Another depressing story from the Daily Mail about the state of boy’s education. As it happens, white, working class boys are behind their peers in achievement by the age of five. FIVE!!! Thank god they have all the privileges of being white and male, Amirite? Who needs school or achievements when one can simply coast through life of the back of preferred skin color and gender? Buck up, lads. The world is your oyster!
Except it’s not. White male privilege is real, but only if you also happen to be RICH, in which case it really doesn’t matter what color your skin is or whether you’re sporting XX or XY chromosomes. Being RICH is, and always will be the most important advantage, and clever children will take care they are born to rich families. All those poor children, what were you thinking? Really, anyone stupid enough to be born to a poor family deserves what they get, no?
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
Let’s take a closer look at what these “achievements” are that boys are failing to meet, shall we? Boys are judged to have reached a ‘good level’ of development if they can show they are:
Attentive in class
Know the importance of school rules
Take turns in conversation
Guess at the meaning of simple sentences
Write a letter to Father Christmas
Blend sounds together to say simple words and
Respect others
Oh, I see. In other words, be girls. Personally, I find it deeply distressing that ANY boys can meet these standards.
Let’s do a little thought experiment and change the rules of the game. Here is what a boy friendly school would be measuring in terms of achievements:
Can accurately judge the speed and trajectory of objects in motion by physically interacting with them
Knows the rules of a variety of competitive sports and follows them
Has confident oral skills and can speak assertively about a variety of subjects
Understands body language and responds to non-verbal cues
Can describe needs and desires using an appropriate vocabulary
Understands the importance of sportsmanship and can accept defeat with dignity and victory with grace
How would we test these achievements? Let’s see. We would need a lot of time spent outdoors playing various competitive games with adult oversight to model good sportsmanship and intervene when children get carried away with their emotions.
We would need a classroom filled with physical objects that can be examined, taken apart, rebuilt and put into some sort of motion that can be measured and evaluated. Race tracks and plenty of cars, balls, blocks, building sets and lots of tools to aid in construction. Hammers, screwdrivers, drills, glue, scissors and plenty of glitter because who doesn’t love sparkly?
We would need a system of evaluation that measures what children SAY, their verbal skills and their ability to understand other people without actually speaking. We would want to see children learning about a particular topic, adding their own personal interpretations and then speaking with confidence and assertiveness about that topic.
We would need winners and losers and rankings and most important, mobility. Children need to take last place in some events and first place in others and fall somewhere in the middle for the rest. They need to evaluate their own skills, understand that other people have different skills and learn to appreciate that everyone takes first place in something.
In other words, we need schools that understand and love boys. I wonder how the average girl would do on this set of achievements? Not very well, I should think. Why does it have to be a competition anyways? If we started from the base assumption that boys and girls are DIFFERENT and need different things from their school experience, we could surely accommodate ALL CHILDREN with little effort. In fact, it’s how schools used to be. Plenty of time for gym and plenty of time for music and art. An array of subjects that gave boys and girls EQUAL chances to shine.
One of the most devastating legacies of feminism has been the complete annihilation of boys from education. In order to compete, women have rigged the school system to ensure that boys are defeated before they even begin. What kind of competition is that? It’s like breaking the legs of male sprinters before the race and then proclaiming women faster.
The social fallout of leaving boys stranded and branded failures by the time they are FIVE YEARS OLD is not going to be pretty. Remember ladies, the little boys that can be berated and shamed and drugged and denied when they are little are not going to stay little forever. They will grow up to be men, bigger, stronger and faster than you. Educated, valued, respected and accomplished young men make our society. They create, invent, build, repair and provide. Angry young men are dangerous.
The price for girl’s educational achievement may be rather high indeed.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
I thought it was pretty much universally acknowledged that girls mature faster than boys and at five years old, the variance in verbal abilities and attentiveness (when defined as sitting quietly and listening) was normal.
Keep up the great posts.
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well how could a female truly be mature when all of society pampers her constantly and encourages her to be a child? What we will have is the following:
-boys being utterly disenfranchised will either commit suicide or (the more strong willed) will become delinquents and eventually criminals, brutes and thugs. White knighting (*cough* police *cough*) will become a paid profession as there will be constant violence and atrocities like Virginia tech, columbine, and Connecticut shootings.
-girls will grow up to be entitled princesses who feel oppressed and offended at even the slightest challenge reality throws at them. They will become mindless consumers buying crap after crap generating endless environment-busting waste, just so they can feel “empowered”.
The above two scenarios are well underway in western nations (especially the US).
Jobs that are important for the maintenance of society and civilization will be given less priority (like dirty dangerous grunt-work like electrician jobs, construction jobs etc), while cushy comfy jobs will be the jobs that are considered “respectable” (like acting, legal work, office work, etc). With no-one getting appreciation for doing all the essential grunt-work, these jobs will remain unfilled and hence lead to slow decay and eventual destruction of civilization and the society that inhabits. When the water stops running, and the food stops being grown, that sociology or arts degree isn’t going to help shit in survival.
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I stumbled across your blog from someone else’s, and I have spent the last 45 minutes reading. The other day someone sent me a “pre-12/15/12” article which said that as we deprive boys of what they need in education we are creating violent young adults who will lash out violently at society. After Connecticut I went back to my in-box to find that article (wouldn’t you know it THAT e-mail I deleted and can’t remember who sent it). You didn’t go that route, I think your article does a much better job of saying what that other article was trying to say. I always thought “A.D.D.” was a BS made-up term, but never could really describe what about it erked me … until I read your article. Thank God MY TEACHERS, encourage me to be “A.D.D.”, but then I was a kid in the south (US) in the 60’s and early 70’s. Enough of my soapbox, I’m going back to reading more of your older articles. Have a great new year and keep writing. If enough young men and women follow advice like your’s maybe there is hope for mankind yet. (Ya I don’t neuter my speach to please feminists).
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Dude, I grew up with three brothers and all their friends. No neutering required.
And thank you!
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LOL you are most welcome
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I’d like to add that for me i could make mathlessons atleast sort of fun by in my head setting up a competition with my friend and benchmate in who did problems the fastest.
Maybe i’d been bored if this was official, maybe not but possibly it could be added to the solution (couldn’t do it alone). Granted this was later on.
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