Campers at Falling Creek Camp, set in a secluded mountaintop cove near the town of Tuxedo in Western North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains. Falling Creek's 150-acre campus is surrounded by hundreds of acres of privately owned lush forest and beautiful wilderness.
(3 of 4)
And that can be done. A generation of enlightened teaching and robust encouragement has awakened American girls to the need for higher education. Women now outnumber men in college by a ratio of 4 to 3, and admissions officers at liberal-arts colleges are struggling to find enough males to keep their classes close to gender parity. "We've done wonderfully with girls. Now let's do the same for boys," says Gurian. One way to start might be to gear advanced training to male-dominated occupations--already the case in many female-oriented fields. Schoolteachers and librarians (roughly 70% female) must go to college, but firefighters and police officers (pushing 90% male)? Not necessarily. Top executive secretaries are college educated; top carpenters may not be.
About the only scale on which today's boys are faring dramatically worse than the boys of my era is the bathroom scale. When I was in high school in the late 1970s, roughly 1 boy in 20 was obese; today 1 boy in 5 is.
My favorite statistic seemed to sum up all the others: fewer boys today are deadbeats. The percentage of young men between 16 and 19 who neither work nor attend school has fallen by about a quarter since 1984. The greatest gains in this category have been made by black youths. In 1984, 1 out of 3 young black men ages 18 and 19 were neither in school nor working. That proportion has been cut almost in half, to fewer than 1 in 5.
Today's boys may wear their pants too damned baggy and go around with iPod buds in their ears. They know everything about Xbox 360 and nothing about paper routes. I doubt that they slog to school through deep snow as I recall doing back before the globe warmed up. But judging from the numbers, they are pulling themselves up from the handbasket to hell.
SO WHERE DID WE GO RIGHT?
Unfortunately, it's one thing to observe human behavior--count the crime reports and the teen births and the diplomas awarded and so on--but quite another to explain it. Popular science and the best-seller lists skip eagerly from one theory to the next, lingering with delight on the most provocative if not always the most plausible. A recent paper suggested that falling crime rates can be explained almost entirely by reduced lead exposure in childhood. Which was odd, because last year economist Steven Levitt's best seller Freakonomics chalked up the improvement to legalized abortion, which, he theorized, cut the number of unwanted children prone to wind up as criminals.
Or take the teen-pregnancy numbers. It's not enough to credit the virtues of responsibility and better sex education. Something racier is desired. According to some writers, fewer teens are getting pregnant because they've all switched to oral sex. Or maybe the phenomenon is due to a still unexplained decline in sperm counts.
But before we go dizzy on cleverness, let's pull out Occam's razor and consider a simple possibility: maybe our boys are doing better because we're paying them more attention. We're providing for them better; the proportion of children living in poverty is down roughly 2% from a spike in 1993. And we're giving them more time. Parents--both fathers and mothers--are reordering their priorities to focus on caring for their kids. Several studies confirm this. Sociologists at the University of Michigan have tracked a sharp increase in the amount of time men spend with their children since the 1970s. Another long-range survey, reported by University of Maryland researchers, has asked parents since the 1960s to keep detailed diaries of their daily activities. In 1965 child-focused care occupied about 13 hours per week, the vast majority of it done by moms. By 1985 that had dropped to 11 hours per week as moms entered the workforce. The 2005 study found parents spending 20 hours a week focused on their kids--by far the highest number in the history of the survey. Both moms and dads had dramatically shifted their energies toward their kids.
Are there risks of overparenting boys? Sure. And here's where the success of The Dangerous Book gets interesting, because it suggests that as parents spend more time with their sons, we may be reconnecting with the fact that the differences between boys and girls need not be threatening and that not all the lore of the past about how to raise boys was wrong.
Gregory Hodge is a good example of this return to tradition. He is principal at the Frederick Douglass Academy, a public school in Harlem. His school was one of three recently honored by the Schott Foundation for excellence in educating black male students--the most troubled cohort but also the group making the greatest progress in many areas. Hodge told me that when he arrived at the combination middle school and high school 11 years ago, the academy was already a great success--but the student body was 80% female. The new principal made it his business to recruit more boys. Today, of the academy's 1,450 mostly poor and minority students, half are male. Yet the dropout rate remains virtually zero, and this year (like most years) every member of the senior class graduated and was college-bound. Every one.
Hodge says the secret is to reach boys before they get into trouble--he uses the academy's basketball facilities to lure youngsters still in grade school. Once you have their attention, you must show them a world of possibilities that you genuinely believe they can achieve. "Young people are looking for validation," he says. "You are important. You will be successful. We don't talk about 'if' you go to college. Around here it's 'when' you go to college."
Frederick Douglass Academy students adhere to a strict dress code and accept rigid discipline. Many of them virtually live at the school, even on Saturdays, doing hours of homework, attending required tutorials if they lag behind, participating in dozens of sports and activities, from basketball to lacrosse and ballet to botany. "Everything a private school would offer a rich kid," Hodge explains. But within this highly structured setting, the school recognizes that many boys need room to learn in their own way. "Some of the kids are hardheaded," Hodge says in a gravelly Bronx roar. "That's what makes a boy. They've gotta experiment, learn the hard way that his head won't break concrete. Male students tend to want to find things out for themselves--so why don't you use that as a teacher?
"I once had about 15 boys very close to dropping out," the principal continues. "They weren't into sports. I had to find something for them to get into. Finally I made a recording studio for the little meatheads, and they ran with that. All of them made it through to graduation. I'll try anything--dance, chess, hydroponics, robotics--anything to let these kids know that this is a world they can fit into, where they can be successful."
THE BASICS OF BOYHOOD