Is there a boy crisis?
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt Sat, 22 Jul 2006 03:26:45 GMT
Very interesting article in TheWeek magazine.
“Nearly everyone involved in education—and the statistics bear them out. Girls have opened a big gap over boys in reading and writing skills, and that gap grows wider the longer they are in school. In many high school honors and advanced-placement courses, girls outnumber boys five to one. Boys’ share of college admissions has dropped to 42 percent and is declining steadily. Boys also are responsible for 80 percent of school discipline problems. They are almost twice as likely as girls to be suspended from school, while four out of five high school dropouts are male. And their problems extend far beyond the classroom. Boys are considerably more likely to commit violent crimes and go to prison. The suicide rate for boys has tripled since the 1970s, and is now four to six times the rate for girls.”
There are a number of recently released book that delve into this phenomenon in detail:
Christina Hoff Sommers’ The War Against Boys and William Pollack’s Real Boys are two worth noting.
Read the whole article here.
