THE FIVE FACTORS DRIVING THE GROWING OF UNMOTIVATED BOYS !

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Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

Source: mensdaily
By J. Steven Svoboda | May 18, 2009


Book Review Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. By Leonard Sax. New York: Basic Books, 2007. www.boysadrift.com. 267 pp. $25.00.

Leonard Sax, family physician and author of Why Gender Matters, has published his second book, and it’s simply superb. While I found his first book quite mixed, Boys Adrift is one of the most important, original gender books I have read in many years.

Not to mention one of the most worrisome. We already knew that at all levels, boys are falling way behind girls in education. University students are close to three-fifths female these days and in some campuses exceed that margin. Sax provides ample evidence that this male malaise is deeply entrenched throughout American society. The author points to several principal challenges, to each of which he devotes a chapter: boys’ disengagement from education, video games, over-prescription of stimulants, and environmental endocrine disruptors. The final challenge may be the most elusive but is also critically important: boys’ need to be schooled in what masculinity is by other men (and principally, by men other than one’s own father).

One of the great things about Boys Adrift is the author’s ability to bridge various disciplines. Early on we receive a primer by Sax on the different development in boys and girls of different regions of the brain. Some regions develop along similar tracks but at different rates, others develop more or less in parallel, and some regions such as the visual cortex show markedly different development between boys and girls with no overlap between sexes in the developmental path. In Sax’ words, “Trying to teach five-year-old boys to learn to read and write may be just as inappropriate as it would be to try to teach three-year-old girls to read and write.” The author points out that, for example, Finland scores at or near the very top of all educational rankings, perhaps because in that country, formal school does not begin until children are seven years old. Sax suggests that if we did the same here, we “might reduce or ameliorate a significant fraction of the problems we see with boys and school.”

Sax sees the dispiriting developments here as stemming from gender-blind education that ignores the different needs and proclivities of boys. He aptly points out that we need to catch the issue of school early. Once a boy spends a year or two typecast as an academic underachiever, we may have “lost” his potential to excel forever, as he will internalize the notion that school is “stupid” to assuage his feelings about his own lack of success.

Boys have disengaged from school for a variety of reasons. Two big ones are the decline in physical education and “zero tolerance for violence” programs that teach boys they are bad for basically just being boys, who tend to like toy weapons, grappling with other students, etc.

Reductions in sports teams means only the best athletes can even make the team, and many others simply stay home. Sax proposes the reinvention of sports teams, “beginning with a new idea: nobody gets cut.” The author also points out the fascinating fact that boys tend to be engaged in any competition or challenge that satisfies two simple requirements: “there are winners and losers, and the outcome is in doubt.” One Maryland all-boys’ school even assigns all students on enrollment to either the Blue Team or the White Team. The assignment is random and permanent. The result: the boys avidly compete for success in all areas, including academic issues, and cheer their teammates on.

The author clearly likes and appreciates both male and female styles. He notes the evidence in the animal kingdom as well as among humans that females simply are hard-wired to please a teacher whereas boys tend to rebel. While boys’ first allegiance tends to be to their fellows, girls are more likely to see a situation from the adults’ perspective. “Girls at every age get better grades in school than boys do, in every subject—not because girls are smarter, researchers have found, but because girls try harder.” One fascinating difference between the sexes: Girls who expect to do well do in fact perform better, but for boys, there is no positive correlation between self-esteem and performance.

Sax is not afraid to put forth some ideas new enough that even our language is not totally prepared to formulate them. The author uses the German word Kenntnis to describe a type of learning—direct, experiential, even tactile–that he considers invaluable for today’s children, who all too often suffer from a “nature-deficit disorder.” Video games have displaced outdoor activities in boys’ lives. Boys are less motivated to read today than they used to be and the predictable result is they read less. Shockingly, even “one in four white boys with college-educated parents can’t read proficiently.” Some schools have seen marked improvement from one simple change: allowing boy students to stand or lie down rather than having to sit.

Due at least in part to environmental interference with male hormones, the sperm count of an average young man today is less than half what his grandfather had at the same age.

The more time a boy spends playing video games, the worse he does in school, and some substantial evidence suggests that the relationship may be causal. Video games may disengage the player from real life, and have been shown to be substantially more destructive than television viewing. Sax believes violent video games should be forbidden outright and the rest should be allowed only for a limited period of time after homework and chores are done. Real-life challenges in the outdoors such as one Edmonton boys’ school poses its students each year can be immensely satisfying and may even chart a path of antidote to the scourge of video games. “Video games may affect the brain in children in much the same way that medications like Ritalin… do.”

ADHD drugs may at times be administered even when they are quite unnecessary. One boy “needed to be on multiple medications for ADHD when he was in school; but when he was assisting a professional hunter in Zimbabwe, he didn’t need the medications at all, even when he had to sit motionless in the bush for long periods of time.” Also, shockingly, “medication for ADHD improved the performance of normal kids by the same degree that it improved the performance of kids with ADHD.”

Sax’ explanation of the toll wreaked by endocrine disruptors is depressing. “There’s growing evidence that the end result of our increasingly toxic environment is girls who are both masculine and feminine, and boys who are neither masculine nor feminine.” Boys’ bones are much more fragile than they used to be. Practical tips: avoid water in plastic bottles, and eat organic!

Perhaps the most sobering chapter of all is the one Sax mostly didn’t write. Admirably, he turns his pen (or should I say word processor?) over to the armadas of males in this country who lack ambition and become parasites in their own homes, as well as their frustrated, perplexed mothers, sisters, and (ex-)wives and girlfriends. One young woman writes, “I went to my 10-year high school reunion last year. All of the girls I went to school with have moved out, gone to college, gotten real jobs, etc. Almost all the boys live at home, have menial jobs, and don’t know what they want out of life.” Vocational education programs, even those that lead to high-paying jobs that do not require advanced education, cannot fill their spaces and in many cases have to be cancelled altogether.

But solutions do exist, many of them not consistent with politically correct gender politics. Single sex schools may be more important for boys’ success than they are for girls. And the young women positively adore the young men who learn respect and proper behavior from older men without the inevitable peer competition that crops up in mixed-sex schools. Sax writes, “[W]hen it comes to showing boys how a gentleman behaves—how a gentleman interacts with women, how he responds to adversity, how he serves his community—then there is no substitute for having a male role model…. In every enduring culture, girls are led into womanhood by a community of adult women; boys are led into manhood by a community of adult men.” Later the author spells it out even more explicitly. “A boy needs role models of health masculinity (just as girls need role models of healthy femininity)…. Left to their own devices, not many boys will choose broccoli and Brussels sprouts over French fries and ice cream. That’s why they need parents.”

Sax’s inspirational story of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s Civil War heroism chilled me to the bone and became a bedtime story for my children. Chamberlain was an academic who left a professorship at Bowdoin College, not to mention a wife and five children, to risk his life fighting in the Civil War and later to lead a heroic, miraculous, death-defying charge of his men that may have turned the entire War’s result around. When the South surrendered, Chamberlain made sure the North’s soldiers treated their former opponents with grace and dignity. What a great tale for this (or any) era.

Sax is controversial, and numerous conclusions and studies of his have been questioned, both by politically correct feminists and more balanced observers. But judge for yourself. Don’t miss this virtual Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of a book, heroic and inspiring and down-to-earth all at once. And quite possibly one of the most ground-breaking, thought-provoking books ever written on gender issues.


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Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men