871 Boys in School

All in all, an interesting article. I didn't really see from the quotes in the article that the parents were responsible for the boys' lack of school skills. If the parents really were at fault, wouldn't girls be doing badly in school too?

The one mom was a math teacher, and the other parents just seemed concerned and seemed to be making efforts to communicate with the schools.

But this part really pissed me off:

"Some scholars, notably Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, charge that misguided feminism is what's been hurting boys. In the 1990s, she says, girls were making strong, steady progress toward parity in schools, but feminist educators portrayed them as disadvantaged and lavished them with support and attention. Boys, meanwhile, whose rates of achievement had begun to falter, were ignored and their problems allowed to fester"

So this self-hating bitch blames girls, women and feminism for the fact that boys don't do well in school? Yeah, whatever...it's ALWAYS the woman's fault, according to some people (sigh)...

CF Scorpio, sadly Sommers' view is a popular one amongst educators. It annoys the fuck out of me. But I have had to hear it from educators who use it to show that boys are persecuted (because they are not doing as well as girls) and 'over-disciplined'. Some schools are putting extra resources into boys' education as a result. They are also tolerating all sorts of bad behavior because they do not want to 'over-discipline'. This includes degrees of harassment of females.

Underlying this is a view that boys, left to their own devices, would 'naturally' equal or outperform girls. Also that boys are 'naturally' destructive and unruly and expecting them to behave in class is contrary to nature. All rather ironic really considering that the other side of the coin has always been that girls are not 'naturally' as good as boys. I was at school myself during the girls' education push. What it was really about was giving girls self-confidence in non-traditional areas and challenging teachers' assumptions that girls did not want to succeed. However at the time it was said that it was 'natural' that girls just wanted to do domestic science and art and that boys wanted to do physics and technical subjects. Now girls are suceeding there is obviously something wrong because 'naturally' they should not be doing this.

Did I mention that most of the vocal proponents of this view are mommies and duhdies with boys?

I went to an all-girls' school and I think I learned more because of it. There were no distractions. Maybe bringing back single-sex education is the answer.

SS Ed is fine for schools but it has been shown that students from co-ed schools have less trouble adjusting to life post-school. Plus in the public system there would still be the issue of the curriculum and teaching methods and how to temper these for boys and girls. Plus I'm not sure that I'd want to work with any boy who came out of a school run the way the advocates of boys' education would like it run.

American Enterprise is a right wing "think" tank just like Heritage, and of course our "liberal" media doesn't ever point that shit out...

Because if girls are succeeding in school more than the boys, they will become interested in their own identities and not want to be baby factories. The boys have got to succeed so they can grow up to support all the new little consumers and most importantly, keep their power.

This article is a big pile of cowshit.