Disappearing Act
Where Have the Men Gone? No Place Good
By Michael Gurian
In the 1990s, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn’t take notes as well as the young women. They didn’t seem to care as much about what I taught — literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, “Sitting here, listening, staring at these words — this is not really who I am.”
That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in the District. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the “biggest agenda items” at Howard. “We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students,” he said. “We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men.” (more…)
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No Running, No Jumping: The War Against Boys in Our Schools
By Charles W. Colson
Commentary from BreakPoint
The Cleveland Avenue School in Atlanta has all the amenities you would expect a new school to have: computer equipment, an up-to-date library, and modern classrooms. It has everything except a playground.
No, it wasn’t an oversight. It was designed that way, in order to make little boys behave more like little girls. And it’s part of a trend.
In 1998, Atlanta eliminated recess in its elementary schools. Other cities, like Philadelphia, retained something called recess, but it bears little resemblance to the unstructured play time most of us enjoyed as kids.
Why? As Christina Hoff Sommers says in her new book, THE WAR AGAINST BOYS, educators today are intolerant of boys acting like boys — moving, making noise, and engaging in raucous play. This intolerance goes beyond the need for order and discipline. The rule is “no running and no jumping,” and boys who engage in normal active play are frequently punished or sent home.
When boys aren’t being punished for being boys, they are being medicated to accomplish the same result. It is revealing that 95 percent of the kids on Ritalin today — a drug used to treat hyperactivity — are boys.
As Michael Gurian, the author of THE GOOD SON, puts it, “If Huck [Finn] and Tom [Sawyer] were in today’s schools, they would be labeled ADD, having attention deficit disorder, and drugged.” (more…)
