Ten paragraphs into yet another story about struggling boys these days, we get this:
Girls have been surpassing boys in school since at least the 1950s, says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization. Colleges in the past were more willing to accept male applicants in need of improvement. That has changed, and women now outnumber men on college campuses.
My guess is that "since at least the 1950s" means "basically forever." We have a remarkable ability to forget just how ill-behaved men have been since the start of time. It's only more obvious now because, like colleges, we're no longer willing to indulge it.
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Feck off.
WordPress or jabberwocking or whatever this is is a lousy blog host. No up or down votes, no way to alert about spam or block it.
My assumption however, is it is an affordable venue for a retired person such as Kevin.
Men are filth.
Argue with me.
Humans are filthy.
Animals are filthy.
Humans are animals.
Ok:
https://www.newsfromme.com/2009/01/14/ricardo-montalban-r-i-p/
You are entirely right. Humans in general aren't so awesome, but young men are really bad. I say this as a former young man.
A man is smart. Men are dumb panicky dangerous animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ppyMUlXfM so Toga! Toga! Toga! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Mk7idVfcA ...
I probably wouldn’t have made it in todays wworld
Dspcole
Folsom Prison
Well, that was refreshing to read.
"We have a remarkable ability to forget just how ill-behaviored men have been since the start of time."
Something made it necessary to invent the rationalization, "Boys will be boys."
Well, I don't think Kevin is exactly correct here. There is a crisis in attention span, which is what is being discussed. Males tend to be visually oriented, that is well established. Give them devices that are ALL visual (games, porn, etc) and they get lost in the visual sensory overload.
Boys today can completely disappear into a world of visual delights via devices, things much more appealing than work or school and plenty of them are doing exactly that. The world in the device is much more interesting than this dull one the rest of us live in.
Girls have a different problem, but they're also motivated by the time they leave high school to get themselves into good paying jobs so they don't have to rely on a man and land in a horrible relationship to keep a roof over their heads (sorry to be triggering the incels out there).
Young men have a serious device and visual stimulus problem and pushing that aside is not the answer.
I was thinking of the difference between myself and my wonderful wife. She is a pilot, owns her plane, snow skis, scuba's, has a horse and has a really fast brain. She is quick to anger and quick to forgive. Lucky Me!!!
I on the other hand am a visual person. I became an engineer, mechanical, because I like making things. I spent a lot of my early career on a drawing board and I enjoyed putting pencil to paper. Building small boats was one of my hobbies.
I like to take my time thinking things through.
If she has a problem with some gear, she gives it to me and says: FIX IT!
For some reason our two natures are compatible.
Loss of privilege is a terrible thing...
It's a problem that 60% of college students are women and 40% are men. In 1930, we had the opposite problem: 60% of college students were men and 40% were women.
Among other problems with fewer men going to college is that the main MAGA voters are non-college white men. We need fewer of them.
> Colleges in the past were more willing to accept male applicants in need of improvement.
And this:
> The roots of boys’ problems are complex. Things that once benefited boys in school, including male teachers, recess and vocational classes, have dwindled in recent years.
If your argument, Kevin, is that no one should get special treatment, and that education should be a one-size-fits-all arrangement, then make it. But either be consistent in saying that no groups will get special treatment, or be explicit in telling us which groups are undeserving.
"Colleges in the past were more willing to accept male applicants in need of improvement." Maybe boys' difficulty in school isn't that they are "visual" it's that they've lost the privilege of being given opportunities they didn't really earn. Buckle down and study - that's how girls have become 60% of college students.
There is some evidence that there is also a larger standard deviation in intelligence amongst boys as well. Assuming that intelligence is somewhat correlated with acceptance into college, in an unbiased system, that would mean fewer boys make the cut. I admit the effect is likely small however I could see that as one reason among many.
The bigger issue is that schools seem not to spend enough time on teaching the foundations of how to be successful in school or life. This may be better than when I was in school but I was basically taught nothing about time management or organization in the early years. It was all just trying to cram identical facts into a room full of bored kid's heads.
That evidence has been somewhat debunked and found to be the result of (1) studies that didn't take into account that women with very low intelligence are kept at home whereas men with very low intelligence are more likely to be institutionalized and thus included in statistics that women are left out of, and (2) that math-talented women have been treated differently in early childhood and thus overlooked by programs for highly gifted students creating the impression that girls are not as smart, less likey to have a very high IQ. When the extremes are not properly measured the variability will be biased, giving rise to the idea that men are more extreme than women, more variable. If girls and boys were no longer treated as differently as they are, there would be less variability.
Our kids' public elementary provides them with planners and many of the teachers coach them on how to use them. I can't tell how much of that is new because of Covid. The teachers have said that this cohort of kids seem less organized overall than previous classes. So it's also not clear how much of a difference the instruction is making.
This was disappointing. Kevin usually uses more rigorous evidence in supporting his positions than he is here, where he quoted some guy and acted like it proved that the recent spate of "guys are being left behind" articles are wrong and its really more that men are basically buttheads.
Until the 1960's, most colleges and universities were single-sex (male), so the male college student was seen as the "norm." Admissions standards weren't anything close to what they are today and a lot of schools basically offered open admissions for legacies. There is no WAY I could get into my alma mater today with the modest transcript I had back then. Moreoever the GI Bill massively expanded access to higher ed for millions of military vets, further swelling the ranks of men in college classrooms through the 1970s. What's happened over the past generation or two as almost all universities became co-ed and more minority and immigrant students have started going to college, is that the typical white, male college student has simply become less typical.
I wonder if going through military training first helped a lot of boys with any lingering disciplinary issues before they got to college.
One possible problem with boys is the fact that academic performance between the ages of 14-18 is what determines acceptance into selective colleges, if boys are more likely (for any or all of the possible reasons mentioned) to be ‘late bloomers,’ well, that’s too bad for boys. Based on my own children’s experience and the experience of other relatives, the boys tend to be less mature and academically minded at every age through high school.
I think parents, both male and female, need to take responsibility for raising young men who are better behaved. We know more about how the young brain works, and we know more about how young men behave badly. With those two pieces of information, we should be able to begin to educate young men at an early age to be more thoughtful. And while we will never completely stamp out the wildness, and we would never want to, we can create kinder human beings.