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I'm a man... But I can change... If I have to... I guess...

"The Red Green Show"

Think about this, from the article:

It's not that the girls of the Class of 2003 aren't willing to give the guys a chance. Last year, the juniors elected a boy as class president. But after taking office, he swiftly instructed his all-female slate that they were his cabinet and that he was going to be calling all the shots. The girls looked around and realized they had the votes, says Tufts University-bound Casey Vaughn, an Intel finalist and one of the alpha femmes of the graduating class. "So they impeached him and took over."

If that boy had been willing to lead a cooperative effort instead of try to take all the reins of authority for himself, would he have been impeached? This is a traditional alpha-male strategy, which will not work with women unless they are "put in their place" regularly, something the self-esteem/equal opportunity movement among girls' advocates is discouraging with live ammo.

Boys can't operate like this anymore. Who has taught them this? Anybody?

And this:

Moreover, girls say much of their drive stems from parents and teachers pushing them to get a college degree because they have to be better to be equal -- to make the same money and get the same respect as a guy. "Girls are more willing to take the initiative...they're not afraid to do the work," says Tara Prout, the Georgetown-bound senior class president at Lawrence High. "A lot of boys in my school are looking for credit to get into college to look good, but they don't really want to do the grunt work."

Suddenly there's real competition. The male-dominated culture doesn't know what to make of it (see the Man's Prayer, above), and so we haven't trained our sons how to respond. Instead of teaching them in a way that will help them compete, they drift. They resent the fact that the girls are "winning", when actually, in the still male-dominated work world, excellence is the norm for successful women, and it's beginning to show up everywhere instead of just in the examples of feminist postergirls. Boys who have always been rewarded for being male and "good enough" are being out-performed.

All that research on brain development and social development is not being acted upon by educational institutions. The idea of day-long kindergarten and mandatory preschool ("No child left behind"?) is disastrous for boys especially, particularly if we intend to continue to focus such programs on academics instead of social and pre-academic skills.

We truly ought to be restructuring our reading curricula in this country to begin teaching reading as a gradeable subject in the second grade, when almost all the students are cognitively ready for it. I don't mean forbidding or discouraging reading among those who can do it, an equally stupid idea. But we can provide 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds with read-aloud sessions for aural vocabulary building, story-sequencing activities, and story-telling activities among the children themselves that focus on developing preliteracy skills to a critical level for everyone. Preliteracy activities can be really fun for readers as well, providing a solid background for a student body that reads, and nobody is marked dumb at the ripe old age of 6 because of a natural developmental difference.

We also need to restore our art programs, which assist in fine motor skill development and constructive emotional expression, and our music programs, which develop parts of the brain that support mathematical learning later on, as well as teaching teamwork in ensemble musical performance.

Whoever suggests cutting recess from the school day as a waste of time needs to be locked in a closet for several hours Monday through Friday to better appreciate how confinement in a seat affects a child's ability to focus and learn. In fact, recess in grades 6, 7 & 8 isn't a bad idea. Cuts to physical education programs need to be roundly ridiculed.

Reading clubs that reflect kids' real interests, rather than pushing them to read things that adults say they "ought to be ready for", need to be developed and rewarded in ways that make them attractive to kids who don't read now.

Lastly, medicating people whose behavior doesn't conform to dysfunctional norms must stop. We can learn a lot from the medical philosophy of osteopathic doctors, who go through all the regular medical school stuff and take an additional year learning about physical manipulation of the body and behavior modification as a first line of attack on human ailments, rather than relying on pharmaceuticals first. What we may need to alter here is not boys' behavior, but the social and academic structure of our schools. We look in horror at the physical practice of foot-binding for girls; why is the chemical practice of mind-binding OK for boys?

It's not about rewarding boys because they're boys, or taking advantages newly won away from girls. It's about paying attention to our own flippin' research and applying it in ways that make sense to the kids rather than making the adults feel better about the institutions in their charge.

< /soapbox >

Regards--
Mary Anne