A recent edition of a local newspaper contained a photograph of some top scholarship winners at Tuscola High School in Haywood County. These students certainly deserve our applause, yet it struck me that of the fifteen students twelve were young women, while only three were young men. According to Christina Hoff Sommers, it is our young men who equally need our help.
Young men living in poverty are far more likely to fail than their female counterparts.
Young men of all social spectra lag behind young women in reading and writing. First, it demolishes the myth that girls are currently suffering some sort of academic failure on account of attention paid to boys. Anyone who has taught in public school would, I think, agree that boys are the ones who struggle more academically, who find themselves in trouble, who cause far more disciplinary problems. Statistics on this point strengthen the author's argument. In 1997, she tells us, college full-time enrollments were 45 percent male and 55 percent female.