Boys are Just "Defective Girls"

Newsweek has an article this week on the boy crisis, which examines how boys are failing in school. Boys are not only doing poorly, they feel poorly about school: The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001. I found the last paragraph of the article the most important:

For Nikolas Arnold, 15, a sophomore at a public high school in Santa Monica, Calif., college is a distant dream. Nikolas is smart: he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of weaponry and war. When he was in first grade, his principal told his mother he was too immature and needed ADHD drugs. His mother balked. "Too immature?" says Diane Arnold, a widow. "He was six and a half!" He's always been an advanced reader, but his grades are erratic. Last semester, when his English teacher assigned two girls' favorites—"Memoirs of a Geisha" and "The Secret Life of Bees" Nikolas got a D. But lately, he has a math teacher he likes and is getting excited about numbers. He's reserved in class sometimes. But now that he's more engaged, his grades are improving slightly and his mother, who's pushing college, is hopeful he will begin to hit his stride. Girls get A's and B's on their report cards, she tells him, but that doesn't mean boys can't do it, too.

Doesn't this last line sound just like what we used to tell girls over twenty years ago? "Girls can be as good as boys", we drilled into kid's heads in the 1970's and 80's--in fact, girls were told that they were better and most of them now believe it (or at least fake it). Are we so angry that girls got the shaft twenty or more years ago that we are willing to sacrifice the education of innocent young boys today to make up for that wrong?

Update: Michal Gurian, who is mentioned in the Newsweek article is the author of, The Minds of Boys : Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life.He will be joining us for a podcast next week on the topic of the disconnect between boys and the classroom. If you have a pressing question for Mr. Gurian, leave it in the comment section and I will choose a couple to ask him--thanks!