Boys will be...college students?

How would you answer the following questions?
1. Are you likely to go to college?
2. How likely are to you find a job in the field of your choice?
3. Do boys and girls have equal opportunities to find the job of their choice?
4. Do you believe that boys encounter difficulties because they are not motivated enough?
5. Are boys discouraged from pursuing their goals?
6. Do your parents actively encourage you to pursue your goals?
7. Do your teachers actively encourage you to pursue your goals?
8. Do you like school?
9. Do boys or girls get called upon more often in class?
10. Do you feel that teachers listen to what you have to say?

Having thought about your own answers to those questions, I'd like you to follow this link to the results from a Met Life survey on gender equity. How do your answers compare with the results? Did anything surprise you?

A week or so ago I bought the book Women Who Make the World Worse by Kate O'Beirne, the Washington Editor of National Review magazine. The jacket of the book reads "The Modern Women's Movement is totalitarian in its methods, radical in its aims, and dishonest in its advocacy. Kate O'Beirne is fed up with women who make the world worse. Women who see "gender discrimination" in every office, in every classroom, on every sports field, and on every military base. If you read this review from National Review Book service," you would find this assertion as the main thesis of the book:

Yet O'Beirne proves here that it is actually men - and boys - who are bearing a considerable amount of the actual suffering. Millions of schoolboys are being feminized in American classrooms; boys' sports are in retreat in schools everywhere; the "gender gap" deforms local and national politics; millions of husbands and fathers (and wives and mothers) believe that men are not needed in the raising of children; and worst of all, transforming the American military into a laboratory for large-scale social engineering puts us all at risk.

O'Beirne establishes that the feminist agenda is at its core not pro-female at all; it's merely anti-male. She demolishes the prevailing myth among feminists that men are the enemy of women's progress.

Back to the results of the MetLife survey. Contrary to popular belief (or should we say "truth" according to radical feminists), girls are not suffering, oppressed victims in school. Rather,

Findings from two nationwide surveys of teachers who teach these grade levels, indicate that: 1) contrary to the commonly held view that boys have an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers' expectations, every day experiences at school and interactions in the classroom; 2) minority girls hold the most optimistic views of the future and are the group most likely to focus on education goals; 3) minority boys are the most likely to feel discouraged about the future and the least interested in getting a good education; and 4) teachers nationwide view girls as higher achievers and more likely to succeed than boys.

Beyond these findings, striking gender differences emerge suggesting that girls have an advantage over boys in terms of their future aspirations. Compared to boys, girls appear more definite about going to college and more focused on education as one of their top goals. They are also more likely than boys to receive encouragement from their teachers and friends and to feel their teachers are good role models for them to learn from and emulate.

The present study indicates that teachers consistently express a more optimistic view of girls than of boys. They believe girls are more likely than boys to graduate from college, to set higher goals for themselves and to exhibit more inner confidence in their ability to pursue their goals. Teachers' higher expectations for girls may explain, in part, why girls are more focused than boys on their education goals. There is a commonly held belief among educators and social scientists alike that teachers' expectations shape students' expectations. Thus, girls appear to be benefiting from their relationship with teachers in ways that boys are not.

These findings clearly indicate the presence of a positive relationship between girls and their teachers, one that reinforces aspirations and encourages girls to aim high.

How does this play out in reality? Perhaps the expectations of students while in high school change, and boys once again become the majority in college? Again, the trend in the past decade or so has seen the ratio of females to males in US colleges move to its current 60-40. Here is a recent piece that appeared in the Washington Post. In commenting on the trend, author Michael Gurian cautions about the inevitable societal disaster lying on the not-so-distant horizon:

If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.

The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a significant crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"

It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry -- men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gateses and John Robertses and George Bushes -- and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.

But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by.

If you young men have adult male role models who set an example and who encourage you to be serious-minded about your education and the hard work it involves, if you are supported in the pursuit of your life goals--realizing that your "dream job" isn't going to be handed to you but you're going to have to work for it--then that is a cause for joyful thanksgiving. The days are long gone when a high school student could either drop out at 16 or graduate and walk into a unionized factory job and earn a comfortable living for his entire career. So make good and positive choices now to work for your goals, to be serious students, to refuse to take shortcuts, to own up to your responsibilities. In short, be a man.

UPDATE: Laura Bush, advocate for boys! Read the article.