Academic institutions have been slow to catch up to what we in the grass roots have known for decades:  boys are struggling in schools, and have been for about 40 years.  While girls struggle with targeted issues, boys struggle across the board.  Because our academic environments are one of the reasons they struggle (they generally refuse to provide training in the male and female brain in academic certification, college, or grad school), academe avoids dealing with core issues facing our nation’s sons.

Starting many years ago I joined experts in calling on universities and the American Psychological Association to step up to the plate–to push past their feminaphobia and biophobia and study what is really happening to our boys today.   Generally, negative responses from academe and social media that I receive fit a range of cliches, from “toxic masculinity” to “boys are privileged except for boys of color” to “boys deserve our help only if they toss off old gender stereotypes.”   Lately, though, there has been a bit of increased academic interest in the truth.

Some academics are ready to study boys as boys are, as the article today indicates.  There is a creeping recognition in a few academic circles that the fifty year old gender feminist vision, of males as victors or villains, and females as victims, might be growing stale.

Unfortunately, though, when you read the link, below, (a cover story in the APA Monitor discussing the APA task force), you’ll still see a lot of the cliches.  Unfortunately, too, you’ll see the biophobia and feminaphobia I discussed in my two blog posts (Boys, A Rescue Plan, Parts I and II–housed now on the News pages of www.gurianinstitute.com).  The Task Force featured in the article mainly uses gender sociology, a very limited approach to sex and gender.  It also provides amorphous thinking that is easily politicized.  Specifically missing in the task force report is the most important thing it should be reporting, neurobiology and the mismatch of the male brain with contemporary school systems.

GI has shown empirically over the last 25 years that the only consistent solution of boys’ issues in school is teacher/school culture training in how boys learn, grow, behave, succeed, and nurture.  As long as the academic world avoids the primal interface of male biology and school systems, it will sorely limit how it helps the systems it claims to study.  Still, I would not point you to this article if it did not have worth as a step in the right direction.   Please click the link below to read the whole APA story or copy it into your browser.

Boys are facing key challenges in school. An APA task force is spotlighting the specific issues and recommending evidence-based ways to enact swift change

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/04/boys-school-challenges-recommendations

–Michael Gurian