http://washingtonexaminer.com/on-masquelinity-and-the-war-on-poverty/article/2542416We're losing the war on poverty because our schools turn boys into eunuchs
By Melanie Sturm | JANUARY 18, 2014 AT 2:22 PM
As a binge-TV watcher, I’ve relished devouring serial dramas in advertising-free gulps. But “Breaking Bad” — the story about a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher turned clandestine meth-cooking badass – didn’t appeal.
Then Anthony Hopkins declared it an “epic work” with “the best actors I’ve ever seen.”
Midway through season two, I understand why Walter White is heroic. As men increasingly check out of work, marriage, and fatherhood, it’s hard not to root for a man fiercely determined to secure his family’s future before dying – despite his morally abhorrent methods.
That there are dramatically fewer men willing and able to safeguard family prosperity is perhaps America’s greatest – and most unrecognized — problem.
Consider Sunday’s “Shattering the Glass Ceiling” discussion on ABC’s “This Week.” Lamenting unrealized opportunities and unsolved problems when “women aren’t fully utilized,” businesswoman Carly Fiorina and co-panelists were oblivious about two key facts.
First, two times more men than women aged 25-34 languish in their parents’ basement far below the glass ceiling, according to U.S. Census data. Second, women now outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic and vocational well-being.Rather than apply Band-Aids to the cancer of chronic unemployment — like unemployment-insurance extensions and minimum-wage hikes — political elites must focus on the real problem:
Millions of males, especially less-educated men, are “unhitched from the engine of growth,” according to a 2011 Brookings Institution report.
Women gained all 74,000 jobs added to payrolls in December, and among the world’s seven biggest economies, America is last in the share of “prime age” males working – just behind Italy.
Why isn’t widespread male workless-ness a priority for policymakers, given the massive economic, fiscal and social costs?
Fifty years after President Johnson declared the War on Poverty “to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities,” we’ve spent an inflation-adjusted $20.7 trillion on 80-plus welfare programs -- $916 billion, or $9,000 per beneficiary, in 2012.
Yet 2013 ended with rates of government dependency and chronic joblessness near 50-year highs. Meanwhile, though inflation-adjusted GDP-per-capita has more than doubled since 1969, men’s median annual earnings dropped 27 percent, according to the Brookings Institution.
Since 1960, the percentage of married Americans plunged from 72 percent to 51 percent, while the rate of unwed motherhood skyrocketed from 4 percent to 41 percent, causing 24 million boys to be raised in fatherless homes – ominous trends considering children of single mothers experience less economic mobility.
As the New York Times explained, the ensuing vicious cycle means less successful men “are less attractive as partners, so some women are choosing to raise children by themselves, in turn often producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners.”
Two recent books, both “cries-de-coeur” in support of men, chronicle the male achievement gap and propose remedies – The War Against Boys, by American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, and Men on Strike, by psychologist Helen Smith.
Citing myriad studies, Sommers details how educational reforms and ideologies that deny gender differences have created hostile environments for rough-and-tumble boys, causing a serious academic achievement gap.
Out: structured, competitive, teacher-directed classrooms that best support boys’ learning and outlets for natural rambunctiousness, including conflict-oriented play like "Cops and Robbers." Last year, 7-year-old Coloradan Alex Smith was suspended for throwing an imaginary grenade at “bad guys.”
In: behavior-modifying drugs designed to make boys attentive and controlled.Distressingly, boy-enthralling, job-directed schools -- like Aviation High School in New York, which specializes in teaching and graduating at-risk kids -- are under assault because females are under-represented.
Sommers laments that “male-specific interventions” -- including masculine readings, single-sex learning opportunities, and teachers trained in boy-friendly pedagogy – “invites passionate and organized opposition” from feminist groups.
As young men disengage from school, alarming numbers are opting-out of post-secondary education, considered by Sommers the “passport to the American Dream.”
Women disproportionately possess these passports, having earned post-secondary degrees in the following percentages: associate’s (62), bachelor’s (58), master’s (60), doctorates (52).
Expanding on Sommers’ argument, Smith taps into her counseling experience to explain that by opting-out of family life, risk-averse men are responding rationally to social institutions that offer fewer rewards and more costs.
The pendulum has swung too far, Smith argues, when male victims of statutory rape and paternity fraud are made liable for child support, or when collegiate men are assumed sexual predators before proven innocent (see the Duke Lacrosse case).
America’s young men aren’t “Breaking Bad” drug dealers, but they are suffering bad breaks in a society rife with misguided policies.
The answer is not to “raise boys like we raise girls,” as Gloria Steinhem suggested, but to recognize that, while the sexes are equal, they’re naturally different – and that’s beautiful.
Every human being arrives on earth with unique gifts, and our short life’s mission is to realize them. Shouldn’t society’s goal be to enable this process?
After all, isn’t closing the gender gap the true definition of feminism?
