Gender Gap In High School

For decades liberals have been saying that girls are shortchanged in school. And they have forced us to implement programs of various kinds to discriminate in favor of girls.

But Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters beg to differ. The problem in education is not girl proficiency but sub-par performance from boys. While

72 percent of female students graduate from high school, only 65 percent of male students earned a diploma.

Well, that�s not too bad, you say. But when you unpack the results by race, as all progressives like to do, the results become alarming.

The difference in graduation rates between females and males was about five-percentage points for white students and only 3 percentage points for Asian students. Among Hispanic and black female students the graduation rates are 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively, compared to 49 percent for Hispanic males and 48 percent for black males. Thus, the gender gap is twice as large for minority students as for white students.

So why is this, liberals? Institutional sexism? Institutional racism? How could this be? Schools in minority areas are run by and for liberals. How could there be racism and sexism there?

There is probably something dark and menacing here. But it probably isn�t racism or sexism. Understandably, liberals really don�t want to look at it too closely. It is beginning to look as thought liberals have been wrong about everything, and especially wrong about education.

Sooner or later we are going to have to admit that the progressive enthusiasm for helping the marginalized has had the opposite effect. People must not be coddled and pushed around. They must learn to make it on their own with minimal help from the helping professions and maximum effort of their own.

But that would be an America with a lot less jobs for liberals. And we can�t have that, can we?

Still, liberals can count one success. They set out to favor girls over boys in the education system, and the result is now in. Girls now do much better than boys in school. But isn�t that discriminatory?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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