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

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
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.”

Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

If you have a boy in school, here's your next "must" read September 9, 2008
33 out of 34 found this review helpful

Ever since women got the right to vote in 1920, they've been on the march. In less than a century, they've muscled their way into the same jobs traditionally reserved for men --- and they're already earning 70% of a man's salary for that work. Why, at this rate, they'll.....

Stop! Hold the presses! At this rate, girls will grow up to be a ruling class. And today's boys will grow up to work in auto-body shops (not that there's anything wrong with that) and dream of advancing to the manager slot at Burger King (ditto). Why? Because boys are falling behind in school --- and not just because they develop a little slower, read a little later, blah blah blah.

The system is failing boys, Peg Tyre says. A feminized curriculum, behavior norms that disadvantage boys, schools with few men on the faculty, a misguided belief that kids are ready to learn at an earlier age --- Tyre rolls out a laundry list of reasons.

I take Peg Tyre very seriously. First, because she's been there --- she is the mother of two boys. At Newsweek, where she covered education, she wrote a story about boys falling behind in school. It struck a nerve --- parents of boys tended to think only their lads were not doing well --- so she dug more and wrote this book.

I'm the father of a girl, and while I'd like her to have every advantage, what's happening now may not be good for anyone. Just one of Tyre's conclusions:

"At all but the very highest income levels, our country is bifurcating into two groups: educated women and less educated men. That division will have massive implications for the way our children live their lives --- their opportunities, their career choices, what they do, who they marry, how they raise their children, if they can afford to retire."

Strong stuff. You want to push back. Well, here are some facts:

-- Boys get expelled from preschool at nearly five times the rate of girls.

-- Boys are prescribed medicine for attention-related disorders at twice the rate of girls.

-- Kids no longer get to "play" in preschool. But "children who attend preschools that emphasize direct instruction experience more stress at school....[in one study] the boys who fell farthest behind girls were the ones who had attended the academic preschools."

-- Since 1992, girls have been taking more science and math courses and doing better in them than boys. "In most schools," Tyre writes, "classrooms where AP courses are taught look like a branch of a local sorority."

-- "39% of all first-graders get 20 minutes a day or less of recess....by fourth grade, nearly half of our students get less than twenty minutes a day." What replaces gym and music and art and free play? No Child Left Behind --- rote learning for a national test, arguably the most uncreative way of learning imaginable.

How does this play out? Boys revere sports, not school. And they pay the price of this sorry focus. The suicide rate for boys aged 5 to 14 is three times higher than the suicide rate for girls; between the ages of 15 to 19, it's four times greater.

Tyre steps back to explain why. Among her compelling observations: The mid-l980s saw a changed attitude about crime and safety. Parents wanted to protect their kids. Free, unsupervised play in public spaces --- the kind of unfettered free time that made childhood such fun for many of us --- became a thing of the past. More recently we have seen an expanding class of parents with money, and more competition to get kids into prestige colleges. Kids need to be "little Einsteins" --- so in a single year (2003 to 2004), sales of "learning" and "exploration" toys jumped 19%, to $510 million; in 2005, "Hooked on Phonics" sales doubled.

What do little boys need? "To get him ready for school, talk to him, rhyme with him, and sing with him," Tyre says. "After kicking the soccer ball, take him to the library for story hour." In other words: Boys need to be boys. And to be treated as boys.

And how will that happen?

Tyre couldn't be more blunt: It's your responsibility.

3 out of 5 stars

"The Philip Roth School Of Early Education" September 19, 2008
22 out of 35 found this review helpful

Peg Tyre's is a serious book which points out undeniable problems facing both boys and girls in contemporary American pre-schools, K-12 classes, and colleges as well. As has already been pointed out, she's done all parents who've felt just their own sons were having trouble in schools these days a real service. Emphasizing the unconscious, largely boy-unfriendly assumptions governing everything from the touchy-feely curriculum to the abolition of recess, she's provided evidence for needed change - if boys, as well as girls, are to succeed - that is unanswerable.

At the same time, I think her case is seriously undermined by her insufficient attention to the all-important role of the home and the society in shaping children BEFORE they attend any sort of school. She does speak favorably of the good old days when parents exercised a "laissez-faire" attitude toward afterschool play and children were free to carry on as they might. And what she correctly sees today, on the contrary, is excessive micromanagement by parents as manifested by play-dates and a push toward merely academic success at far too early an age. What I think she misses, however, is central, the new sort of laissez-faire marking contemporary parenting, the decision that children, boys especially, should be allowed to grow naturally, like plants, without any pruning or shaping, lest they be repressed by authority. Watch the little dears running through supermarkets, department stores, and restaurants with their playground voices at full volume and with nary a parental reprimand, and you'll get the idea. I read Peg Tyre as a devotee, since she quotes him, of what might be called the "Philip Roth School Of Early Education," a kind of stale compendium of leftover 60's cliches which privileges the liberation of natural impulse over the creative action of loving parents in shaping naturally rude, boisterous children into potentially civilized human beings - in other words, creating children already socialized to learn BEORE they enter any school.
Tyre quotes Roth at length:
"what boys like me needed to learn was not only how to express themselves with precision and acquire a more discerning response to words, but how to be rambunctious without being stupid, how not to be too well concealed or too well behaved, how to begin to release the masculine intensities from the institutional rectitude that intimidated the bright kids the most." While this may have been true of what Philip Roth needed, were he a goody-goody "model boy" of the old school, I question whether any instruction in rambunctiousness or release of masculine intensities from ...institutional rectitude, other than the blowing off of steam provided by recess, is what members of the current crop of boys need. Raised "naturally" as so many of them have been, they'd sooner kick a kindergarden teacher in the shins when thwarted than be intimitidated by her. Clearly, the merely "natural" child is not yet fit for education.

In short, a sentimental view of the nature of children and an ignoring of the civilizing essentials that parents should provide them with weakens Tyre's otherwise impressive book.

5 out of 5 stars

As a former boy this book is disturbing. September 12, 2008
14 out of 16 found this review helpful

Peg Tyre has written a revealing and somewhat alarming book on the condition of boys in our schools and society. The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School and What Parents and Educators Can Do is insightful. Quite simply, in society's rush in the 1980s and 1990s to support our girls both socially and educationally we have apparently put the boys at a disadvantage.

Among the many points Tyre makes, boys mature on a variety of scales later than girls. In our rush to improve standardized test grades, activities such as recess have been virtually cut from the daily school activities. Boys are genetically designed to run, throw, explore, and test their abilities. In modern America, this has normally been achieved through physical play some of which occurred at school. Among other things, this allowed the boys to burn off that abundant energy. In our current educational environment the morning and afternoon recesses have been scrapped so that additional study time could be found. The normal physical play at lunch has also been eliminated in most schools. This one factor has aggravated boys' natural restlessness and caused problems with their ability to pay attention. Our response has been to drug them. Insane!

But Peg Tyre also points out that male educators are in woefully short supply as teachers during the elementary grades. Boys may lack positive male role models in their personal lives due to the national plague of absentee fathers and this is aggravated when male role models are missing at school.

Peg Tyre isn't the only game in town on this subject though her book is quite good. If you're interested in additional materials on the plight of boys, checkout the following:

Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leonard Sax
Bring Up Boys by James C. Dobson
The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens

Also, if you want information what little boys used to be interested in read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden.

An editorial point. This is an intelligent country in which most teachers and principals are dedicated to the proper education of their students. Certainly we can find a way to meet the needs of both boys and girls without short changing anyone.

Peace always.

5 out of 5 stars

A must read for parents of a school-age boy! September 10, 2008
10 out of 14 found this review helpful

This book is well-written and researched and full of information that any parent would find useful. As a parent of a boy who had trouble in school I felt helpless and heartsick as I watched him struggle. I only wish this book had been available to me earlier to help me understand some of the possible causes and to reassure me that I was not alone and, as he got older, to reassure him that he was not incapable of success. My thanks to Ms. Tyre for her thoughtful and insightful work on this issue.

1 out of 5 stars

The Trouble With Boys September 11, 2008
6 out of 47 found this review helpful

...written by a girl. Interesting.
This book has merit in that it simply brings the issue to light. Schools have been dominated by intolerant, frustated female teachers for far too long, who quickly label most boys as having ADD or ADHD...and then they're drugged up with prescription meds to "make" them behave. What we need are more MALE teachers to relate to our boys, not drugs.
Another issue is that in the "Leave It To Beaver" type of family, the dad is at work, which leaves the mom at home, or the mom picks them up from school, takes them to soccer/football practice, etc. If you want less trouble with boys, a GOOD father (or father figure) should be active in a boy's life. Unfortunately, because there seems to be a plethora of abusive, absent or deadbeat fathers, we have a whole generation of angry boys on our hands, which become the responsibility of single moms and...you guessed it...female teachers to teach them.
My son is a US Marine now, serving in Iraq. He went into bootcamp a boy and came out a man. The Marines did something I could have never done...gave him a good dose of his own angry self, and instilled RESPECT into him. If you ask me, what ALL students - girls AND boys - need is a semester of some sort of boot camp/military school during their freshman year. The lack of respect that plagues the youth of today is incredible. They need a good dose of their own mouthy selves - and a good butt-kicking by someone OTHER than their parents!

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