The war on boys: Have they been left behind? | FACTUAL FEMINIST — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Can America safely ignore the educational needs of boys just because they’re protected
2. 0:04by the patriarchy?
3. 0:06Well MSNBC seems to think so.
4. 0:13Coming up, we’ll explain why the underachievement of American boys is a ticking time bomb.
5. 0:23When I appeared on the MSNBC show The Cycle to discuss the plight of boys in school, the
6. 0:28hosts were having none of it.
7. 0:30The MSNBC skeptics are hardly alone in dismissing the plight of boys and young men.
8. 0:39Just recently, Vox, this new website started by the the former New York Times statistics
9. 0:44guru, Ezra Klein, it told its readers, well boys have always done worse than girls in
10. 0:48school, there’s nothing new to worry about here.
11. 0:51Well it failed to explain why it is that male deficits in education are far more serious
12. 0:56today than they were in the past.
13. 0:58I mean as recently as 30 years ago, a mediocre male student could get his high school diploma,
14. 1:04find a job, work hard and make it into the middle class.
15. 1:07Those days are gone forever.
16. 1:10Education beyond high school is the new ticket to the American Dream.
17. 1:15Today women earn 62% of Associates Degrees; 57 percent of BAs; 60 percent of Master’s
18. 1:21Degrees; and 52 percent of doctorates.
19. 1:23Well what’s in store for a minimally educated young man?
20. 1:27The wages of men with only a high school diploma have declined 47 percent since 1969.
21. 1:36The British, Canadians and Austalians, they’re struggling with a boy gap--and they are trying
22. 1:40desperately to address it.
23. 1:42‘Cause they view widespread underachievement of males as a threat to their national economy.
24. 1:48Why is this happening to boys?
25. 1:50What explains the college gap?
26. 1:52Well one of the best sources for insight about students is the University of Michigan Monitoring
27. 1:57the Future survey.
28. 1:59Since 1975 the Michigan researchers have been studying large, national samples of students.
29. 2:05Now they found that in the nineteen-seventies and 80s, nearly the same number of top male
30. 2:09and female students had very high aspirations, they planned to be pursuing post graduate
31. 2:14degrees in fields like law, medicine, science, college teaching.
32. 2:17It was about 14% of boys and girls.
33. 2:21Well by the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared to only 16 percent
34. 2:27of boys.
35. 2:29Now why isn’t there a national effort to address this ambition gap?
36. 2:33Congress passed legislation characterizing girls as an underserved population.
37. 2:37There were hundreds of millions of dollars made available to improve girls self esteem,
38. 2:42their math and science achievement.
39. 2:44Well where are the efforts for boys?
40. 2:48Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, has yet to comment on male underachievement,
41. 2:52but he’s not idle on the gender gap front.
42. 2:55He made a cameo appearance, along with Beyoncé, in Sheryl Sandberg’s Girl Power/Ban Bossy
43. 3:00video where he encouraged girls to be ambitious.
44. 3:03The Factual Feminist is disappointed.
45. 3:08MSNBC and the women’s groups are known to be polemical—but the well-being of boys
46. 3:14is too important for television antics and gender war hijinks.
47. 3:19As for Secretary Duncan, his apparent indifference to the boy gap is alarming.
48. 3:24His Department is the federal agency responsible for the educational well-being of the nation’s
49. 3:31children--girls and boys.
50. 3:34Well what do we need to do to get American boys interested in education again?
51. 3:37Please leave your thoughts in the comments, subscribe to the video, follow me on Twitter.
52. 3:43Thank you for watching the Factual Feminist.