What's Happening to the Boys?

Last night Kelly and I had Kelly's principal and her husband over for dinner (Kelly works at a center for homeschoolers once a week). They are phenomenal people, thoughtful, full of various interests and the type of people who are interested in you even though you aren't nearly as interesting as they are.

One topic of discussion was the decreasing numbers of males at most colleges and universities. Boys are getting left behind in the public school systems at an alarming rate. In the very near future, UNC-Chapel Hill, my alma matter and where I work, will be 70% female. That's 70%. That's crazy.

To the cynical reader this might seem only just. After all the system been biased towards boys for much of American history. But it would seem that there's got to be some way to correct historical biases without mowing down a generation or two of boys.

Being the dad of a boy now, I wonder about his schooling experience. It is not just bowing to stereotype to say that boys are generally more "kinetic" than girls are. To sit at a desk and learn is not going to be as easy for boys as it normally will be for girls. I realize that there are exceptions to this, but on the whole these things are true.

In the African-American community, educated women struggle to find "marriage-able" men because at the college and university level the numbers are anywhere from 75% to 85% female. One student confessed to us at a conference on dating and sexuality that she and her friends didn't expect to get married the way that the white women did, and that was cause for bitterness and frustration. At the rate that boys in the white community are getting lost in the education system, there might not be all that much need for forgiveness in the not-to-distant future.