National Review’s Kate O’Beirne joins The Other Charlotte and me (here and here) in praising therapist Michael Gurian’s welcome piece “Disappearing Act: Where Have the Men Gone? No Place Good,” in Sunday’s Washington Post.
In it, Gurian laments the declining number of young men attending college and recognizes something very politically incorrect: Men and women are different. Schools in recent decades have become less comfortable to boys. Hooray for Gurian for saying this-but maybe he doesn’t go quite far enough.
“[H]e doesn’t explain who is to blame for boys’ alienation from our current schooling regime,” writes O’Beirne. “So I will. It’s radical feminist academics, theorists, and activists.
“Gurian explains that boys ‘dominate the failure statistics in our schools’ beginning in elementary school and continuing through high school. Boys lag behind girls in reading ability by 1 ½ years, a disparity that persists into college. This diminished educational achievement consigns young men to the lowest-level jobs, lands plenty in prison, and takes many out of the long-term marriage pool. He counsels that we abandon the ‘boys-are-privileged-but-the-girls-are-shortchanged emphasis of the last 20 years.’ No kidding. This ‘emphasis’ that has so disadvantaged our boys is the fundamental tenet of feminist educational policy that is subsidized by tens of millions of public dollars in the name of a phony ‘educational equity.'”
One problems is that feminists have made school boring to boys:
“Take reading achievement,” O’Beirne writes, “as one example of what feminism has wrought. With the federal government’s clout and cash, feminists have dictated the rewriting of textbooks to conform to their notions of gender equality. At its 1973 convention, NOW resolved to take “dramatic action” to see that dangerous sex-role stereotypes were erased from textbooks, and within a year they had the Women’s Educational Equity Act to advance their campaign with funding for alternative curricula. The editors, publishers, administrators, bureaucrats, and teachers’ unions that make up the feminized education establishment have eagerly adopted the feminists’ destructive gender agenda.
“The result is what NYU psychology professor Paul Vitz calls ‘Wonder Woman and the Wimp’ stories that little boys understandably have little interest in reading. Sandra Stotsky, a reading specialist and research scholar at Northeastern University explains, ‘Gone are the inspiring biographies of the most important American presidents, inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. No military valor, no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventurous and brave women abound.'”