Add The New York Post on Google Ms. Jefferson, the kindergarten teacher, held up wooden skewers, cotton balls, and craft glue. “Today we’re each going to make a pussywillow,” she told the children.
“I don’t wanna make a pussywillow,” Jason said. “I wanna make a lightsaber.” Ms. Jefferson ignored him. Jason glued a cotton ball to the end of his wooden skewer. “I find your lack of faith – disturbing!” he said to her, channeling his inner Darth Vader, brandishing the skewer. She sent him to the principal.
Jason was sent to the principal’s office four times in the first two weeks. At the end of the second week, he came home in tears. He told his mom, “School is stupid. I hate school.”
Sad lonely boy sitting in the back of the classroom during classes Photographee.eu – stock.adobe.co Deborah Stipek, former dean of education at Stanford, has found that kids form attitudes toward school early. Those attitudes, once formed, are stable and non-contingent. That’s a fancy way of saying that once a boy decides that he hates school, he’s not likely to change his mind. And he doesn’t think there’s anything he can do that’s going to make a difference.
Over the past 25 years, I have visited more than 500 schools. I have seen first-hand how schools have become unfriendly to boys. Boys doing things that boys have always done – pointing fingers at each other, saying “bang bang you’re dead.” Drawing pictures of weapons. Throwing snowballs. All that now gets a boy in trouble.
When I graduated from my public high school in Ohio in 1977, boys outnumbered girls among the highest achievers — not only in my high school, but nationwide. Thirty years ago, Myra and David Sadker published their book “Failing at Fairness: How our Schools Cheat Girls,” documenting that achievement gap and showing how schools were keeping girls down.
That was then. Times have changed. Girls now outperform boys by wide margins in every content area K-12, including math and science. Girls now outnumber boys by more than 2-to-1 among high-school valedictorians. Young women are now much more likely than their brothers to attend college.
We all applaud girls’ achievement. But why didn’t we level off around 50-50? Why are boys now doing so much worse in school than their sisters?
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can make a school friendly to boys without making it unfriendly to girls.
“Boys Adrift” by Leonard Sax (Basic Books, available Sept. 1) I lead workshops for schools, sharing zero-cost strategies that boost achievement for both boys and girls by deploying gender-aware instructional strategies. The best way to get boys excited about Emily Dickinson is different from the best way to get girls excited about Emily Dickinson. The best way to get girls excited about computer coding is different from the best way to get boys excited about computer coding. Many teachers don’t know this, because at Harvard and Columbia and many other “leading” schools of education, the professors endorse Judith Butler’s claim that gender is just a social construct.
How can you tell if your son’s school is friendly to boys? Here are some tips:
First, check the honor rolls. They should be roughly 50-50. If girls vastly outnumbers boys, then something is going wrong.
Second, ask whether teachers are allowed to use the phrase “boys and girls.” At many schools today, teachers are officially prohibited from using these words. They’re supposed to say “purple penguins” instead, or some similar nonsense. Such silliness indicates an allegiance to a dogma that is unfriendly to boys — and to girls, I might add.
Third, ask about the top athletes at the school. At boy-friendly schools, the top male athletes are also scholars, as a rule. At the schools unfriendly to boys, young men have to choose: They can be scholars or they can be athletes, but they cannot be both.
I just published a new edition of my book “Boys Adrift,” documenting a growing gender gap in achievement. As I show in the book: the achievement gap is getting bigger not because girls are doing better — they’re not — but because boys are doing worse. You don’t want your son to be one of those boys adrift. The first step is to make sure that he’s attending a boy-friendly school.
Leonard Sax MD PhD is a physician, psychologist, and educational consultant.
