Family Forum / Marriage / Marriage / March 2008

The feminized American classroom—and how it hurts boys:

The aggressive and rationalist nature of males, redefined by educators
as a behavioral disorder, gets them into trouble

August 6, 2006

By Gerry Garibaldi

Since I started teaching several years ago, after 25 years in the movie
business, I've come to learn firsthand that everything I'd heard about
the feminization of our schools is real—and far more pernicious to boys
than I had imagined. Christina Hoff Sommers was absolutely accurate in
describing, in her 2000 best seller, The War Against Boys, how feminist
complaints that girls were "losing their voice" in a male-oriented
classroom have prompted the educational establishment to turn the
schools upside down to make them more girl-friendly, to the detriment of
males. As a result, boys have become increasingly disengaged. Only 65
percent earned high school diplomas in the class of 2003, compared with
72 percent of girls, education researcher Jay Greene recently
documented. Girls now so outnumber boys on most university campuses
across the country that some schools, like Kenyon College, have even
begun to practice affirmative action for boys in admissions. And as in
high school, girls are getting better grades and graduating at a higher
rate.

As Sommers understood, it is boys' aggressive and rationalist
nature—redefined by educators as a behavioral disorder—that's getting so
many of them in trouble in the feminized schools. Their problem: they
don't want to be girls.

Take my tenth-grade student Brandon. I noted that he was on the no-pass
list again, after three consecutive days in detention for being
disruptive. "Who gave it to you this time?" I asked, passing him on my
way out.

"Waverly," he muttered into the long folding table.

"What for?"

"Just asking a question," he replied.

"No," I corrected him. "You said"—and here I mimicked his voice—" 'Why
do we have to do this crap anyway?' Right?"

Brandon recalls one of those sweet, ruby-cheeked boys you often see
depicted on English porcelain.

He's smart, precocious, and—according to his special-education
profile—has been "behaviorally challenged" since fifth grade. The
special-ed classification is the bane of the modern boy. To teachers,
it's a yellow flag that snaps out at you the moment you open a student's
folder. More than any other factor, it has determined Brandon's and
legions of other boys' troubled tenures as students.

Boys want a rational explanation

Brandon's current problem began because Ms. Waverly, his social studies
teacher, failed to answer one critical question: What was the point of
the lesson she was teaching? One of the first observations I made as a
teacher was that boys invariably ask this question, while girls seldom
do. When a teacher assigns a paper or a project, girls will obediently
flip their notebooks open and jot down the due date. Teachers love them.
God loves them. Girls are calm and pleasant. They succeed through
cooperation.

Boys will pin you to the wall like a moth. They want a rational
explanation for everything. If unconvinced by your reasons—or if you
don't bother to offer any—they slouch contemptuously in their chairs,
beat their pencils or watch the squirrels outside the window. Two days
before the paper is due, girls are handing in the finished product in
neat vinyl folders with colorful clip-art title pages. It isn't until
the boys notice this that the alarm sounds. "Hey, you never told us
'bout a paper! What paper?! I want to see my counselor!"

A female teacher, especially if she has no male children of her own,
I've noticed, will tend to view boys' penchant for challenging classroom
assignments as disruptive, disrespectful—rude. In my experience, notes
home and parent-teacher conferences almost always concern a boy's
behavior in class, usually centering on this kind of conflict. In
today's feminized classroom, with its "cooperative learning" and
"inclusiveness," a student's demand for assurance of a worthwhile
outcome for his effort isn't met with a reasonable explanation but is
considered inimical to the educational process. Yet it's this very
trait, innate to boys and men, that helps explain male success in the
hard sciences, math and business.

The difference between the male and female predilection for hard proof
shows up among the teachers, too. In my second year of teaching, I
attended a required seminar on "differentiated instruction," a teaching
model that is the current rage in the fickle world of pop education
theory. The method addresses the need to teach all students in a
classroom where academic abilities vary greatly—where there is
"heterogeneous grouping," to use the ed-school jargon—meaning kids with
IQs of 55 sit side by side with the gifted. The theory goes that the
"least restrictive environment" is best for helping the intellectually
challenged. The teacher's job is to figure out how to dice up his daily
lessons to address every perceived shortcoming and disability in the
classroom.

After the lecture, we broke into groups of five, with instructions to
work cooperatively to come up with a model lesson plan for just such a
classroom situation. My group had two men and three women. The women
immediately set to work; my seasoned male cohort and I reclined sullenly
in our chairs.

"Are the women going to do all the work?" one of the women inquired
brightly after about ten minutes.

"This is baloney," my friend declared, yawning, as he chucked the
seminar handout into a row of empty plastic juice bottles. "We wouldn't
have this problem if we grouped kids by ability, like we used to."

The women, all dedicated teachers, understood this, too. But that wasn't
the point. Treating people as equals was a social goal well worth
pursuing. And we contentious boys were just too dumb to get it.

Female approval has a powerful effect on the male psyche. Kindness,
consideration, and elevated moral purpose have nothing to do with an
irreducible proof, of course. Yet we male teachers squirm when women
point out our moral failings—and our boy students do, too. This is the
virtue that has helped women redefine the mission of education.

The notion of male ethical inferiority first arises in grammar school,
where women make up the overwhelming majority of teachers. It's here
that the alphabet soup of supposed male dysfunctions begins. And make no
mistake: while girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male-related
disorders in this world, girls diagnosed with learning disabilities
simply don't exist.

Problem starts in grammar school

For a generation now, many well-meaning parents, worn down by their
boy's failure to flourish in school, his poor self-esteem and
unhappiness, his discipline problems, decide to accept administration
recommendations to have him tested for disabilities. The pitch sounds
reasonable: admission into special ed qualifies him for tutoring,
modified lessons, extra time on tests (including the SAT), and other
supposed benefits. It's all a hustle, Mom and Dad privately advise their
boy. Don't worry about it. We know there's nothing wrong with you.

To get into special ed, however, administrators must find something
wrong. In my four years of teaching, I've never seen them fail. In the
first Individualized Educational Program meeting, the boy and his
parents learn the results of disability testing. When the boy hears from
three smiling adults that he does indeed have a learning disability, his
young face quivers like Jell-O. For him, it was never a hustle. From
then on, however, his expectations of himself—and those of his
teachers—plummet.

Special ed is the great spangled elephant in the education parade. Each
year, it grows larger and more lumbering, drawing more and more boys
into the procession. Since the publication of Sommers' book, it has
grown tenfold. Special ed now is the single largest budget item, outside
of basic operations, in most school districts across the country.

Special-ed boosters like to point to the success that boys enjoy after
they begin the program. Their grades rise, and the phone calls home
cease. Anxious parents feel reassured that progress is happening. In
truth, I have rarely seen any real improvement in a student's
performance after he's become a special-ed kid. On my first day of
teaching, I received manila folders for all five of my special-ed
students—boys all—with a score of modifications that I had to make in
each day's lesson plan.

I noticed early on that my special-ed boys often sat at their desks with
their heads down or casually staring off into space, as if tracking
motes in their eyes, while I proceeded with my lesson. A special-ed
caseworker would arrive, take their assignments, and disappear with the
boys into the resource room. The students would return the next day with
completed assignments.

"Did you do this yourself?" I'd ask, dubious.

They assured me that they did. I became suspicious, however, when I
noticed that they couldn't perform the same work on their own, away from
the resource room. A special-ed caseworker's job is to keep her charges
from failing. A failure invites scrutiny and reams of paperwork. The
caseworkers do their jobs.

Brandon has been on the special-ed track since he was nine. He knows his
legal rights as well as his caseworkers do. And he plays them
ruthlessly. In every debate I have with him about his low performance,
Brandon delicately threads his response with the very sinews that bind
him. After a particularly easy midterm, I made him stay after class to
explain his failure.

"An 'F'?!" I said, holding the test under his nose.

What we teach is feminized, too

"You were supposed to modify that test," he countered coolly. "I only
had to answer nine of the 27 questions. The nine I did are all right."

His argument is like a piece of fine crystal that he rolls admiringly in
his hand. He demands that I appreciate the elegance of his position. I
do, particularly because my own is so weak.

Yet while the process of education may be deeply absorbing to Brandon,
he long ago came to dismiss the content entirely. For several decades,
white Anglo-Saxon males—Brandon's ancestors—have faced withering assault
from feminism- and multiculturalism-inspired education specialists.
Armed with a spiteful moral rectitude, their goal is to sever his
historical reach, to defame, cover over, dilute . . . and then
reconstruct.

In today's politically correct textbooks, Nikki Giovanni and Toni
Morrison stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Mark Twain, William Faulkner
and Charles Dickens, even though both women are second-raters at best.
But even in their superficial aspects, the textbooks advertise
publishers' intent to pander to the prevailing PC attitudes. The books
feature page after page of healthy, exuberant young girls in winning
portraits. Boys (white boys in particular) will more often than not be
shunted to the background in photos or be absent entirely or appear
sitting in wheelchairs.

The underlying message isn't lost on Brandon. His keen young mind reads
between the lines and perceives the folly of all that he's told to
accept. Because he lacks an adult perspective, however, what he cannot
grasp is the ruthlessness of the war that the education reformers have
waged. Often when he provokes, it's simple boyish tit for tat.

A week ago, I dispatched Brandon to the library with directions to
choose a book for his novel assignment. He returned minutes later with
his choice and a twinkling smile.

"I got a grrreat book, Mr. Garibaldi!" he said, holding up an old,
bleary, clothbound item. "Can I read the first page aloud, pahlease?"

My mind buzzed like a fly, trying to discover some hint of mischief.

"Who's the author?"

"Ah, Joseph Conrad," he replied, consulting the frontispiece. "Can I?
Huh, huh, huh?"

"I guess so."

Brandon eagerly stood up before the now-alert class of mostly black and
Puerto Rican faces, adjusted his shoulders as if straightening a
prep-school blazer, then intoned solemnly: "The Nigger of the
'Narcissus' "—twinkle, twinkle, twinkle. "Chapter one. . . ."

Merry mayhem ensued. Brandon had one of his best days of the year.

Boys today feel isolated and outgunned, but many, like Brandon, don't
lack pluck and courage. They often seem to have more of it than their
parents, who writhe uncomfortably before a system steeled in the armor
of "social conscience." The game, parents whisper to themselves, is to
play along, to maneuver, to outdistance your rival. Brandon's struggle
is an honest one: to preserve truth and his own integrity.

Boys who get a compartment on the special-ed train take the ride to its
end without looking out the window. They wait for the moment when they
can step out and scorn the rattletrap that took them nowhere. At the end
of the line, some, like Brandon, may have forged the resiliency of
survival. But that's not what school is for.

©2006 Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_chicsuntimes-the_feminized_american.htm