The Boys Project

by Laureen

A friend online recently pointed me to The Boys Project. And so I thought I'd share with you guys, yet another wonderful example of why parents of boys should keep them home.

The mission of The Boys Project is:

To help young males develop their capabilities and reach the potential that their families and teachers know they have. The Boys Project seeks to accomplish for young men what the Girls Project so successfully accomplished for young women--- to increase academic skills, to increase college success, and to develop the confidence, drive, and determination to contribute to American society.

OK, forget your horror that such a thing is necessary, for a moment. The education system started as a boy-only institution, then girls were allowed after much fighting, and now boys require a whole support system, because girls are adapting to the system better than the boys are, now. That just makes my head spin. The site goes on to say,

We are  losing young boys to a sense of failure that comes from schooling  poorly adapted to their needs. We are losing adolescent males to the depression that comes from feeling neither needed nor respected. We are  losing young men to life tracks that include neither college nor any other energetic endeavor.

A large,  sullen, poorly educated group of men will not keep the nation vital in  the twenty-first century. The nation needs the energy, initiative, and  ambition of its young men as well as its young women.

Aha! You mean.... the school system isn't meeting the needs of an entire gender? Fascinating.

As a mother of two sons, I suppose the other stats on the site should be horrifying and chilling.

For every 100 girls ages 15 to 17 in correctional facilities, there are 837 boys behind bars (which says more, I think, about the "justice system" than it does about gender issues per se, but anyway...).   For every 100 females ages 20 to 24 that commit suicide 624 males of the same age kill themselves. For every 100 girls diagnosed with a learning disability 276 boys are diagnosed       with a learning disability. And so on and so on.

And as much as I can admire the concept that we have to band together to save our boys from what school will do to them, banding together to help them cope better with an institution fundamentally unsuited to their basic natures seems, somehow, a fool's errand. But it's nice at least that someone's seeing it.

Laureen is a writer, a professional editor, a scuba instructor, a beginning  sailor, a traveler, and an obsessive researcher who's chiefly focused  on, and delighted with, her husband Jason and her sons Rowan and  Kestrel. She's a lifelong Californian, which lends a very distinctive  spin to both her ideas and her politics, and she's discovered, in her  peregrinations, that the world is far smaller yet far more fascinating  than anyone gives it credit for being. She holds forth her opinions on  that in her blog, The ElementalMom.

Comments

[Karen]

I pulled my 7 year-old son out of school because it was making him sick... migraines, night terrors 6 nights out of 7, and weight loss were just a few of the symptoms he had 3 months ago when we started homeschooling. I'm happy to say that he's regained his confidence, balance, and good humor - and also his health.
I'm writing a research paper about a related subject, "Homeschoolers Who Removed a Child or Children from Public School: A Survey," and would love for anyone reading this who pulled a child out of school to email me at whywehs@yahoo.com; I'll email you a 7-question survey (one per family), and if you can get it back to me by the end of April, your story will be included in this poignant and important area of research.
Thanks very much for this post, it's a really important one!