Boys are struggling in school, but this isn’t a hard problem to solve, Fred Reed says:
The problem could be solved in about ten minutes by having separate schools for boys, grade school through high school, with male teachers only and a death penalty for even uttering the word “Ritalin.” Let boys run, jump, wrestle, compete. Grade them on substance, which boys understand (How much algebra do you know?) not on diligence (Did you paste pretty pictures neatly in your unutterably boring, make-work project about diversity?)
Reward performance, not patience, and excellence, not being docile and cooperative and good in groups. Offer advanced courses that appeal to smart boys — calculus, for example — and grade on math learned, not homework done on time. Problem solved. It should gratify women, who don´t want boys in the schools anyway.
It is important to recognize that integration of the sexes is directly responsible for the slide by boys. Today’s schools are run by women for girls. Fine. Girls should be in schools run for girls. Boys should not. Female teachers want decorum and good behavior (not strong points for boys), dislike competitiveness, rambunctiousness and cutting up in class. Boys will engage in these unless heavily, and now chemically, restrained. Thus the drive to keep boys doped up.
Men as teachers can handle boys without having them led from class in handcuffs and subjected to psychotherapy because they drew a soldier with a rifle.
This should be extended to undergraduate colleges. Women have wrecked the liberal arts to the point that men will not pursue them. The humanities have degenerated into girls’ finishing schools à la the Nineteenth Century.
Bob Sykes, Fred Reed agrees with your sentiment in his article:
“Put them in a male-only university, with a male-only professoriate, and teach them history, the sciences, literature, mathematics, philosophy, and languages. Let them engage in athletics as they choose. Emphasize reasoning over propaganda. Problem solved.”
Also possible is scoring diligence anyway — on something where diligence has substance. Long chains of logic, for example; every step must be just right.
I’ve said both what Bob Sykes and Fred Reed says before as well. Mostly gender separate schooling for boys and girls through undergrad appears to be the correct model.
The problem isn’t gender; it’s intelligence. Neither smart boys nor smart girls belong in dumbed-down classes doing busy work.
DLR,
I would still be in favor of gender segregation. A major issue is that smart boys are more easily distracted — by girls, sports, blah blah — than smart girls.
I also sit with DLR, but I’ve been a homeschooling and unschooling advocate for 20 years now. Mass schooling is more or less guaranteed to fail almost anyone not median on the bell curve, or median to a track.