Our schools are failing our boys

There’s a major social shift occurring in our country right now and I’ve written about it before.  But it seems that those who should know, are either ignorant of the problem or have chosen to look somewhere else.

The social shift has to do with boys and with education.   Our national educational system is skewed against boys and oriented towards girls.   That’s just a fact and has been since the women’s movement of the 1970’s.

Boys drop out of high school at rates far greater than girls.  Some 25 percent of all boys never graduate.   More girls walk across the stage at high school graduation ceremonies to receive their certificates – than do boys.   Many boys will never make it to college.

In our higher education system there are 167 girls for every 100 boys enrolled in college.  Girls make up nearly 65 percent of all college students in such fields as law and medicine.

On average, girls have higher GPAs than boys and girls do better on standardized tests than do boys.  College admission officers say that girls write better essays than do boys and that girls are more involved in extra curricular activities.

Women now make up nearly 55 percent of the work force and usually take jobs that require higher education such as white collar jobs.

Men, on the other hand, still continue to take blue collar jobs in factories.   Those jobs still haven’t come back since the 2008 recession and many men are still unemployed or under-employed.

Women have recovered well and are the sole or primary breadwinners in more than 60 percent of the households.   This trend will continue as more and more jobs become white collar jobs and require more and more education.

This puts wmen in control of the money.   It’s a new paradigm.   Previously, women married up the social ladder while men often married down.   Society is now reversed. Men and women’s roles have changed – – and yet our educational system is still skewed against boys.

At the elementary school level, classes are taught mostly by women and oriented towards traditional female activities such as sitting quietly, working cooperatively and following the rules.

Boys on the other hand don’t sit still.  They don’t follow the rules and want to be top dog – -something you can’t get from cooperative work.

And, so our educational system – designed for girls – forces boys to conform or drop out.   And, boys drop out thus dooming them to lower paying jobs.

We need to change our educational system, but the matrons who control it either don’t recognize the problem, or don’t care.  In the meantime, boys continue to fail, drop out or slip between the cracks.