Let boys become men: The need for all-male education - Anthony Esolen, New English Review, June 2018
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpag ... _id=189272
Boys now make up only about forty percent of college students, and that is just to scratch the surface of their troubles. They drop out far more often than their sisters do. They commit suicide more often. They break the law and are thrown into prison more often. They do every illegal thing you can name more often, except for shoplifting and prostituting themselves. But why? They are as intelligent as their sisters. They are if anything bolder than their sisters, as witness their propensity to crime; for the capacity, let us say, to build bridges never conceived before is akin to the capacity to rob banks never robbed before. The dynamism may be directed to good as well as to evil. They come from the same families as their sisters, they have gone to the same mostly lousy schools, they have lived in the same subdivisions or apartments or mansions or farm houses. What explains their colossal failure?
We are talking about failure here, and not about girlish success. It is not as if the world has been set afire by our college graduates, who very seldom can write three sensible and grammatical sentences in a row, who might be able to parrot the slogans of gender theory but cannot identify Garibaldi or Catherine de Medici, and whose actual performance in the arts is generally beneath embarrassment. I have not the time here to argue that the age of great women novelists is largely past, or that the greatest woman poet is still either Sappho or Emily Dickinson, those artists of the lyrical and terse. I will say that civilization seems to have gained nothing at all by feminism, if you take into account every Bernini, Bach, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Newman, and Planck burnt out in the bud; because that is what is happening to boys, en masse. If I hear of a boy who has failed out of high school, I can make no assumptions as to his intelligence; he may be a genius. Certainly, the capacity to do well in our high schools, such as they are, is a strong indication against genius, and in favor of a neat and happy willingness to please, to do what is always socially acceptable, however that is defined from place to place and from time to time.
The reader will here challenge me to suggest why boys should be lagging behind their sisters—and I do not speak metaphorically there; they lag behind their sisters. Let me do so right now. ...
