Brute Reason

As one critic told me recently, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy and unfocused workers. But unproductive workers are adults — not 5-year-olds. If boys are restless and unfocused, why not look for ways to help them do better? As a nation, can we afford not to?

This is a great article, but misses a point. The reason why boys behave worse than girls at school and are more easily distracted isn’t because Men Can’t Concentrate and Women Can. It’s because girls are socialized to be attentive and obedient, and boys are not.

The solution is neither to socialize boys the same restrictive way as girls, and nor it is to “include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles)” as this article suggests. It’s to 1) stop socializing little girls to be obedient robots, and 2) restructure primary education to account for the ways kids actually learn—NOT by rote, not by sitting still in a classroom for eight hours a day, not by answering boring questions with only one correct answer.

In my opinion, it’s not that boys are “underachieving”; it’s that girls are “overachieving,” because they’ve been raised to do well in the sort of stifling environment that most American schools are. Forcing boys to fit into this system is a vastly inferior strategy to bringing down the entire system itself.