Our schools need to help boys become men? Part III

In Part I, we saw an article that highlighted how poorly schools were doing with boys. In Part II, we saw that we should expect the exact opposite: there should be more boys excelling at school than girls, given the different distributions of intelligence.

So what the heck is going on?

To figure this out, we need to go back to Christina Hoff Sommer’s exceptional book The War Against Boys. Let’s do a super-condensced, Readers’ Digest version of it:

– In 1990, feminist Harvard academic Carol Gilligan informed the world that “America’s adolescent girls were in crisis.” Despite there being no real empirical evidence for this claim, feminists went berserk such that in a relatively short time, the topic became a virtual national emergency. Only there wasn’t one – it was all morbid feminist fantasy.

– Entities like the American Association of University Women (AAUW) marketed “research” which supported this girl-victim fantasy, but tended to ignore or exclude research showing that it wasn’t true. It’s as if every feminist organization in the US wanted this to be “true,” and went out of its way to make it appear so. And, as they say, a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.

– In response to this dire “crisis” – all feminist rubbish – Congress even enacted the Gender Equity in Education Act. Now feminist researchers and activists had even more money to “research” the non-existent problem of mass suffocation of girls’ education.

– The reality was that: girls were getting better grades; girls had higher educational aspirations; they followed amore rigorous academic program; they participated more in the prestigious Advanced Placement (AP) program; there were slightly more female students enrolled in high-level math and science courses; and girls outnumbered boys in student governments, at school newspapers, and even in debating clubs. Don’t get me going about reading and writing. Sports was the only area in which boys held a lead, and feminist activists targeted this “with a vengeance.”

– Even teachers generally believed the feminist propaganda – goodness knows the media was terribly irresponsible in parroting feminist claims. This was even though the truth of boys’ educational plight was staring teachers right in the face.

– Hence came a bunch of initiatives to address the girls’ “crisis.” What these were really doing was giving girls an unfair advantage in school. “In the United States, a proposal to do something special for boys usually gets plowed under before it has a chance to take root.” Britain was much more advanced than the US in recognizing boys’ problems; apparently Canada is nothing to brag about.

– As if this wasn’t bad enough, feminists starting to consider the cause of this girls’ “crisis.” Clearly it was due to “patriarchy” – according to feminists, boys were socialized to be dominant and to suppress adolescent girls in school. Thus, boys were to be socialized to be like girls. Thus, the very essence of being a boy became bad in the education system, although this wasn’t obvious. Feminists held that men were responsible for all violence.

– This more or less starts the feminist belief that gender is merely a “social construct” in earnest. Since boys’ gender is obviously bad (to feminists), they basically have to “educate” boys to behave socially like girls. Which, if you’re a boy, is really not much fun at all. Despite this having no basis in reality, this is what was and still is happening.

– Thus, you have the fabricated adolescent girls’ “crisis” at the very time that girls had generally caught up to boys in school. Feminists activists go to town to correct the “crisis,” and suppress any notion that this is all rubbish. Girls are given substantial extra resources to get ahead, while at the same time just being a boy was unofficially and surreptitiously declared to be “bad.” Normal male behaviour was effectively defined as bad and was to be driven out of them through deceptive educational policies and practices. As a result, boys are made to feel bad about themselves merely for being boys, although this is never generally openly stated.

All under the deranged feminist guise of the manufactured “crisis” for girls. How on Earth could such an outrageous, fraudulent, deceitful, duplicitous, heartless, cunning, manipulative and controlling feminist program of oppression of boys in the educational system ever have taken place, and why hasn’t it been corrected?

As it turns out, there is a very rational explanation as to why.

(To be continued …)