Monday, August 26, 2013

Educating Boys

This post really struck a chord with me:
Well, childhood-development geniuses, it’s 40 years into your project to turn boys into girls. How’s that working out for you?

“Great! Let’s double down!” reply self-proclaimed “experts” like Rosalind Wiseman, the vapid creator of the “Mean Girls” meme (in her 2002 book “Queen Bees and Wannabes”) who has turned her guns (sorry, her magical glowing beams of understanding and love) on boys in her new follow-up “Masterminds & Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World.”

A better title would have been “Batman in Love,” because that’s a great example from the book of the absurd nature of Wiseman’s determination to reconceptualize boyhood to make it less alien to her, i.e., less masculine.
If girls were on the trajectory that boys are, there'd be Title IX and similar programs mandated all over the place.

1 comment:

Ellen K said...

Boys are more likely to be labeled as learning disabled, as ADHD, as disruptive, as troubled. Boys are more likely to drop out, to attempt and be successful at suicide and to use drugs. The buzzwords of collaboration fly in the face of what we know about how the male mind is hardwired. Real boys survive public education over succeeding. Many of the boys who do succeed do so because they were either held back in early grades or they have developed social skills desirable in a female dominated education structure. Boys are being coached to either subliminate their emotions or being pushed into roles they did not shape. I am a teacher and a mother of male children. I think the feminists have created schools that serve no one well. Lack of competition leaves boys bored and both sexes unfit to compete in the real world. Rigor in education requires competition-and yet how many schools actively avoid things like honor rolls, awards and recognition of achievement for fear of hurting someone's feelings?