New York Times Says Boys Underperforming in College!

Now even the folks at The New York Times admit it. Boys aren’t doing too well in college. Writes Tamar Lewin,

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment.

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Of course, this isn’t new. The schoolboy “creeping like a snail/ Unwillingly to school” was already a stereotype when Jaques mourned about life in the Forest of Arden.

But hidden in the article is this little nugget. It turns out that not all boys do worse than girls in college.

The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education.

Oh really. So “the rich” are doing just fine. It is the middle and lower class boys who aren’t doing too well. The upper-class feminists are taking care of their own even as they visit a murrain upon the sons of the lower classes.

What is to be done, as Lenin once said? Shall we start affirmative action programs for boys? Consciousness raising? New programs to target at-risk male youth?

Let us not be tempted by the the liberal recipe. It is that sort of thinking that got us here, the programmatic, government-funded liberal mindset that turns everything into a government program and turns an independent people into servants cowed by the lash of compulsion.

Let us ask instead big questions, such as:

• What exactly is education for, beyond basic skills such as literacy and numeracy?
• What level of political direction is beneficial, or even prudent, when it comes to education?
• What are we achieving with compulsory education?
• Is it really such a good idea to separate work and learning the way we do?
• What is the point of undergraduate education today?

My own view is that I don’t know what girls want or need in an education. But I do believe that boys need an Education for Adventure, a program that develops in them them a capacity for physical and social risk, so that they can take their adult places in the world with these qualities: “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.” Those are the words of General von Seeckt writing about the kind of soldier he wanted in the German army.

Obviously the current education system is designed for some other purpose.