Why Boys Are Failing

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I was following along and nodding in approval until he dropped this bomb:
I draw a conclusion that never occurred to me when I was younger. We have undertaken a great experiment unknown to any society until a hundred years ago. It is the education of boys en masse by women, always indoors and in the company of girls. I think we can say, with reservations, that the experiment has failed.
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What follows is not the presentation of evidence and reasoned argument one might have hoped for, but a caricature of society, a world-view distorted like an image seen in a funhouse mirror. In this view, progressive women appear large and fierce, and men look short and stupid. Sorry, that’s not the world I live in.
 
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Yes, I think that passage is the essence of his article. And he concludes, a few paragraphs later:

“However that may be, the facts speak for themselves. The experiment has failed. It is time for men to resume the responsibility to educate their sons.”

But I didn’t take the article as being anti-woman, but as being against the current method of educating boys.
 
The difficulty I have with the argument is that it seizes upon one factor which has emerged concurrently with many other factors, and declares “Aha! This is the cause of our problem.”
 
Yes, I think that there is something to that. In my old elementary school, boys and girls were together educated by nuns, and we seemed to survive okay. But there are a number of societal factors that have since intervened. There were no cell phones, no internet, and about the only entertainment was to play outside.
 
I’m trying to figure out how you are supposed to fix the problem!

In order to increase the number of male teachers, salaries are going to need to be more attractive.

I don’t think anyone disagrees with fathers needing to be more involved in their sons upbringing but what’s the solution to absentee fathers, uninvolved fathers or exhausted fathers?

Is the military the only way to achieve self denial, teamwork, manual skills, respect for authority?

Finally, the problems of TV and video games would solve itself if boys were more involved in manual labor activities or more outside play. How do you push that change?

I thought the article was a smidge condescending of women. Men used to be the school teachers long ago and women didn’t push them out…they left. The article made it sound like most teachers are unsympathetic to male interests in reading selections, etc. however, I think that’s pretty rare. Teachers are taught how to engage all their students, male and female. If they are ignoring the needs of half their students they should never have gotten their teaching certification.

Oh, one more thing…what was the point of starting with the rare, unusual cases of some men that had great achievements and starting in on the problems of boys education? These stories are interesting because they are so unique, not because they represent boys education…several of them never even went to public education! So, confusing as to his point.
 
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JimG said:
There were no cell phones, no internet, and about the only entertainment was to play outside.
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I think that’s a major change that is affecting boys more negatively than girls, for some reason. Boys seem to need to “play outside” to a greater extent. All the screen time nowadays is stunting development. Then again there are exceptions: think of all the “computer nerds” who grew up constantly at the keyboard and are now successful men. Women can be great teachers, and while I agree they cannot be a boy’s father, that’s not their fault as educators. More objective research, free of any and all bias, needs to be done about this.
 
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One glaring omission is that he neglects to define failure. Is it just that more women that men are in college? Is it that 14-year-old boys are not writing symphonies? What does he mean when he says boys are failing?
 
Raising hand :raising_hand_woman: I thought we were supposed to raise children. Or just the girls? I’m confused.’
 
Sarcelle said:
Are you in favor of reinstating the draft?
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Personally, I would not favor reinstating it unless it’s needed, but it did provide some benefits—diversity, for one. Had the draft not been in effect, I woud not have enlisted in the USAF, nor would a lot of others. There was a great deal more diversity of people in my Air Force unit than there would be in any similar civilian group. Unfortunately, the military, which used to be self sufficient as to neary every aspect of its operations, started farming out many jobs to contractors. Twenty years later my wife and I went to a reunion with people we would never otherwise have known.
 
The modern educational system has so many problems, for both sexes and all social groups. I couldn’t, now, begin to list the problems,or suggest solutions.

But the kind of ideas discussed in the article , I believe, are part of a movement (‘the red pill’ real Men don’t eat quiche’) which, I believe, mainly blames feminism, and, when asked for concrete suggestions, proponents tend to trail off, and say that women should be happy with how things are. I didn’t see the article go that far, but then, it hardly mentions women. Except as stumbling-block teachers.

I’d better get to my treatise on modern education…
 
Since men still hold most of the top leadership positions in US corporations, I don’t believe we’re failing boys at all.
 
MamaJewel said:
Since men still hold most of the top leadership positions in US corporations, I don’t believe we’re failing boys at all.
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We’re not talking about economic opportunities here. That’s not what this article is about. There is an epidemic of “failure to launch” (for lack of a better term, but I think it’s actually much worse than that) among boys today. And the odd thing about it is that’s it’s a worldwide phenomenon. The root cause seems to be that fatherhood in the last several generations had had enough damage done to it that some sort of threshold has been crossed. Combine that with technological advances and we have a worldwide epidemic of aimless young men wreaking havoc on societies.

The angle of this particular article is interesting, but ultimately it comes across as trying to p(name removed by moderator)oint women in education as a major factor. I just don’t see it that way. I don’t think it even stands as a contributing factor compared to the technological advances which I think are the biggest contributing factors. Our methods of civil governance, teaching, psychology, and culture simply have not been able to keep pace with technological advances which push us into spaces we’ve never been.
 
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1Lord1Faith said:
The root cause seems to be that fatherhood in the last several generations had had enough damage done to it that some sort of threshold has been crossed. Combine that with technological advances and we have a worldwide epidemic of aimless young men wreaking havoc on societies.
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If fatherhood was damaged in any way, it was at the very hands of men. Young men wander aimlessly because women stepped into many roles that “mediocre” men filled during the industrial age. As technology advanced and world wars rained misery on humanity, men went out to fight for ideologies while women did the factory work (men were still in leadership positions, though).

The everyday, mediocre man who had a basic understanding of history and the humanities, allowed himself to be fooled by the educated elite who used a short-sighted version of the scientific method to promote the elitist viewpoint and supplant God.

If anything destroyed fatherhood, it was the elitist, intellectual male viewpoint of human overpopulation, especially by people of color. The family, in general, and women in particular, were the targets of the solution to the faulty theory of humanity’s demise and earth’s destruction due to overpopulation. Like a polygamist community, women became objects for the benefit of a few “good” men. It didn’t matter if their sons were ejected from the family and community and left to fend for themselves.

Since women aren’t having babies anymore, and fathers have been rendered useless by technology, women are the teachers and college students today.

Even the male chauvinists in the IT world got their heads handed back to them on a platter when they were recently reminded that women were the original workers in IT because it was deemed women’s work at that time in history.

Now men and women are competing for jobs, and since women either 1 ) don’t know their worth and fail to negotiate better pay and 2) are willing to pay a heck of a lot more for an education than men are, we see young men wandering aimlessly because they )in their minds) are worth way more than what they will be paid.

On top of that, doing work that gets one sweaty and stinky is not valued in today’s US culture. We’re all supposed to be in refined positions in a pimped-out office.

Many young women are attracted to men with beards, unlike many young women of the previous generation who seemed to like big-hair boys w/o facial hair.

If we could make construction workers, HVAC techs, journeymen, electricians, etc the sexy new masculine male, then things might change.

But really, young men are content to sit in their parents home and let some other schlub making six figures a year come unclog the toilet or clean the air handler unit. As far as the appliances go, just purchase new ones when the current appliances break down. No need to repair it.

Btw, your spot on with your take on the article and really, women in education are not the ones to blame.
 
If “boys are failing” it’s largely because they no longer have strong father figures in their lives and thus lack male role models. A boy needs a dad, that’s why God provided an earthly father for Jesus in the person of St. Joseph as well.

Has nothing to do with the gender of the teachers, and in fact there are a lot of male teachers, coaches, admins etc in education but the teacher, admin, coach etc is usually not a father figure for the students. The teacher’s job is to teach academic subjects, not to teach life skills to every kid in the class who is only present there from an hour to a few hours per day.
 
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The fact that there aren’t as many recent prodigies as the author believes there should be does not mean that “boys are failing”. In fact, both boys and girls are failing in a sense and I don’t think it’s the school’s fault.If you look at the author’s list of boy geniuses, you’ll notice that many of them didn’t even have formal training. What they had was passion and the time to pursue it. I see the problem is less the inadequacy of schools, but the almost complete dependence of society on schools and childcare facilities to essentially rear their children for them. It’s not uncommon for my students to be at school for 11 hours a day, five days a week. There’s no more afterschool play. All their activities are hyper organized. Even their birthday parties follow a tight schedule. Any spare time they do get is spent in front of a screen in order to protect them from the perverts we believe are roaming the street en masse. I think most schools are more or less exactly what they were designed to be, a place for kids to learn basic skills and be exposed to the world outside their family. It was never meant to be their entire childhood though. And you can call it a “camp” all you want, most kids even spend their entire summer in school as well. They have no time to pursue their interests or interact with the adult work world as they spend their entire holidays in hyper-organized kiddie care. THis isn’t just bad for boys. It’s bad for everyone.
 
A good teacher is a good teacher regardless of whether they’re male or female. When the teacher is good, the students learn. But in stating this, it points to a question that truly needs to be asked: Are our teachers good at what they teach? If so, wouldn’t we see better results? Similarly, a good parent is a good parent whether male or female - and most preferably - both! But again, in saying this, questions need to be asked. Shouldn’t we be seeing better results? If not, why not?

Tony Esolen has a well established ax to grind against a culture that diminishes the dignity of boys as being a separate reality from the dignity of girls. I don’t doubt for second that he doesn’t respect girls. I suspect that he loves them completely. But he is focused on boyhood as being a time of special concern, and I appreciate that. I’ve read many of Professor Esolen’s books and essays (including his deeply penetrating translation of Dante). His opinion is worthy of my respect. So, when he suggests that there is something wrong with how boys are being taught, I pay attention. I think he’s right. I think that boys may very well be “failing.” And if they are, it’s NOT their fault! Something else is going on and it needs to be addressed.

Not all boys need to be geniuses, but all boys, if they can, should be respected for their true worth. Boys are definitely different than girls. They learn differently and behave differently. We have to admit this as a truth and deal with it openly and sympathetically, otherwise we will be doing a great disservice to the children we love.
 
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MamaJewel said:
If we could make construction workers, HVAC techs, journeymen, electricians, etc the sexy new masculine male, then things might change.
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I think tha Mike Rowe would agree with much of what you have posted. Those who are doing the “dirty jobs” are making tons of money and are happier in what they do. And they don’t have a lifetime of student loan debt.
 
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