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How
the Educational System Bombs Out for
Boys
Mysterious
Decline -Where Are the Men on Campus?
The
Great Lie
Men,
Women and Work
In
this 6th grade, boys can't talk to
girls
Men's
life expectancy described as a
'crisis'
Important
Books
The following is not about blaming feminists for
the outcome described in the various articles below
(except those who knew that they were creating a
"noble lie*" and the myth that resulted - that
school shortchange girls). It is about holding the
educational system and government responsible from
here on out with the equality of quality education
of girls and boys, now that we know that it
is a myth.
How the Educational System
Bombs Out for Boys
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The main focus of a cover story in the
May 26, 2003 issues of Business
Week looked at "Why are boys falling
behind girls in education - and what it
means for the economy, business and
society?" 
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In the May, 2003 issue of Men's
Health magazine, there was a story
called "Stiff Competition" which compared
the status of women and men today.
It concurred that "in the battle of the
sexes, women always seem to have the
unfair edge." And, in many cases, these
advantages are guaranteed by law - using
discrimination to supposedly end
discrimination. How quaint.
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We reviewed this research in 2,000,
which seemed to be pretty much discounted.
The fact that mainstream media is just
learning what many of us have known for
years, is hopeful. In their 1998
publication "The Myth That Schools
Shortchange Girls: Social science in
the service of deception," the Women's
Freedom Network exposed this situation.
Copies available by calling
907.474.5266
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With all of this information at hand, what are
you going to do about it? What can you do? Get
copies of the publications and read them for
yourself. Then
Click on covers for more specific
information.
How the Educational
System Bombs Out for Boys
The new gender gap - from kindergarten to grad
school, boys are becoming the second sex. In the
past 30 years, nearly every inch of education
progress has gone to girls. Boys are missing from
nearly every leadership position, academic honors
slot, and student' activity post. At one exclusive
private day school in the Midwest, administrators
have even gone so far as to mandate that all awards
and student' government position be divvied equally
between the sexes. It's that boys themselves are
falling behind their own functioning and doing
worse than they did before.
From his first days in school, an average boy is
already developmentally two years behind the girls
in reading and writing. Yet he's often expected to
learn the same things in the same way in the same
amount of time. While every nerve in his body tells
him to run, he has to sit still and listen for
almost eight hours a day. Biologically, he needs
about four recesses a day, but he's lucky if he
gets one, since some lawsuit-leery schools have
banned them altogether. Bug a girl, and he could be
labeled a "toucher" and swiftly suspended - a
result of what some say is an increasingly anti-boy
culture that pathologizxes their behavior.
If he falls behind, he's apt to be shipped off
to special ed, where he'll find that more than 70%
of his classmates are also boys. Squirm, clown, or
interrupt, and he is four times as likely to be
diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder. That often leads to being forced to take
Ritalin or risk being expelled, sent to special ed,
or having parents accused of negligence. One study
of public schools in Fairfax County, VA found that
more than 20% of upper-middle-class white boys were
taking Ritalin-like drugs by fifth grade.
And, boys are 30% more likely to drop out, 85%
more likely to commit murder, and four to six times
more likely to kill themselves, with boy suicides
tripling since 1970.
Conversely, British educators have waged
successful classroom programs to ameliorate
"laddism" (boys turning off to school) by
focusing on teaching techniques that reengage them.
But in the U.S., boys fall from alpha to omega
status doesn't even have a name, let alone the
public's attention.
Among African-Americans, 30% of 40- to
44-year-old women have never married, owing in part
to the lack of men with the same academic
credentials and earning potential. Currently, the
never-married rate is 9% for white women of the
same age. Women are going to pull further and
further ahead of men, and at some point, when they
want to form families, they are going to look
around and say, "Where are the guys?"
Corporations should worry, too. During the boom,
the most acute labor shortages occurred among
educated workers. A problem companies often
solved by hiring immigrants. When the economy
reenergizes, a skills shortage in the
U.S could undermine employers' productivity
and growth.
Better-educated men are also, on average, a much
happier lot. They are more likely to marry, stick
by their children, and pay more in taxes. For the
ages of 18 to 65, the average male college grad
earns $2.5 million over his lifetime, 90% more than
his high school counterpart. That's up[ from
40% more in 1979, the peak year for U.S.
manufacturing. The average college diploma holder
also contributes four times more in net taxes over
his career than a high school grad. Meanwhile, the
typical high school dropout will usually get
$40,000 more from the government than he pays in, a
net drain on society.
Before educators, corporations and policy makers
can narrow the new gender gap, they will have to
understand its myriad causes. Everything from
absentee parenting to the lack of male teachers to
corporate takeovers of lunch rooms with
sugar-and-fat-filled food, which can make kids
hyperactive and distractible, plays a role.
Schools have inadvertently played a big role
losing sight of boys - taking for granted that they
were doing well even through data shows the
opposite. Some boy champions go so far as to
contend that schools have become boy-bashing
laboratories. Christina Hoff Sommers says the
American Association of University Women report,
coupled with zero-tolerance sexual harassment laws,
have hijacked schools by overly feminizing
classrooms and attempting to engineer androgyny.
And, according to Lilian G. Katz, the earliest
push, in which schools are pressured to show kids
achieving the same standards by the same age or
risk losing funding, is also far more damaging to
boys. Even the nerves of boys' fingers develop
later than girls', making it difficult to hold a
pencil and push out perfect cursives. These
developmental differences often unfairly sideline
boys as slow or dumb, planting a distaste for
school as early as the first grade. "Instead of
catering to boys' learning styles, many schools are
force-fiting them into an unnatural mold. The
reigning sit-still-and-listen paradigm isn't ideal
for either sex. But it's one girls often tolerate
better than boys. Girls have more intricate sensory
capacities and biosocial aptitudes to decipher
exactly what the teacher wants, whereas boys tent
to be more antiauthoritarian, competitive, and
risk-taking. They often don't bother with such
details as writing their names in the exact place
instructed by the teacher.
Experts say educators also haven't done nearly
enough to keep yup with the recent findings in
brain research about developmental differences. 99%
of teachers are not trained in this. They were
taught 20 years ago, than gender is just a social
function. But, in fact, brain research over the
past decade has revealed how differently boys' and
girls' brains can function. Early on, boys are
usually superior spatial thinkers and posses the
ability to see things in three dimensions. They are
often drawn to play that involves intense movement
and an element of make-believe violence. Instead of
straitjacketing boys by attempting to restructure
this behavior out of them, it would be better to
teach them how to harness this energy effectively
and healthily. As it stands, the result is that too
many boys are diagnosed with attention-deficit
disorder or its companion, attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder. The U.S. - mostly its boys
- now consumes 80% of the world's supply of
methylphenidate (the generic name for Ritalin).
That use has increased 500% over the past decade,
leading some to call it the new K-12 management
tool. There are school districts where 20% to 25%
of the boys are on the drug.
Instead of recommending medication - something
four states have recently banned school
administrators from doing - experts say educators
should focus on helping boys feel less like
misfits. Especially given that boys tend to learn
best through action, not just talk. Studies have
found that boys who attend kindergartens that focus
on social and emotional skills - as opposed to only
academic learning - perform better, across the
board, by the time they reach junior high.
Indeed, brain research shows that boys are
actually more empathic, expressive and emotive at
birth than girls. But the boy code which bathes
them in a culture of stoicism and reticence, often
socializes those aptitudes out of them by the
second grade. Some executives pay $10,000 a week to
learn emotional intelligence which are actually the
skills boys are born with.
The service sector, where women make up 60% of
employees, has ballooned by 260% since the 1970s.
During the same period, manufacturing, where men
hold 70% of jobs, has shrunk by 14%. Even in this
jobless recovery, women's wages have continued to
grow, while men's earnings haven't managed to keep
up with the low rate of inflation.
A new world has opened up for girls, but unless
a symmetrical effort is made to help boys find
their footing, it may turn out that it's a lonely
place to be. After all, it takes more than one
gender to have a gender revolution.
Legend:
Source: Michelle Conlin,
Business Week, May 26, 2003.
Mysterious Decline
-Where Are the Men on Campus?
The Trend is clear. Everybody wants to know where
all the men have gone. The Washington Post calls
their disappearance the "question that has grown
too conspicuous to ignore," and USA Today notes
"universities fret about how to attract males as
women increasingly dominate campuses."
Females now outnumber males by a four to three
ratio in American colleges, a difference of almost
two million students. Men earn only 43% of all
college degrees. Among blacks, two women earn
bachelor's degrees for every man. Among Hispanics,
only 40 percent of college graduates are male.
Female high school graduates are 16% more likely to
go to college than their male counterparts.
Source: Philip W. Cook and Glenn
Sacks, www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0429sacks.html
The Great Lie
It is time to abandon the myth of "woman as victim"
and replace it with "woman as survivor and
success."
Source: Wendy McElroy,
www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0422.html
Men,
Women and Work
Who does the work of the world in a world of over
six billion people -- men or women? Who does it in
the United States?
Source: Glenn Sacks,
www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2003/0318sacks.html
In
this 6th grade, boys can't talk to girls
(4/30/03)
Alarmed by displays of public affection, an
elementary school in southern Oregon has banned all
conversation between boys and girls.
Source: www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32326
Men's
life expectancy described as a 'crisis'
(04/30/03)
The average U.S. man dies almost five years before
the average woman, but a medical journal says that
is not biologically inevitable, calling the
disparity a "silent health crisis."
Source: www.washtimes.com/national/20030430-3227656.htm
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