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The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do

Peg Tyre · 2 HN comments
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Amazon Summary
From the moment they step into the classroom, boys begin to struggle. They get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls; in elementary school, they’re diagnosed with learning disorders four times as often. By eighth grade huge numbers are reading below basic level. And by high school, they’re heavily outnumbered in AP classes and, save for the realm of athletics, show indifference to most extra­curricular activities. Perhaps most alarmingly, boys now account for less than 43 percent of those enrolled in college, and the gap widens every semester! The imbalance in higher education isn’t just a “boy problem,” though. Boys’ decreasing college attendance is bad news for girls, too, because ad­missions officers seeking balanced student bodies pass over girls in favor of boys. The growing gender imbalance in education portends massive shifts for the next generation: how much they make and whom they marry. Interviewing hundreds of parents, kids, teachers, and experts, award-winning journalist Peg Tyre drills below the eye-catching statistics to examine how the educational system is failing our sons. She explores the convergence of culprits, from the emphasis on high-stress academics in preschool and kindergarten, when most boys just can’t tolerate sitting still, to the outright banning of recess, from the demands of No Child Left Behind, with its rigid emphasis on test-taking, to the boy-unfriendly modern curriculum with its focus on writing about “feelings” and its purging of “high-action” reading material, from the rise of video gaming and schools’ unease with technology to the lack of male teachers as role models. But this passionate, clearheaded book isn’t an exercise in finger-pointing. Tyre, the mother of two sons, offers notes from the front lines—the testimony of teachers and other school officials who are trying new techniques to motivate boys to learn again, one classroom at a time. The Trouble with Boys gives parents, educators, and anyone concerned about the state of education a manifesto for change—one we must undertake right away lest school be-come, for millions of boys, unalterably a “girl thing.”
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

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> I think it's a pretty poorly kept open secret

There are lots of book about this. E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ...

JohnWhigham
Right, but nothing gets done about it. Bring up issues that affect only boys/men nowadays in a public sphere, and you get reflexively labelled as sexist for even having the fucking audacity for caring. This cancerous mentality shows no signs of abating, and it's going to have disastrous consequences in subsequent decades.
Peg Tyre wrote the classic book on this 10 years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ...

It hasn't gotten a huge amount of follow-up traction in schools though.

Also The New Jim Crow for a racial perspective that hits black men's employment prospects pretty hard.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblind...

BTW for folks who are concerned that feminist or women don't care about boys and men, these two leasing books are books written by women about the abuse boys and men face.

ShadowFaxSam
Always appreciate different news sources and ways to further educate myself.

>It depends on the job. What you say applies mainly to Twitter-empowered employees at consumer-facing tech companies.

It may depend on the job, one of them falls into the consumer facing tech company bucket (marketing).

However my other job was an analyst role at a Financial Services company which you typically expect to be male dominated and where you might expect this sex discrimination to occur.

It could have been the specific company I worked for (small sample size), but I found it to be a fair and equal opportunity hiring/promoting process at least for those early on in their career.

throwawayyx96
You worked as a financial analyst but yet don't seem to grasp the monumental difference between "women earn 80 percent less than men", which you cited above as the common narrative, and "women earn 80 percent of what men earn" or "women earn 20 percent less than men", which are two accurate descriptions of the common narrative.
ShadowFaxSam
I have to laugh at this because I definitely noticed my error after I posted this. I was waiting for someone to comment on the mathematical error.

Thank you, yes I understand how percentages work. Tip of the hat to you.

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