Product Description
From the moment they step into the classroom, boys begin to struggle. They get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls; in elementary school, they’re diagnosed with learning disorders four times as often. By eighth grade huge numbers are reading below basic level. And by high school, they’re heavily outnumbered in AP classes and, save for the realm of athletics, show indifference to most extracurricular activities. Perhaps most alarmingly, boys now account for less than 43 percent of those enrolled in college, and the gap widens every semester!
The imbalance in higher education isn’t just a “boy problem,” though. Boys’ decreasing college attendance is bad news for gi… More >>
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…written by a girl. Interesting.
This book has merit in that it simply brings the issue to light. Schools have been dominated by intolerant, frustated female teachers for far too long, who quickly label most boys as having ADD or ADHD…and then they’re drugged up with prescription meds to “make” them behave. What we need are more MALE teachers to relate to our boys, not drugs.
Another issue is that in the “Leave It To Beaver” type of family, the dad is at work, which leaves the mom at home, or the mom picks them up from school, takes them to soccer/football practice, etc. If you want less trouble with boys, a GOOD father (or father figure) should be active in a boy’s life. Unfortunately, because there seems to be a plethora of abusive, absent or deadbeat fathers, we have a whole generation of angry boys on our hands, which become the responsibility of single moms and…you guessed it…female teachers to teach them.
My son is a US Marine now, serving in Iraq. He went into bootcamp a boy and came out a man. The Marines did something I could have never done…gave him a good dose of his own angry self, and instilled RESPECT into him. If you ask me, what ALL students – girls AND boys – need is a semester of some sort of boot camp/military school during their freshman year. The lack of respect that plagues the youth of today is incredible. They need a good dose of their own mouthy selves – and a good butt-kicking by someone OTHER than their parents!
Rating: 1 / 5
I bought this as a present for my mom and she seems to really love it so far.
Rating: 5 / 5
This books makes you think about how the US school system has swung the pendulum so far in the direction of girls that boys get lost. Hopefully there can be more balance in the future.
Rating: 4 / 5
Peg Tyre’s is a serious book which points out undeniable problems facing both boys and girls in contemporary American pre-schools, K-12 classes, and colleges as well. As has already been pointed out, she’s done all parents who’ve felt just their own sons were having trouble in schools these days a real service. Emphasizing the unconscious, largely boy-unfriendly assumptions governing everything from the touchy-feely curriculum to the abolition of recess, she’s provided evidence for needed change – if boys, as well as girls, are to succeed – that is unanswerable.
At the same time, I think her case is seriously undermined by her insufficient attention to the all-important role of the home and the society in shaping children BEFORE they attend any sort of school. She does speak favorably of the good old days when parents exercised a “laissez-faire” attitude toward afterschool play and children were free to carry on as they might. And what she correctly sees today, on the contrary, is excessive micromanagement by parents as manifested by play-dates and a push toward merely academic success at far too early an age. What I think she misses, however, is central, the new sort of laissez-faire marking contemporary parenting, the decision that children, boys especially, should be allowed to grow naturally, like plants, without any pruning or shaping, lest they be repressed by authority. Watch the little dears running through supermarkets, department stores, and restaurants with their playground voices at full volume and with nary a parental reprimand, and you’ll get the idea. I read Peg Tyre as a devotee, since she quotes him, of what might be called the “Philip Roth School Of Early Education,” a kind of stale compendium of leftover 60′s cliches which privileges the liberation of natural impulse over the creative action of loving parents in shaping naturally rude, boisterous children into potentially civilized human beings – in other words, creating children already socialized to learn BEORE they enter any school.
Tyre quotes Roth at length:
“what boys like me needed to learn was not only how to express themselves with precision and acquire a more discerning response to words, but how to be rambunctious without being stupid, how not to be too well concealed or too well behaved, how to begin to release the masculine intensities from the institutional rectitude that intimidated the bright kids the most.” While this may have been true of what Philip Roth needed, were he a goody-goody “model boy” of the old school, I question whether any instruction in rambunctiousness or release of masculine intensities from …institutional rectitude, other than the blowing off of steam provided by recess, is what members of the current crop of boys need. Raised “naturally” as so many of them have been, they’d sooner kick a kindergarden teacher in the shins when thwarted than be intimitidated by her. Clearly, the merely “natural” child is not yet fit for education.
In short, a sentimental view of the nature of children and an ignoring of the civilizing essentials that parents should provide them with weakens Tyre’s otherwise impressive book.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is a must read for all parents of boys. My friend who only has daughters even found it informative and very interesting, as it talks alot about the public school system and the changes that have occurred over the years and why they have happened as they have.
If you do have a son in school who is having ANY TYPE OF problem, you will feel better and more hopeful after the first few chapters.
Rating: 5 / 5