Posted in 52 Books in 52 Weeks 2009
The subtitle of this book is "The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men" and it is a fascinating read! What are the five factors he identifies?
1. Changes in schools
One of the major school changes he considers is the academic emphasis of kindergarten. We as a society just should not be expecting five year old boys to sit still and do academic work. My son is currently homeschooling kindergarten, and we normally work from one to two hours depending on his attention span and other factors. Normally he is capable of sitting during this time, but if he needs to get up and jump or run around, I just let him. There's certainly no way he could sit for a whole school day. Homeschooling your sons is an obvious solution for many of the school changes Dr. Sax talks about, but it is never mentioned.
2. Video games
Dr. Sax does not argue that video games are all bad. He does say that for a segment of the male population, they are increasingly taking the place of real life. It's not so much that the games are bad, it's that they are spending a lot of time playing games instead of doing anything real. In most of life, being able to press a button .002 seconds faster isn't that helpful.
3. Medications for ADHD
In this chapter, he explores the way that medication is being prescribed for many boys and the consequences it can have on them. Medicating boys so they can sit still should not be an option in this society. However, he is not completely anti-medication, only when it's not really necessary. My personal experience with this made an impression on me. I had a friend whose son was in school, and it was a struggle to get him to do his work, but she helped him after school. He was just a normal boy in my opinion, and I saw him several times a week, since he was good friends with my son. Then their family situation changed and my friend could not work with him so much. I hadn't seen them in a few weeks when I went to pick him up after school so he could play with Robert. The whole drive home he just sat in my car like a zombie. I asked him several times if something was wrong. He said no. I thought, "Something awful must have happened at school!" When my friend arrived several hours later to pick him up, I told her that I thought he was upset and that something must have happened. That's when I found out that he was now being medicated. It seemed to me like a situation where he was getting the short end of the stick and being medicated so he would fit in better with the adults' reality. I also find it scary that these medications can stunt growth so much!
4. Endocrine disruptors
This part is all about hormones and plastics in the environment and the damage they are doing to our children. I'll sum it up by saying: bottled water is evil!
5. Lack of a path to manhood in American culture
Sax points out that American society has no "manhood ritual" that designates when a boy has become a man in society. Since we lack this, dangerous ones are being formed, such as gang initiation rituals.
This book is an easy read and presents lots of interesting information. The author, who is also the founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, not surprisingly is very much in favor of all girls' schools and all boys' schools, or at least classrooms. I think they could be very beneficial, because then boys and girls aren't too busy trying to impress each other. He describes a boys' school where each boy is assigned "Blue Team" or "White Team" when they enter, and then everything is a competition between the teams for the whole school year. I told Robert about if and he said it sounded really cool! Girls, however, don't usually respond well to that kind of competition.
Of course, there's always homeschooling too to circumvent many of these issues. It would be nice if Dr. Sax mentioned it!
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