OUTLAWING BOYHOOD

BOYS WILL BE BOYS - EXCEPT IF SCHOOLS HAVE THEIR WAY

Girls have not just surpassed boys in the education system. They have trounced them. So what if 57% of undergraduates are women? There's no rule that everything between the sexes is always going to come out fifty-fifty. [funny; that argument doesn't work re: Title IX][snip]

... investigates an education system in which women principals oversee women teachers who treat girl behavior as standard. All the way down this gynocracy, normal male behavior (squirming in preschool, being more interested in war stories than relationships, pretending to shoot each other) is redefined as antisocial, threatening, or (most sinister of all) indicative of "special needs" that gets boys disappeared to the Gitmo of Special Ed. (Boys are diagnosed with attention disorders at four times the rate of girls). [snip]

"What do you see in a reading circle? A teacher reading and the girls sitting and the teacher stopping to say, 'Stop moving around, Matt. Pay attention, Jules.' Boys who need to move around attract lots of negative attention. They get beat down early. They lose their spark."

... his son's third grade teacher frowned upon a picture of a battle scene the boy had drawn. "Did any of the students have a negative reaction?" Johnson asked. The teacher said no, but added, "I'm a parent. And if my son brought home work like this, I would tell him that it didn't represent our family values."

Ralph Fletcher, who teaches elementary school teachers how to teach writing, says he handed out a questionnaire to boys asking them to complete this sentence: "When we write at school, I wish we were able to . . ." The majority responded with some variation of "Write what I want." That's a beatdown. It isn't boys vs. girls but boys vs. their women teachers.

"Too often," says boys' psychologist Michael Thompson, "Boys are simply treated as defective girls."

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