The Boy Crisis

So the tables have turned and everyone is having a hissy fit. For the past couple of years girls are outperforming and outsmarting boys in school, especially in standardized tests. Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a learning disorder, twice as likely to be in a special ed program, more likely to repeat a grade and more prone to drop out of school. Newsweek and the Today show both stated their growing concern for the poor boys getting left behind. Some of the reasons they attribute this trend to are: being fatherless, living in poverty, slower brain development, lack of good role models, and traditional learning techniques which are not compatible for the boy brain (such as sitting down and learning). Boys are active creatures that need a physical task in order to learn. How they've survived through such hardships for so long is unexplained. Brain development is beyond their control but being fatherless and living in poverty affects girls just as much. Beyond the aging Gloria Steinem, girls aren't particularly blessed with a bounty of good role models either. So maybe there is something else. Maybe it's that for the past 30 years the educational opportunities for girls have changed. Maybe it's that when girls are given equal footing they prove to be more apt for the learning environment. It's not that boys are getting dumber than girls, it's just that now girls have equal access and are being instilled to value what for boys has always been there.