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Boys, continued

By Stephan Thernstrom
Posted Thursday, Dec. 10, 1998, at 5:56 PM ET

Dear Abby:

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I'm sure that Bill's description of the male subculture in suburban high schools is on the mark. But I'm not sure how much explanatory power it has, because I think it applies just as well to Battle Creek Central High as I remember it back in the early 50s. When my debate partner and I went off to Ann Arbor to appear in the finals of the state championship, we were not accompanied by hundreds of cheering classmates as we surely would have been if we had been playing for the state championship in football or basketball. It wasn't cool to be a bookworm then, and even less cool for a boy than for a girl. But males in those days nonetheless outnumbered females in college by two to one.

The vanishing male in higher education is a small part, and not the most troubling part, of a larger trend. Dramatic rises in teen suicides, homicides and other violent crimes, out-of-wedlock births, etc. Children are getting a lot less parenting than they used to, and the boys are the more damaged. That is, most of the pathologies that are increasingly afflicting teens affect boys a lot more than girls. Causal readers of the press may believe, for example, that teen-age girls are much more likely to commit suicide than boys. They do make more suicide attempts, but young males in fact are five times as likely to kill themselves. And males are far more likely to: get poor grades, be diagnosed as dyslexic, perform below grade-level, find themselves suspended from school or drugged with Ritalin, drop out of school, land in trouble with the law.

If women end up the more educated in the next generation, it would be a return to the nineteenth century picture, when men were much more likely to attend college, but since almost no one went to college, high school graduation was more important. And among high school graduates, women were a large majority. In the 1890s, for instance, the ratio was 65 females/35 males. That was because women needed a diploma to teach school and men with only eight years of school--like my father a generation later--had plenty of opportunities.

You may not be worried about the women without a Saturday night date at Vassar, but I'm worried about the future of men in our high-skilled society.

Steve