The Choice Channel

Boys have trailed girls in most indices of academic performance for at least two decades. In recent years, boys’ educational struggles have finally been acknowledged and explored in the mainstream media. This has resulted in an unfortunate backlash from misguided women’s advocates. The latest example of these advocates’ efforts to minimize or deny the boy crisis in education is the American Association of University Women’s highly-publicized new report “Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education.”

The AAUW says its report “debunks the myth of a ‘boys crisis’ in education,” but the study provides little evidence to support this contention. According to the Report’s own data, girls get much better grades than boys, are far more likely to graduate college, and are on the good side of a longstanding “literacy gap.”

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Excerpted in part from Chapter 10 of “Healing Our World” (Kalamazoo, MI: SunStar Press, 2003).

Can you imagine what a successful school might look like if education were totally freed from government control? Can you imagine what education might look like if teachers didn’t need to be licensed; children were not forced into the classroom for a decade or more; and parents, teachers, and children picked the curriculum rather than the state?

You might think it’s easy to imagine school without the state, but our educational system is so shaped by the government, it’s tough to think outside the box. Consequently, when imagining what education in a free society might look like, starting inside the box and working our way out might be the best strategy.

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“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and LOYALTY TO THE STATE and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”

- quote from a California “judge”

Starting Early

As with other animals, what humans learn very early in life often stays with them forever. Children are very trusting in authority and unable to think for themselves (having had little life experience). While of course they cannot understand complex “administrative policy decisions,” the most basic pro-tyranny, anti- freedom concepts should be pounded into their little heads as soon as possible. Early on, the goal should not be to teach the young peasants specific facts, or even particular political ideas, but to mold the way they view life in general-to build a foundation upon which all your future propaganda can be built.

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Among the recent activities of our nation’s Drug Czar is pushing school districts to adopt a random drug testing policy for all students. ONDCP offers $125,000 grants to help with the costs involved. This is not just the sports participants, as in the past, but ALL students.

Adding to a huge tome listing unintended consequences related to our War on People (sorry, Drugs) this is but another example. You see, most of our youth who experiment with drugs have done so with marijuana, which has been proven in many studies (some actually authorized by ONDCP - the 1999 National Institute of Health study comes to mind) to be the least harmful of all the illegal drugs. Not being as unenlightened as many think, most of them understand that marijuana use is detectable in their systems for nearly a month. On the other hand, other illegal drugs - the ones that can actually be abused and cause addiction - are usually gone from one’s system within 72 hours.

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A “Rocky Mountain News” headline warned earlier this month, “College funding teeters on brink: Officials say huge tuition hikes likely if system isn’t fixed.”

With a recession looming large, University of Colorado President Hank Brown fears that a weakened Colorado economy could result in state funding cuts of up to 50 percent and massive tuition hikes.

Yet the state is awash in cash. Last November, Governor Bill Ritter submitted the largest budget proposal in Colorado history - a whopping $18 billion for fiscal year 2008-09. Much of the additional money courtesy of taxpayers who narrowly approved Referendum C, which lifted the state’s constitutional spending cap for five years and permanently raised baseline spending thereafter.

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As we send our young sons back to school, millions of boy parents are apprehensive, dreading the pain of the “boy parent dilemma.”

Modern schools are not suited to boys’ personalities and learning styles. This can be seen from the time boys enter school, when many of them are immediately branded as behavior problems. The line of 10 kids who had to gather every day after school in my son’s first grade class for their behavior reports–all boys. The names of kids on the side of the chalkboard who misbehaved and would lose recess–all boys. The kids as young as five or six who must be drugged so they will sit still and “behave”–almost all boys.

By any measure, our schools are failing our sons. Boys at all levels are far more likely than girls to be disciplined, suspended, held back, or expelled. By high school the typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading and writing, and is less likely to graduate high school, go to college, or graduate college than a typical girl.

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The holiday season can be filled with surprises. Of course, when it comes to the public school system, those surprises aren’t always wrapped with colorful ribbons.

One morning a few weeks ago, I got a frantic call from my 14-year old daughter from school. “Mom, can you bring in some canned food?” she frantically inquired.

“What for?” I asked.

“It’s for English class. We get 10 bonus points for bringing in canned food for the poor.”

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Smoking first. Then cheeseburgers. So goes the logical extension of Michael Carrigan’s thinking. The well-intentioned University of Colorado regent is currently pushing a system-wide ban on all outdoor smoking. He says he was inspired by his desire to protect young people from dying of lung cancer. “I’ve had a number of close relatives die from smoking, including my grandparents and my uncle, who was my namesake,” Carrigan told the Rocky Mountain News. “I would like to see the next generation be free of smoking.”

But if saving people from the bad decisions they want to make is what this crusade is all about, shouldn’t banning cholesterol-laden fast food as a way to fight heart disease be his top target? After all, it’s heart disease–and not lung cancer–that is America’s number one killer, taking nearly a million U.S. lives every year.

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In Florida last week children were traumatized by protocols that for two days in a row kept them locked down in schools away from their parents. The reason given? A crime had taken place that is normally handled by the police. In these cases the two separate crimes, a robbery and an escaped convict, were used to justify a complete lock down of the area around Ft. Lauderdale.

Government schools are unsafe, frightening, and also fail to teach. Students graduate without understanding elementary book keeping, the principles of electricity, much less physics, how our courts work and many other subjects that two generations ago were assumed as basic parts of becoming a literate, functioning adult.

In Maryland today parents who entrusted their children to government schools are facing jail time for refusing to do what many experts now say is hazardous to their health, immunizations.

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Full disclosure: My wife got good grades in law school. She graduated third in her class. She practices law with a firm downtown that only hires lawyers with good grades, just like every attorney there.

Full disclosure: I got good grades in graduate school (though I was nowhere near third in my class). That helped me get on the faculty at one of the most selective institutions in American higher education. There, I give out grades. Good ones to those who master the material, bad ones to those who do not. That is my job. It is, I think, an important one.

So when it comes to today’s topic, I might be biased. I actually believe in things like academic excellence and intellectual merit. I believe that right answers are better than wrong answers, that people can differ in their ability to distinguish between the two, and that identifying those who can do that well, is an important social good.

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