War on Boys | 5 Minute Video

What ever happened to letting “boys be boys?“ Take these two cases: In one, a seven-year-old boy was sent home for nibbling a Pop Tart into a gun. In another, a teacher was so alarmed by a picture drawn by a student (of a sword fight), that the boy’s parents were summoned in for a conference. In short, boys in America’s schools are routinely punished for being active, competitive, and restless. In other words, boys can no longer be boys. Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, explains how we can change this. 🚨 PragerU is experiencing severe censorship on Big Tech platforms. Go to to watch our videos free from censorship! SUBSCRIBE 👉 📲 Take PragerU videos with you everywhere you go. Download our free mobile app! Download for Apple iOS ➡ Download for Android ➡ 📳 Join PragerU’s text list! SHOP! 🛒 Love PragerU? Visit our store today! Script: Being a normal boy is a serious liability in today’s classroom. Boys tend to be disorganized and restless. Some have even been known to be noisy and hard to manage. Sound like any boy you know? But increasingly, our schools have little patience for what only a couple of decades ago would have been described as “boyishness.” As psychologist Michael Thompson has aptly observed: “Girls behavior is the gold standard in schools. Boys are treated like defective girls.” As a result, these “defective girls” are not faring well academically. Compared with girls, boys earn lower grades, win fewer honors they’re are far less likely to go to college. Boys are languishing academically, while girls are prospering. In an ever more knowledge-based economy, this is not a recipe for a successful society. We need to start thinking about how we can make our grade school classrooms more boy-friendly. Well, here are four reforms that would make a very good start. 1. Turn boys into readers. In all age groups, across all ethnic lines, boys score lower than girls on national reading tests. Good reading skills -- need I say? -- are critical to academic and workplace success. A major study in the UK discovered, not surprisingly, that girls prefer fiction, magazines, and poetry while boys prefer comics and non-fiction. Boys whose eyes glaze over if forced to read Little House on the Prairie may be riveted by the Guinness Book of Records. Boys will read if given materials that interest them. If you’re looking for suggestions for books that have proved irresistible to boys go to . 2. Inspire the male imagination. Celebrated writing instructor Ralph Fletcher contends that too many teachers take what is called “the confessional poet” as the classroom ideal. Personal narratives full of emotions and self-disclosure -- these are stories girls commonly write -- and these are prized; whereas action stories describing, say, a skateboard competition or a monster devouring a city, these are not. I recently read about a third-grader in Southern California named Justin who loved science-fiction, pirates, and battles. An alarmed teacher summoned his parents to school to discuss the picture the 8-year-old had drawn of a sword fight -- which included several decapitated heads. The teacher expressed grave “concern” about Justin’s “values.” The boy’s father was astonished, not by his son’s drawing which to him was typical boy stuff, but by the teacher’s overwrought -- and female-centered -- reaction. If boys are constantly subject to disapproval for their interests and enthusiasms they are likely to become disengaged and lag further behind. Our schools need to work with, not against, the kinetic imaginations of boys. For the complete script, visit