Hate has permeated our society to the point where boys no longer have hope.

This is what happens when society regulates testosterone and typical "boy behavior", oftentimes with heavy medication, to the point where they no longer have an idea as to who they are.

Girls are taught to feel "empowered", while boys are told to "sit still and shut up".

All thanks to the liberal PC agenda.

MAY 26, 2003

COVER STORY
By Marcia Vickers

Commentary: Why Can't We Let Boys Be Boys?

In the fall of 2001, my husband and I were bursting with enthusiasm, anticipating our first-ever parent-teacher conference. We couldn't wait to hear glowing remarks about Christopher, our 3-year-old genius. How he could sing the words from almost every Wiggles song and had been reciting the alphabet since he was a year and a half -- only leaving out the occasional "t" or "y."

We eagerly walked into his classroom and sat down in midget-size wooden chairs as his two teachers brought out a long manila envelope. Then came the usual "how nice it is to have your son in our class" patter.

Not far into the discussion came the zinger. "Christopher is having a difficult time with stickers," said one teacher, holding up a sheet of green and purple dinosaurs. "What do you mean?" my husband and I asked in unison. "Well, he hasn't figured out that he needs to scratch the edge with his fingernail and lift and peel," said the teacher. It turns out, at least according to his teachers, whom we genuinely liked, that he was having trouble with his fine motor skills -- grasping and manipulating things with his fingers.

Looking back, the sticker incident was the precise point of liftoff into a world of which I was previously unaware: evaluations with child-development experts, the screening and eventual hiring of occupational and physical therapists (OTs and PTs), and trips to sensory gyms, which supposedly help the brain process sensory information though activities like touching different textures. Like most parents, I wanted to make sure Christopher had every possible advantage to overcome any weakness -- however far-fetched it might sound. After all, we're no experts.

But some two years later, I've come to suspect the diagnosis is often flawed. It turns out that it's not uncommon for young boys to have a so-called problem with fine motor skills.

In Manhattan, where we live, this phenomenon has become the status quo. One reason is that 4-year-olds must score well on a standardized test to gain acceptance to the city's elite private kindergartens. This test has a section that emphasizes fine motor skills. So multitudes of young boys are in OT or PT. A cottage industry, in fact, has sprung up around it -- most private OTs charge upwards of $135 per 45-minute session. There are waiting lists to get kids -- mostly boys -- into these therapy sessions.

All this for a simple biological fact: Boys typically develop fine-motor skills up to six years later than girls. And in the early years, boys tend to be unfairly compared with girls on that score. This can have a devastating effect, say experts. If boys can't draw and color a bunny rabbit or cut simple shapes with scissors, they are subtly made to feel inferior. And a growing number of professionals believe that pressuring boys early only creates a sense of helplessness on their part. That can extend to how they feel about themselves and how they view school for many years.

Educators should be careful not to single out boys as "developmentally delayed" because they can't color in a sunflower as well as a girl. Now that a few experts are focusing on boys' learning gaps, the danger is to address the problem in the wrong way.

Some schools emphasize teaching methods that allow boys to brandish spatial mechanical skills as well as channel their energy. Says Dr. Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education: "Especially in the early years, schools should be playing to boys' strengths, such as playing games, building forts out of blocks, kicking a soccer ball, rather than emphasizing their weaknesses."

Christopher, who will soon turn 5, suddenly loves writing his name and drawing things from his incredibly vivid imagination, like space monsters and magic men. Last week, he wrote and illustrated a construction-paper book about a little boy whose hair turns into green beans. I think the therapy he has had has given him more confidence with crayons and scissors. But I'm not convinced he wouldn't have come around on his own.

Recently, he got one of the highest scores possible in vocabulary and general knowledge on that standardized test -- though on the part that called for drawing shapes, he fell into the "average" category. Is he still our little genius? More than ever. He has even aced dinosaur stickers. Now, if only he wouldn't put the darned things on the furniture.

Vickers writes about Wall Street and finance from New York.

Yet, it is only a starting point to the feminazis.

From kindergarten to grad school, boys are becoming the second sex

Why should kindergarten through grad school be different from the rest of their lives.

Even as so far as taking the only sanctuary safe for men!

MAY 26, 2003

COVER STORY

Online Extra: "It's a Bart Simpson Culture"

Academic Andrew Sum says one reason men are falling way behind in the education stakes is America's anti-intellectual climate

From his cluttered office at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, Andrew Sum has been watching chart after chart deliver the same disturbing news for several years. The data show a lack of positive educational momentum among boys and young men. Sum says the new gender gap could create a new kind of "social dynamite" that will drive deep rifts in society. If he had his way, high schools across the country would be plastered with posters reading "Wanted: Five Million Men." That's how many more men it will take, Sum points out, to achieve gender parity in higher education by 2010.

BusinessWeek's Michelle Conlin talked with Sum at length about his views concerning everything from Bart Simpson to the impending marriage squeeze. Following are edited excerpts of their conversation:

Q: You're very careful to point out that it's not as if boys are completely worse off than they were a generation ago.
A: That's right. The real issue is that men just haven't made any real progress. The dangerous thing about this is that we're in an economy that is rewarding the educated more and more. And men are just not responding to this new reality.

Yes, some guys are doing very, very well. But more guys are doing very, very badly. And it's those guys that will dominate prisons, homelessness, and who will be far less likely to get married and raise kids. Men have fallen behind, and they're continuing to fall behind. And it's going to be a tragedy for the country.

Q: Are college degrees the new high-school degrees? In other words, is it even more imperative now that people go to college?
A: Absolutely. Just think back to the heyday of manufacturing in the 1970s. Back then, you could go into trucking or construction and do alright. But you just can't get into the middle class today with a low-class education. Today, your college counterpart will make 90% more than you. And so what we have is a situation where men are really underinvesting in themselves. They're shortchanging their future.

Q: What's the ultimate cost of this underinvestment?
A: Our country needs a well-educated workforce. Our productivity, our innovation, our growth -- they all depend upon the population getting continuous improvement in literacy and other skills. This lack of progress among men will hold down productivity growth. It will also have a big impact on male earnings, and, as a result, for taxes and government spending.

Already, we've become so much more dependent on the immigrant workforce. It's also true, when we do happiness studies, that better-educated people tend to be much happier. So there are immense social implications across the board here.

Q: But isn't it true that men with high school degrees still make more than their female counterparts?
A: There used to be a big pay gap between the genders among high-school graduates. But today, boys out of high school only make about 5% more, on average, than girls in the same boat.

Q: What role is the culture playing?
A: There are so many strains to that question. But one of the biggest things that jumps out at me is rap culture. It's totally antagonistic to academic achievement. It demeans students who try to do well in school. And I think it disengages boys from academic learning.

Q: When Michael Moore asked Marilyn Manson about the role of music in his film Bowling for Columbine, Manson replied that music wasn't to blame. The real problem was a media machine that promotes fear and consumerism.
A: Well, boys aren't just victims. They play a big role in this, too. They need to get off their butts, basically. It's not cool to take AP classes. It's a Bart Simpson culture. Underachiever and proud of it. Cool to be stupid.

And these are the guys who are going to keep living with mom. I mean male culture has just become totally anti-intellectual. The male cultural heroes and icons -- very few of them have a brain in their head. We glorify male idiocy. And young guys pick up on that.

Q: And then what happens to the women who may want to date those guys?
A: When you listen to women's groups, and they say there's not enough good men out there, they're right. There are fewer well-educated men than there were 20 years ago. And people tend to like to marry someone within the same educational class. Historically, women have tended to marry up.

Q: Now what do you think will happen?
A: More women will marry down, or marry younger, or not marry at all.

Q: What's your prescription then?
A: Men have to realize what women did. We have to go back and earn it. We have to start paying our dues.

Please consider for the black conservative ping list. I know it's not directly related, but the word needs to be spread.

Most girls I know are generally respectful of authority figures in general, and care about doing a good job in school.

Most guys I know are generally apathetic... they have better skills and they are far better programmers than girls, but they don't study nearly as much.

The smartest computer programmer I know reverse-engineered the Dreamcast, the Nintendo, and we were part of a 12-hour computer programming team in a competition. He did almost all the work and he built a freaking X window manager from scratch in 12 hours. (Me? I just wrote the code for the custom X mouse cursor.)

Yet his GPA is in the tiolet, because he hates doing homework, he hates studying for tests, and he hates authority. That's why girls will excel men in computer science in terms of GPA, but girls in computer science are very unenthusiastic about computers & programming.

And the answer to this is neighborhood schools DIVIDED BETWEEN THE SEXES.

education bump

MAY 26, 2003

COVER STORY

Online Extra: "This Is a World Made for Women"

The Pell Institute's Thomas Mortenson says today's education system isn't preparing boys for the New Economy -- and that hurts women, too

Thomas Mortenson is a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. For a decade, his campaign has been a lonely and frustrating one: convincing educators, politicians, and parents that boys are in trouble. BusinessWeek Working Life Editor Michelle Conlin talked to Mortenson about how the crisis could affect women -- and why addressing the problems with boys in high school is too late. Following are edited excerpts of their conversation:

Q: About 20 years ago, there was a famous article in Newsweek about how women could pretty much kiss marriage goodbye if they hadn't walked down the altar by the age of 30. Of course, that turned out to be completely false. Much of the research the story was based on was discredited. But you believe that women could be in for store for a marriage squeeze -- a real one. Why?
A: Black women are really the canaries in the coalmine on this. Put simply, I believe white women are headed to where black women are today. If white women want to see the future of what will happen if men aren't brought along through the educational system with them, they should listen to the problems among black women today.

When I make presentations, I can see 95% of the women in the audience nodding to along to this, agreeing with me. I don't think some women -- and some gender feminists -- have fully thought through the idea of what it means to leave a generation of boys behind. And by the time this gender imbalance really hits whites, it will be too late. We're stuck back in the 1960s in terms of producing college-educated men.

Q: Still, you oppose affirmative action for boys in college.
A: Affirmative action in college doesn't get at the causes in the previous 18 years of a boy's life. The problems go all the way back into elementary schools. We need to start there and work our way up. By a time a boy is in high school, it's often too late.

So the answer is not to put a thumb on the scale of admissions to get more boys in. The answer is to use research and training to prepare schoolteachers. To help them create more engaging learning experiences for young boys in the same way we've done with girls.

Q: When did it hit you that something was awry?
A: I've been studying educational data for 30 years. Back when I started in 1970, women were far behind in college continuation rates out of high school. Then in 1990, it hit me. Why hadn't boys made any progress over this period of time? I started looking into it. Nobody else had reported it. Even people who run higher education hadn't been tracking this redistribution of enrollment. So I dug in.

Q: And this isn't just an American problem.
A: It's an issue throughout the industrial world -- women are just beating the pants off guys in college. The move away from a goods-producing economy is just killing men's jobs. But it's creating wonderful opportunities for women. Manufacturing has shrunk from 35% of GDP after World War II to 14% today. Within a decade it will slip to 10%. Then think about agriculture.

Q: Do you agree that women tend to be better-suited for the New Economy?
A: New Economy jobs tend to require communication skills, interpersonal skills. This is a world made for women. So the question in my mind is: How do we design educational experiences for boys that, from the beginning, are engaging and exciting to boys and are geared toward getting them into jobs in the service economy. Health care, business services, even education.

We can't allow boys to think, gee, just because they had fun in high school working on their cars with their hands that they'll be able to make much of a living in their lives. Of course there'll be some manufacturing jobs. But they are fast disappearing to China and South India. These guys that put their lives into the auto plant -- and then it closes -- they simply drop out of the labor force. They're lost.

Q: What would you tell elementary-school teachers?
A: I would get my boys out of the classroom, and we'd be in a field all day long chasing tadpoles and pollywogs and looking at swamp water. I certainly wouldn't have them sit down at a classroom desk and read a book in the first grade. I just don't think we've developed education that's appropriate for boys' learning styles.

We've tried to force this model that works so well for girls onto boys. And we're paying a very steep price.

Q: So what's needed now?
A: When I was growing up and it was thought that girls just couldn't do high-level math, the women's movement took up the cause. They put girls' feet to the fire to learn science and math. Now men need to do the same thing for boys. We need a boys' project.

Q: And women?
A: My belief is that until women decide that the education of boys is a serious issue, nothing is going to happen. Some women are threatened by the issue of raising boys' problems in the educational system because they're fear it will take away from the progress of women. That's not what I'm advocating. What everyone needs to realize is that if boys continue to slide, women will lose too.

Nobody's safe anymore...How long before Shrillery demads to be referred to as "She Who Must Be Obeyed" and begins to refer to herself in the third person? ("We are not amused...")

Welcome to the plantation, boys and girls...the obahseeah will be 'round shortly....

Black conservative ping

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Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.

A few years ago Fortune magazine (I think) did a profile of all the CEOs of the top 500 companies in the U.S., and the results of their research were startling (to some). The typical CEO was a middle-aged male who was never known for his academic excellence -- in fact, among the 500 at the time there wasn't a single high school valedictorian and very few who made the Dean's List in college.

When most of these guys were in their early teens, getting an A in history or math was far less important than earning $5,000 mowing lawns over the summer.

In my experience, most boys are simply bored with school and would be better off doing something more interesting (and more productive, in the long run) with their time.

The irony of this story is amazing -- girls have become more dominant in the American classroom at the same time the quality of American education has declined considerably.

I think a lot of young boys learn pretty early that official state education is largely BS.