Friday, January 2, 2015

What have we done to our boys?

Only days from celebrating the incarnation of our Lord (not into some vague, genderless humanity but as a man), we find more and more psychologists warning of the damage we are doing to our boys and how that is keeping them from growing up into responsible men.  Consider this:
Much of this has come from the educational centers of America.  Yet here the crisis is also felt.  Where there was once parity among men and women graduating from a four year college, now 135 women graduate for every 100 men who graduate.  In other words, our boys are falling further and further behind in the marketplace of jobs and ideas.  The intellectuals of academia have by and large given into the feminist agendas and perspective.

Yet this is harming women as much as it is hurting men and corrupting the idea and future of the family even more.  How long can we continue to label boys being boys a pathology or diagnosis requiring medication?  How long can we marginalize boys from the mainstream of life and marriage and family?  When will we wake up to the damage already done and to those still growing up into what it means to be a man?

If we don't know what we're doing, maybe we shouldn't be doing it.  What we have done has not proven helpful to anyone.  Boys have a dearth of good role models at home, in school, and in life in general.  The media delights in portraying men as unstable, immature, and misogynistic.  Drugs are being used without regard to their effect over the long haul.  What we are doing is not improving things, maybe we should stop and try something else.

This crisis about boys and men has become normative in the Black community.  More Black teens and young adults are in trouble with the law, school, without a father at home, etc... than the reverse.  Yes, there are other factors at play here but our recent history in Ferguson and NYC has only highlighted what is surely on the horizon for other cultures and ethnic segments of our population.  There has got to be a better way!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen and amen. I agree 100%. Just watch the commercials on tv (if you can stand it) and you will notice the man being made into a fool every time.
Come on ladies-we want our men back!

Carl Vehse said...

"Where there was once parity among men and women graduating from a four year college, now 135 women graduate for every 100 men who graduate."

Forbes noted a similar thing in their February 2012 article, "The Male-Female Ratio in College."

In her 2002 paper, "Where the Boys No Longer Are: Recent Trends in U.S. College Enrollment Patterns," Dartmouth Economics Prof. Patricia M. Anderson provides several reasons for smaller male-to-female ratio in colleges:

1. "the very high male/female ratio in the early to mid 1970’s was likely a result of the Vietnam War, since as Vietnam-era veterans taking advantage of educational benefits moved through the system, older male enrollments swelled."
2. "today’s young women are much less likely to be married and are accordingly more likely to enroll in school"
3. "males are less likely than females to graduate from high school, are more likely to be in prison, and are more likely to be in the military."

OTOH, some of the top universities have larger or near even male percentage to female percentage enrollment:

Caltech: 61.7 to 38.3
MIT: 54.7 to 45.3
Stanford: 52 to 48
Harvard: 50 to 50
Yale: 50.3 to 49.7
Univ. Chicago: 52.8 to 47.2
Princeton: 52 to 48
Rice: 50.7 to 49.3
Washington Univ.-St. Louis: 51 to 49
Cornell: 49.4 to 50.6
Columbia: 51 to 49
Dartmouth: 50.4 to 49.6
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 70 to 30

Carl Vehse said...

According to the Pew Research Center U.S. Religious Landscape Survey of 2008, the male and female percentages for the LCMS, ELCA, and the general population are:

LCMS: 47 53
ELCA: 44 56
U.S. Pop.: 48 52

John Joseph Flanagan said...

I met a young man recently who works in the frozen food dept of a supermarket. He seems like an intelligent and motivated individual. He told me he had wanted to enlist in the military but couldn't because "I have ADD." I said to myself that this guy feels forever branded with a disability because some psychologist, school administrator, or other professional pronounced him "ADD" the popular ailment fraudulently attached to young people who may or may not really have this problem. I believe this term has been as misused as "bullying" by the media, phoney professionals, and social engineers in our day. God save us from the so called experts.

Carl Vehse said...

What have we done to our boys?

We can always blame the problem on "the devil, the world, and our flesh." That's good for numerous sermons.

Or we could be more specific, and politically incorrect, and identify a major source of the problem - the bizarro world of liberalism. And by liberalism in today's context I mean the demonic cult largely populated and led by Democrats (aka demonicrats), socialists, homosexual activists, feminazis, and supported by their dependent sycophants.

And as long as I'm being specific, since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, a significant number of (voting) women have increasingly looked to Washington (DC, not George) as their "(sugar)daddy," and have elected politicians who will enable that role, even if that politician, personally, was faithless to his own wife (like FDR, JFK, Teddy, and Slick Willie; yeah, there were Republicans, too). Such women expect government health insurance to pay for their birth control before they marry, and, if the birth control or marriage fails, they expect government funding for either abortion or child support.

Masculine-reinforcing occupations like the military, police, firemen, and construction worker have succumbed to feminist influence, demands, and control. Since the demise of westerns, a male on TV and in films is increasingly portrayed as metrosexual, homosexual, henpecked, or on his girlfriend's leash. Product advertisements now focus on or emphasize feminine feelings and "intuition."

Government protection and personal security are the buzzwords. Liberal religions decorate these with religiosity, and demote any notion of masculine responsibility, especially in the post WWII atomic bomb/Cold War age and now in the environmental, globull-warming age.

Today a grade school boy is punished by his (female) teacher and suspended from school by his (female) principal for drawing on paper or folding his hand into the shape of a gun. And, if a boy were found today with a pocket knife (something most boys carried in their pockets, along with a firecracker or two, when I was in grade school), he would likely be tasered, arrested, handcuffed, and placed with foster parents. Now, any boy who displays the slightest bit of masculine behavior is likely to be prescribed Ritalin.

Even a confessional Lutheran denomination like the LCMS, whose 1940 Lutheran Witness chastised women for seeking occupations as doctors, lawyers and business executives, have withdrawn their doctrinal objections to women in secular or church positions except for the pastoral office... well, officially, anyway. Currently the LCMS is playing an ecumenical game of spin-the-level-of-fellowship-bottle with church bodies like NALC, ANCA, ECAC-CR, ECAC-SV, SESAC, and EECMY, who give no indication they will stop ordaining pastrixes. The liberal cult infection of the LCMS is also seen in the publicity and political activities of the Lutheran Immigration And Refugee Services (LIARS), which is supported by officials within the Purple Palace.

Kirk Skeptic said...

Government schools are a large part of the problem, and you fool yourself if you think you can reform them. Perhaps Lutheran schools can be reformed, but that would require the church to be first, so don't hold your breath. Homeschooling and selective private schooling remain viable options.

Anonymous said...

Richard Strickert, a retired nuclear chemist, believes women should not have been allowed to vote. He furthermore spends a lot of time on the Internet attempting to repristinate what he regards to be the "golden age" of the LCMS; namely, the years his father attended the seminary, in the 1930s.

He also believes that The LCMS should not be talking to any other Lutherans who are not as pure as we are.

He apparently lives in Austin, TX and as far as I can tell, attends a congregation that is quite proud of their happy-clappy liturgy.

He furthermore goes by the nome de plume "Carl Vehse" because he labors under the delusion that a layman named Vehse was chiefly responsible for the formation of The LCMS, the man who ran back to Germany when the going got rough.

In my opinion, Richard Strickert is a deeply bitter and troubled man.

Carl Vehse said...

In his 2008 article, Girly Men The Media's Attack on Masculinity," S. T. Karnick writes:

"The tendency of the nation’s schools to suppress boys’ natural way of seeing and doing things, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture.

"According to Hoff-Sommers, programs in America’s public schools are set up to obliterate all that is masculine and establish femininity as the human norm:

"This book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world. No one denies that boys’ aggressive tendencies must be checked and channeled in constructive ways. Boys need discipline, respect, and moral guidance. Boys need love and tolerant understanding. They do not need to be pathologized.

"Hoff-Sommers goes on to note that 'it’s a bad time to be a boy in America. . . . Routinely regarded as protosexists, potential harassers and perpetuators of gender inequity, boys live under a cloud of censure'."

Carl Vehse said...

In her May 1, 2000, Atlantic article, "The War Against Boys," Christina Hoff-Sommers writes:

"On the 1998 SAT boys were thirty-five points (out of 800) ahead of girls in math and seven points ahead in English. These results seem to run counter to all other measurements of achievement in school. In almost all other areas boys lag behind girls. Why do they test better?

"First of all, according to College Bound Seniors, an annual report on standardized-test takers published by the College Board, many more "at risk" girls than "at risk" boys take the SAT—girls from lower-income homes or with parents who never graduated from high school or never attended college.

"Another factor skews test results so that they appear to favor boys. Nancy Cole, the president of the Educational Testing Service, calls it the "spread" phenomenon. Scores on almost any intelligence or achievement test are more spread out for boys than for girls—boys include more prodigies and more students of marginal ability. Or, as the political scientist James Q. Wilson once put it, 'There are more male geniuses and more male idiots.' "

Hoff-Sommers also noted from a study at Scarsdale High School, in New York: "They found little or no difference in the grades of boys and girls in advanced-placement social-studies classes. But in standard classes the girls were doing a lot better."

This brings up the question of composition (racial, ethnic, and cultural) in various schoastic levels of classes. Here an October, 2014, interview with one of the authors of The Bell Curve is of interest; see "‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray."

BrotherBoris said...

Excellent article! As a former public school teacher for over 10 years, so much of what you wrote rings true. Sadly, I don't hold out much hope for today's public schools either. It very much is an anti-male and anti-boy environment.