The Lost Boys

Parent Cafe
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<p>“By the way, my ninth grade S just said that girls have to work harder to get anywhere in U.S. society”</p>

<p>“because he’s been indoctrinated by 10 years worth of female teachers telling him that!”</p>

<p>What does that mean? Is it indoctrination to say that girls had to work harder to get somewhere? And what is the connotation regarding “female” teachers? Isn’t it true that years ago girls had to work harder?</p>

<p>Perhaps I am just thick, but I don’t understand this…</p>

<p>Lets think about Title 9 while we are at it!!! I think Title 9 was wonderful. Look at our daughters now. I am so tired of people complaining because there is finally some parity…</p>

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Nobody was complaining about parity. They were expressing opinions, just as you do. It’s part of having a discussion. :)</p>

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<p>I guess when I read about indoctrination, I get my knickers in a twist…sorry ;)</p>

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<p>lol, citygirlsmom, that sounds like an English expression. I heard Katie Couric said it a while back.</p>

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<p>Lost or…</p>

<p>Under the Radar Until Such Time as They Can Come Out and Knock Out the Competition?</p>

<p>Anecdotally, I’d observe that the majority of American boys adhere to the Ladism Code; ie </p>

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<p>True, American girls have made tremendous headway in post-secondary school education. </p>

<p>What happens in the workplace? Are those top female graduates going on to be the majority of top investment bankers, academics, architects, surgeons, law partners, politicians, developers, entreprenuers, software designers, fundraisers or publishers? No. The numbers do not tally. </p>

<p>Either the men do not NEED to compete in school to take the majority of top spots in later life, or…</p>

<p>Women are succeeding in an educational realm which does not correspond to the realities of the medical, legal, construction, business, political or social life in America.</p>

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<p>Cheers, I’m with you. Clearly childbearing and childcare are major factors in women’s professional lives, but long before that…the skills that produce excellence in a classroom are often quite different from those that lead to success in the workplace. Sadly, in the elementary years high-energy boys are often treated as quasi-demonic by their teachers. By the first grade my son was writing satiric verse he called “girl poems” (I am not making this up): “The trees are nice, the flowers are nice, nice nice nice” etc. </p>

<p>By the later years of school many boys have learned that pleasing their teachers – never an easy thing to do – is no longer where the action is, anyway. </p>

<p>Boys are ill-served school, and girls in adult life, by an educational system that too often rewards compliance.</p>

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<p>Girls tend to be more perfectionists, this is where could be the problem in the work place.
While boys tend to take on more risks, which could reward them if the risks turn to opportunities.</p>

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<p>What? I thought “indoctrination” was a fairly common word! Ugh, no wonder I catch flak for using “SAT words” in everyday life.</p>

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<p>Of course it is, but I think now the tables are turned and things are stacked to keep pushing girls to their maxim. I didn’t mean anything offensive by the teacher comment, either. I just think the “girls need to work harder - it’s a mans world we need to overcome, glass-ceiling, etc, etc” is being taught to (re: indoctrinated into) the kids from a very young age.</p>

<p>Remember - today’s primary and secandary teachers are almost entirely female and were the people in college during the apex of radical feminism. Furthermore, for many of them teaching probably wasn’t a first choice career wise. What do you think they’re going to be saying when they’re asked about gender in education/the workplace/in general? I’m not trying to suggest they’re holding “anti-male” power lunches, but I think their bias probably finds its way into classroom discussion more often than not.</p>

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<p>Radical Feminism? What is that?..</p>

<p>taught and indoctrinated are two very different words</p>

<p>Indoctrinate:
To instruct in a body of doctrine or principles.
2. To imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view: a generation of children who had been indoctrinated against the values of their parents. </p>

<p>I am pretty sure I am getting the points made, I disagree, but your bias is pretty clear</p>

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<p>Torching bras and abandoning razors (when done as a social statement). The type of people who scorn and act condescending toward women who chose to be full time mothers/homemakers for “bringing down their entire gender”</p>

<p>Not that they weren’t right in the 70’s. Womens-lib was overdue, but they were pretty radical in their methods.</p>

<p>EDIT:</p>

<p>How is that not indoctrination? If they’re told by authority figures (their teachers) every year that women are put down and have to work 20 times harder to get to the same places what would you call it?</p>

<p>A lie repeated often enough…</p>

<p>I mean if you really want a test all the parents should just go ask their kids if they’ve heard their teachers say “women need to work harder” etc. My bet is the vast majority will have heard something along those lines.</p>

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<p>I am not going to get into a spitting contest regarding feminism…too easy to win</p>

<p>Anyway, it is interesting what is going on with boys. </p>

<p>There is a kind of feeling in society in the last several years- an anti-intellectualism, I fear</p>

<p>I won’t even go into the pants boys wear and the shirts/skirts girls wear. That seems to be changing though.</p>

<p>There is a change in language, a lack of reading, too much use of electronics, a huge amount of time spent on sports, 4000 tv channels, and different expectations.</p>

<p>We have been at war and I think that creates a certain fear among young men. I am not choosing sides on that, but it can’t help but cause tension and stress.</p>

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<p>I believe my post was deleted. Funny thing that even I do not know.</p>

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<p>Ladism? Laddism? I just googled this. Any thoughts? I’ve never heard the term. Thanks.</p>

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<p>I am wondering if we should pose this question on the kids site to see what the boys have to say – you know, first hand information gathering so to speak – </p>

<p>Aparent5’s
“Boys are ill-served school, and girls in adult life, by an educational system that too often rewards compliance” </p>

<p>…is moving us into an interesting direction (for me at least.) I understand about indoctrination based on racial stereotypes (i.e. the tendency in Hawaii to “teach down” to the native Hawaiian kids…) but I had not thought much about female teachers and an ed. system based on feminaine values and modes of operation that work against boys in school and ill prepare girls for the realities of the workplace…</p>

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<p>I don’t know if it is the school system, society or family life that is making it more difficult for our boys, but it is definitely happening. Some of it is nature itself. From conception, the males are the most vulnerable with more miscarriages being male, and females just have a better survival rate at birth and through many traumas. Those statistics are well known in the medical field. Then if you ever walk into a “support” room at a school for LD, speech therapy, any special needs, the number of boys is much larger than those for girls. If you go into juvenile facilities, substance abuse centers, the same thing. If you look at traffic records (heck, ask the insurance people) boys have more trouble driving, more trouble,period. And the jails also tell the same story. So it is pretty obvious why there are fewer boys applying to colleges.</p>

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<p>“he QUESTION: What has happened to our boys in the last twenty or so years (which is when the downward trends began…)?”</p>

<ol>
<li>It’s an international phenomenon, too. When I was in France last summer, the cover story on one of France’s news magazines addressed the issue of why boys were having so many academic problems in h.s. and were not going to college as much as girls are. </li>
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<p>As is true here, the issue is particularly evident with minorities (in France’s case, this includes children of African, Caribbean and Middle Eastern immigrants). However it affects all races and classes.</p>

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<li><p>I have read here that a reason that some males are not going to college is that they can get lots of money in the technology fields without having a college ed.</p></li>
<li><p>We also have major problems with getting our African American and Hispanic (particularly Puerto Rican and Mexican) males through school. There are in S’s h.s. black males who are 17 and are high school freshmen. I read an article last year from the Jackson, Miss. paper describing how an all black h.s. could not find a homecoming king because none of their seniors had a 2.5 average. There were no problems finding girls who met the academic criterion for homecoming queen.</p></li>
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<p>That is not a problem just at that h.s. I have seen the same thing at S’s school.</p>

<p>I also know that there are many gifted males – of all races including whites and Asian – who are underperforming academically. They may seem to be doing OK because they are in the AP/IB honors classes and may even be in NHS. But from what I have seen, it’s far more common that if a student has high scores (such as 1400+ old SATs) and an unweighted 3.0 or less average, that underperforming student is likely to be male, not female. </p>

<p>And I don’t see a lot of institutional concern about this even though such students probably are at great risk of dropping out of college or not going to college.</p>

<p>My thought is that gifted boys are much less likely than are gifted girls to comply with doing things like handing in outlines, word definitions, etc. when they can easily ace tests without this kind of studying that is necessary for bright, but ungifted students to do to learn the material. The boys then decide that formal academics is a waste of time, and they make their college decisions accordingly. </p>

<p>They also don’t end up at LACs where the work is likely to be more intellectually stimulating than at large public universities with large lecture classes and multiple choice tests.</p>

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<p>I’ve got a quick question for you guys that’s a little off topic.</p>

<p>Why are you so willing to embrace the idea of “culture” being the culprit for gender-based underperformance, but so willing to discount or completely ignore it when it comes to racial underperformance?</p>

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<p>Anyways - you hit the nail on the head there. I think boys are less inclined to keep their 300 “homework binders” in perfect order and repair, do undeniably irrelevant busiwork “work sheets” (word searches etc), or do the homework (graded as completed/not completed) that they obviously don’t need to do to understand the material.</p>

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<p>This is an interesting discussion - S is a college freshmen that fits the above definition to a tee. Binder and notebook checks were his downfall in middle school and most of high school. I have a younger son who thinks more like a girl when it comes to academics. (organized, does and hands in homework, can read his handwriting) His grades are better, but he understands less of the material. I do think, however, that a certain amount of organizational skills are necessary for the real world and that some of these boys just miss the boat. My oldest struggled throughout freshman year due to his lack of organizational skills. I can’t help thinking that he is not ready to be where is he now.</p>

<p>That being said, in some ways, I think boys mature later. Some in high school, some in college, and some later. In my generation, men have for the most part, surpassed women in the workforce. I don’t know how much of that is due to women leaving the workforce, either full-time or part-time, for a number of years. It will be interesting to see how this generation of highly educated women approaches marriage and child raising.</p>

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<p>"Why are you so willing to embrace the idea of “culture” being the culprit for gender-based underperformance, but so willing to discount or completely ignore it when it comes to racial underperformance?</p>

<p>"
I don’t think that I have ever discounted the importance of culture when it comes to racial underperformance.</p>

<p>The US society had a several hundred year history of not even regarding black people as being human beings. Black people were regarded as beasts incapable of higher level thought and human emotions. </p>

<p>Black slaves were by law not allowed to learn read. They faced being sold or tortured if they persisted in trying. Slaves who acted intelligent were apt to be punished for their behavior. The US culture created an environment in which it was wife for blacks to hide their intelligence.</p>

<p>This also existed after slavery. For instance, blacks who rightly questioned costs they were assessed or money they were paid while sharecropping could lose their jobs or even be lynched. That’s exactly what happened to some people.</p>

<p>Black people were regarded as so inferior to whites that that until 1965, blacks could not even walk across or work in menial positions on some southern college campuses.</p>

<p>Then, when schools were desegregated, black teachers – who had been doing a fine job of teaching black students – lost their jobs because when schools were integrated, black teachers weren’t allowed to teach white students.</p>

<p>Thus, black students ended up being taught by people who had been raised to think of blacks as inferior, unintelligent, child-like beings and who had only known blacks in the position of being domestics, porters and in other subservient positions. It’s simply unlikely that such white teachers would have noticed or appreciated the intelligence of their black students. Indeed, many were hostile to their black students. </p>

<p>Meanwhile, education really didn’t do that much for most black people because until the 1960s, blacks were shut out of most high paying jobs – no matter what part of the country they lived in. It didn’t matter how intelligent or hard working they were, it was perfectly fine for them to not be hired simply because they were black.</p>

<p>Anyway, one big reason that immigrants and children of immigrants from the Caribbean and black Africa do so well educationally in the US (a high proportion get doctorates and they also tend to be disproportionately among the group of blacks going to places like Ivies) is that they were able to grow up in a culture that assumed that black people could achieve.</p>

<p>The children of African/Caribbean immigrants are able to do that here because in general, they do not mix with African Americans. They stick to their Caribbean or African immigrant communities or hang out with nonblack students.</p>

<p>Unlike African Americans whose parents and grandparents lived during the days of legal segregation and discrimination here, the African and Caribbean immigrants and their kids came to the US during a time in which there were doors opened to black people simply because they were black.</p>

<p>Thus, the American culture that they experienced reinforced the importance of getting an education, doing well in school, etc.</p>

<p>In Great Britain and in France, however, where there is lots of prejudice against Caribbean and African immigrants, such students do as poorly in school as African American students do here. The Caribbean and African immigrants and their children are the group with the lowest test scores, behavior problems, etc.</p>

<p>I know that in France, research has indicated that even with the IB diploma, immigrants and the offspring of immigrants from the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean (many of whom have from birth been considered French) have a harder time finding employment than do similarly educated native French people. </p>

<p>That’s the same kind of thing that occurs in the US when research indicates that if a black sounding name is put on a resume, that “person” will get fewer calls for interviews than occurs when the same resume has a “white” sounding name at the top.</p>

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<p>Compliance problem, impulse control issues, poor judgement, inability to see possible consequences are all characteristic of boys. I have been struggling with these traits for nearly 25 years now. Even with the love, structure, culture, everything we have given these boys, they have had so many problems due to those issues. And so far, I have been dealing with bright kids; we are an intact family with parents dedicated to making things work for the kids. I can make excuses about the adopted ones and my nephew, but the truth of the matter, is that my birth boys are every bit as bad. </p>

<p>I am looking into finding a psychotherapist to help me reach these “lost boys” (I love the name of this thread; what a chord it has struck in me) since the little ones have some real issues that need to be addressed. They are doing so well right now, beyond expectation, but puberty has not yet kicked in, and that is when the real problems tend to occur for us. Because my other boys were “bright” in the academic sense with no category of problems like ADD, depression, learning disabilities, etc, I held the academic bar hard and high for them. THis is not going to be the case with these younger ones, and I am at loss as to the direction to take. Loving and caring for them is just not enough, I have found. I am spewing out alot of issues with no solutions, I know. I really feel that the lost boys are a big problem in this country, not just for the poor and underpriviliged. In the high school where I do some work, the incareration rates are bandied like matriculation rates to colleges are in the more well to dod areas. And it is overwhelmingly the boys. And “but for the grace of God, goes I”,is what I think when I hear of each incident, as my boys have skirted the edge too often.</p>