The force that made and served America, the force that projected our national power to the moon, now culturally speaking, serves the whim of it’s individual owner. This is what Evil wanted when Evil set out to destroy a Nation Under God. Divide and conquer. So far Evil is doing pretty good....
Wait until the Federal Government takes over the loan program for higher education!
Wow! You’re an awesome writer. Thanks!
Thank you, that's one of my pet peeves too. And on a thread complaining about leftists destroying education.
I was gonna give Rareista props but he will get plenty.
Your words deserve a bump as well.
If anyone is “failing boys,” it’s the nation’s parents. Maggie Gallagher is a fairly accurate observer of problems, but her solutions are all statist, and therefore will never help.
“The Nation’s schools are failing....” Just fill in the blank. The schools are failing both genders and any other category you chose.
National Review recently noted that the Berkeley California school board became alarmed that blacks and Hispanics were doing badly on math and science while whites and Asians were doing well.
This disparity was intolerable. So they simply voted to drop all science lab courses from the curricula, fire the science teachers, and use the money saved to fund remedial courses for the “minorities.”
this bra-burning 1960s mentality where men are cultural and social neanderthals = no babies.
Is everybody happy?
Been there, done that, seen that so many times like many.
I had my own personal horror story of a control freak, closet man hater feminist type. I am glad that chapter is long since closed.
Pretty good article. I’ve been making similar points here for several years. (Yes, I’m a woman, but I like men. I want my boys to be men, and I want my daughters to marry men.)
Don’t like the put-down advertising on TV? Stop watching, stop buying. Schools are bad for your sons? Get them out of there. Turn off the tv and get out and run, or play ball, or go shooting.
And if you think playing poker is a dangerous, manly, risk-taking activity, try saying, “I think Christianity is just plain better than Islam,” or “I think homosexuality is wrong,” in polite company.
education by the gov. is emasculating on purpose.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.