American Taliban part one: School boys

Boys graduate less, get lower grades, dropout more, are expelled or suspended more frequently, and they are also the root cause behind global warming.  Everybody knows this, but why should anyone care?  Well, the 28 kids killed in Chicago this school year, were murdered by boys.  And the boys who killed them were not honor students; they were dropouts and academic bottom-feeders. I f the punks could shoot straight you might be able to ignore this phenomenon, but since half the people killed weren’t the intended victims, either face up to this epidemic or replace midnight basketball with shooting lessons.  We are all at risk.  Let’s look at this problem with a sociological perspective, infuse quantitative reliability, and arrive at an operational solution.  But first, we have to understand the nature of the beast.  Schools, teachers, and You Tube did not cause this problem, they certainly will not end it, but they may well have made a unintended contribution to its prevalence.

Though it would be difficult to find it written down anywhere, I am sure most educators have long known the secret to a successful school:  Restrict enrollment to little girls.  Christiana Hoff Sommers, in her bestselling book, The War Against Boys, asserts:  ‘A boy today, through no fault of his own, finds himself implicated in the social crime of shortchanging girls. Yet the allegedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be the superior student.  She is probably more articulate, more mature, more engaged, and more well-balanced.  The boy may be aware that she is more likely to go on to college. He may believe that teachers prefer to be around girls and pay more attention to them.’

In 1991, the prestigious, but goofy, American Association of University Women (AAUW) made a startling declaration:  ‘Most girls emerge from adolescence with a poor self image.’  Researchers, all female, informed the body politic that the primary culprit here was the public school system in America.  No one seemed to notice that at the time this assertion was loosed upon us that 85% of all public school teachers were women.

Consequently, after much ripping of garments and public self- flagellation, Congress passed the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act which officially categorized girls as an ‘under-served-population,’ placing American womanhood on a par with other discriminated against minorities.  Millions of dollars flowed into the coffers of thought-control institutions so they could look deeply into this heart-of-darkness.  In 1995, at the UN 4^th World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, the American delegation, chaired by Secretary of State Madelyn Albright, laid bare the educational and psychological deficits of American girls as a pressing human rights issue.

Human rights issue?  Hard data from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) and from several recent university studies show that far from being shy and demoralized, today's girls outshine boys.  Girls get better grades.  They have higher educational aspirations.  They follow a more rigorous academic program and participate more in the prestigious Advanced Placement (AP) program.  Furthermore, the DOE reports that in 1996 there were 8.4 million women but only 6.7 million men enrolled in college.  It also shows women holding on to and improving this advantage well into the next decade.  According to one department prediction, by 2010 there will be 10.2 million women in college and 6.9 million men.

Good news indeed, for the smaller of the species and America’s largest minority.  In the meantime, what is going on with the guys?