What about boys?
COMMENTARY
Josh Deitz

The Dallas Independent School District is going ahead with plans for an all-girl public high school. A number of studies have shown that females benefit from single-sex education, so the school could be an interesting experiment for Dallas and for Texas in general.

That may be fine for the girls, but how about the boys?

Quite a bit of attention has been focused on improving education for females in the past few decades, and rightly so. Between active discrimination against women and passive bias in the classroom, females have historically gotten a raw deal. So it’s understandable that educators and social policy makers are interested in improving schooling for females.

The problem is that males have gotten lost in the shuffle. Women are now out-performing men in nearly every educational assessment. Even fields like math and science, which used to be dominated by men, are now almost even. Unfortunately, while women seem to be doing better and better in school, men appear to be doing worse and worse in comparison.

Why is this? Are girls smarter than boys? Maybe, but I doubt it. This is a problem that is bound up with our culture, our educational focus and with male students themselves.

The cultural idea of what it means to be male has undergone a revolution since the fight for women’s rights. The old male ideal was responsibility. Men were caretakers of their family, of the church, the government, the company. Now that those roles are shared, men seem to be defined merely by testosterone.

Intelligence is not something that is admired in men by popular culture. The typical sitcom formula these days deals with an idiotic husband and a smart wife. Athletes and entertainers routinely shun education and celebrate ignorance. Even President Bush brags about how terrible he did in school!

All of this adds up to a very negative cultural attitude towards education for males. There are some parallels for women (Jessica Simpson, for example), but in general, our society has a much better attitude towards intelligent women than intelligent men.

Society is not solely to blame for the problems boys are having with education. The education system needs to put much more work into finding solutions that benefit both males and females. We also need to find answers to specific problems boys are having in school — answers that go beyond just pumping our kids full of Ritalin.

We face a looming crisis if we do not take care of the young men in our society. There aren’t many jobs left that only require a high school diploma. Lack of education virtually guarantees poverty in this country. If we let a generation of young men fall through the cracks, they will drag the country down with them.

Josh Deitz is a senior political science major from Atlanta.