The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do | 
| Author: Peg Tyre
Publisher: Crown
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 6140
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0307381285
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.8210973
EAN: 9780307381286
ASIN: 0307381285
Publication Date: September 9, 2008
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Product Description
From the moment they step into the classroom, boys begin to struggle. They get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls; in elementary school, they’re diagnosed with learning disorders four times as often. By eighth grade huge numbers are reading below basic level. And by high school, they’re heavily outnumbered in AP classes and, save for the realm of athletics, show indifference to most extra curricular activities. Perhaps most alarmingly, boys now account for less than 43 percent of those enrolled in college, and the gap widens every semester!
The imbalance in higher education isn’t just a “boy problem,” though. Boys’ decreasing college attendance is bad news for girls, too, because ad missions officers seeking balanced student bodies pass over girls in favor of boys. The growing gender imbalance in education portends massive shifts for the next generation: how much they make and whom they marry.
Interviewing hundreds of parents, kids, teachers, and experts, award-winning journalist Peg Tyre drills below the eye-catching statistics to examine how the educational system is failing our sons. She explores the convergence of culprits, from the emphasis on high-stress academics in preschool and kindergarten, when most boys just can’t tolerate sitting still, to the outright banning of recess, from the demands of No Child Left Behind, with its rigid emphasis on test-taking, to the boy-unfriendly modern curriculum with its focus on writing about “feelings” and its purging of “high-action” reading material, from the rise of video gaming and schools’ unease with technology to the lack of male teachers as role models.
But this passionate, clearheaded book isn’t an exercise in finger-pointing. Tyre, the mother of two sons, offers notes from the front lines—the testimony of teachers and other school officials who are trying new techniques to motivate boys to learn again, one classroom at a time. The Trouble with Boys gives parents, educators, and anyone concerned about the state of education a manifesto for change—one we must undertake right away lest school be-come, for millions of boys, unalterably a “girl thing.”
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 If you have a boy in school, here's your next "must" read September 9, 2008
Jesse Kornbluth (New York)
33 out of 34 found this review helpful
Ever since women got the right to vote in 1920, they've been on the march. In less than a century, they've muscled their way into the same jobs traditionally reserved for men --- and they're already earning 70% of a man's salary for that work. Why, at this rate, they'll.....
Stop! Hold the presses! At this rate, girls will grow up to be a ruling class. And today's boys will grow up to work in auto-body shops (not that there's anything wrong with that) and dream of advancing to the manager slot at Burger King (ditto). Why? Because boys are falling behind in school --- and not just because they develop a little slower, read a little later, blah blah blah.
The system is failing boys, Peg Tyre says. A feminized curriculum, behavior norms that disadvantage boys, schools with few men on the faculty, a misguided belief that kids are ready to learn at an earlier age --- Tyre rolls out a laundry list of reasons.
I take Peg Tyre very seriously. First, because she's been there --- she is the mother of two boys. At Newsweek, where she covered education, she wrote a story about boys falling behind in school. It struck a nerve --- parents of boys tended to think only their lads were not doing well --- so she dug more and wrote this book.
I'm the father of a girl, and while I'd like her to have every advantage, what's happening now may not be good for anyone. Just one of Tyre's conclusions:
"At all but the very highest income levels, our country is bifurcating into two groups: educated women and less educated men. That division will have massive implications for the way our children live their lives --- their opportunities, their career choices, what they do, who they marry, how they raise their children, if they can afford to retire."
Strong stuff. You want to push back. Well, here are some facts:
-- Boys get expelled from preschool at nearly five times the rate of girls.
-- Boys are prescribed medicine for attention-related disorders at twice the rate of girls.
-- Kids no longer get to "play" in preschool. But "children who attend preschools that emphasize direct instruction experience more stress at school....[in one study] the boys who fell farthest behind girls were the ones who had attended the academic preschools."
-- Since 1992, girls have been taking more science and math courses and doing better in them than boys. "In most schools," Tyre writes, "classrooms where AP courses are taught look like a branch of a local sorority."
-- "39% of all first-graders get 20 minutes a day or less of recess....by fourth grade, nearly half of our students get less than twenty minutes a day." What replaces gym and music and art and free play? No Child Left Behind --- rote learning for a national test, arguably the most uncreative way of learning imaginable.
How does this play out? Boys revere sports, not school. And they pay the price of this sorry focus. The suicide rate for boys aged 5 to 14 is three times higher than the suicide rate for girls; between the ages of 15 to 19, it's four times greater.
Tyre steps back to explain why. Among her compelling observations: The mid-l980s saw a changed attitude about crime and safety. Parents wanted to protect their kids. Free, unsupervised play in public spaces --- the kind of unfettered free time that made childhood such fun for many of us --- became a thing of the past. More recently we have seen an expanding class of parents with money, and more competition to get kids into prestige colleges. Kids need to be "little Einsteins" --- so in a single year (2003 to 2004), sales of "learning" and "exploration" toys jumped 19%, to $510 million; in 2005, "Hooked on Phonics" sales doubled.
What do little boys need? "To get him ready for school, talk to him, rhyme with him, and sing with him," Tyre says. "After kicking the soccer ball, take him to the library for story hour." In other words: Boys need to be boys. And to be treated as boys.
And how will that happen?
Tyre couldn't be more blunt: It's your responsibility.
 "The Philip Roth School Of Early Education" September 19, 2008
Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States)
22 out of 35 found this review helpful
Peg Tyre's is a serious book which points out undeniable problems facing both boys and girls in contemporary American pre-schools, K-12 classes, and colleges as well. As has already been pointed out, she's done all parents who've felt just their own sons were having trouble in schools these days a real service. Emphasizing the unconscious, largely boy-unfriendly assumptions governing everything from the touchy-feely curriculum to the abolition of recess, she's provided evidence for needed change - if boys, as well as girls, are to succeed - that is unanswerable.
At the same time, I think her case is seriously undermined by her insufficient attention to the all-important role of the home and the society in shaping children BEFORE they attend any sort of school. She does speak favorably of the good old days when parents exercised a "laissez-faire" attitude toward afterschool play and children were free to carry on as they might. And what she correctly sees today, on the contrary, is excessive micromanagement by parents as manifested by play-dates and a push toward merely academic success at far too early an age. What I think she misses, however, is central, the new sort of laissez-faire marking contemporary parenting, the decision that children, boys especially, should be allowed to grow naturally, like plants, without any pruning or shaping, lest they be repressed by authority. Watch the little dears running through supermarkets, department stores, and restaurants with their playground voices at full volume and with nary a parental reprimand, and you'll get the idea. I read Peg Tyre as a devotee, since she quotes him, of what might be called the "Philip Roth School Of Early Education," a kind of stale compendium of leftover 60's cliches which privileges the liberation of natural impulse over the creative action of loving parents in shaping naturally rude, boisterous children into potentially civilized human beings - in other words, creating children already socialized to learn BEORE they enter any school.
Tyre quotes Roth at length:
"what boys like me needed to learn was not only how to express themselves with precision and acquire a more discerning response to words, but how to be rambunctious without being stupid, how not to be too well concealed or too well behaved, how to begin to release the masculine intensities from the institutional rectitude that intimidated the bright kids the most." While this may have been true of what Philip Roth needed, were he a goody-goody "model boy" of the old school, I question whether any instruction in rambunctiousness or release of masculine intensities from ...institutional rectitude, other than the blowing off of steam provided by recess, is what members of the current crop of boys need. Raised "naturally" as so many of them have been, they'd sooner kick a kindergarden teacher in the shins when thwarted than be intimitidated by her. Clearly, the merely "natural" child is not yet fit for education.
In short, a sentimental view of the nature of children and an ignoring of the civilizing essentials that parents should provide them with weakens Tyre's otherwise impressive book.
As a former boy this book is disturbing. September 12, 2008
Robert Busko (Waynesville, NC USA)
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
Peg Tyre has written a revealing and somewhat alarming book on the condition of boys in our schools and society. The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School and What Parents and Educators Can Do is insightful. Quite simply, in society's rush in the 1980s and 1990s to support our girls both socially and educationally we have apparently put the boys at a disadvantage.
Among the many points Tyre makes, boys mature on a variety of scales later than girls. In our rush to improve standardized test grades, activities such as recess have been virtually cut from the daily school activities. Boys are genetically designed to run, throw, explore, and test their abilities. In modern America, this has normally been achieved through physical play some of which occurred at school. Among other things, this allowed the boys to burn off that abundant energy. In our current educational environment the morning and afternoon recesses have been scrapped so that additional study time could be found. The normal physical play at lunch has also been eliminated in most schools. This one factor has aggravated boys' natural restlessness and caused problems with their ability to pay attention. Our response has been to drug them. Insane!
But Peg Tyre also points out that male educators are in woefully short supply as teachers during the elementary grades. Boys may lack positive male role models in their personal lives due to the national plague of absentee fathers and this is aggravated when male role models are missing at school.
Peg Tyre isn't the only game in town on this subject though her book is quite good. If you're interested in additional materials on the plight of boys, checkout the following:
Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leonard Sax
Bring Up Boys by James C. Dobson
The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens
Also, if you want information what little boys used to be interested in read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden.
An editorial point. This is an intelligent country in which most teachers and principals are dedicated to the proper education of their students. Certainly we can find a way to meet the needs of both boys and girls without short changing anyone.
Peace always.
A must read for parents of a school-age boy! September 10, 2008
FCollin
10 out of 14 found this review helpful
This book is well-written and researched and full of information that any parent would find useful. As a parent of a boy who had trouble in school I felt helpless and heartsick as I watched him struggle. I only wish this book had been available to me earlier to help me understand some of the possible causes and to reassure me that I was not alone and, as he got older, to reassure him that he was not incapable of success. My thanks to Ms. Tyre for her thoughtful and insightful work on this issue.
A Thought-Provoking Account of Educational Deficiencies September 16, 2008
Jan Peczkis (Chicago IL, USA)
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
As an experienced male elementary public-school teacher, I find this book outstanding, even if I disagree with some of it. Instead of repeating other reviewers, let's elaborate on some specific issues. To begin with, Tyre professes objectivity, and denies having any agenda (p. 13). She categorically rejects the notion that concerns about boys are a form of anti-feminism, or some kind of backlash against female successes.
Boys in general, not only poor and minority ones, undergo learning difficulties, and the problem has only gotten progressively worse in recent decades. The wealthy Wilmette Public School system, of suburban Chicago, is presented as a model of a school system that systematically investigated and remedied the unique problems of males.
Tyre is at times an iconoclast. She sees boys' playing with finger-guns as normal. She questions the high frequency of ADHD diagnoses, but doesn't go as far as suggesting that ADHD is nonexistent (p. 110). She deplores the replacement of traditional play-centered pre-K and K curriculum with academics, and other manifestations of the cram-school phenomenon. She doesn't believe that children, especially boys, are sufficiently developed for academics before 1st grade, and contends that children in play-based classes catch up with their academic-based counterparts by third grade (pp. 74-75).
Tyre is a strong advocate of phonics-based learning-to-read over the look-say method. Manipulatives should be emphasized. She recounts an experiment wherein the children were allowed to use magnetic letters which they could rearrange to make new sounds (p. 147). The children came out well ahead of grade level in reading and spelling. Astonishingly, the boys did better than the girls in this female stronghold.
Are little boys really more physically active than little girls, or is this a culturally-based perception? Attached sensors demonstrate that boys are, on average, more active than girls, but the difference in averages is not great. The extremes, however, are prominent. The most active individuals in class are almost always boys, and the least active ones are usually girls. (p. 68). This is largely hormonal. For instance, pregnant women with high testosterone levels are likely to give birth to girls that are tomboys.
Besides unfailingly providing rough-and-noisy recess, schools should allow boys to move around, and to stand at their desks, when they wish, instead of sitting all the time. Oversize pencils should be given to those with graphomotor challenges. Various other boy-friendly strategies are mentioned. These include providing mentors to boys, encouraging boys to do mathematical studies of sports players, letting boys solve math problems with classwide card games (p. 215), welcoming stories and writing that have grandiose, goofy, gory, and good-vs.-bad-guy themes, etc.
Tyre doesn't think that advances in the study of brain neurology translate into a direct understanding of the learning process. For instance, an increase of blood flow into a certain area of the brain can be interpreted in different ways. She recounts the onetime misunderstanding of brain function related to "left brain" and "right brain" activities.
Boys having male teachers don't generally do better than those with female ones. Also, Tyre doesn't think that, in general, all-male schools are superior for boys. However, boys in such schools appear to feel freer to pursue "feminine" activities such as art, music, etc.
Teacher attitudes and expectations count a lot. Tyre concludes: "Teachers who express hostility toward the natural way in which little boys express themselves--even if it is sometimes noisy, noncompliant, quirky, rambunctious, aggressive, and, yes, a little irritating--should be removed from classrooms (and if possible from the profession). To teach children, you have to love what they are. And teaching little boys is part of the job." (p. 284). Strong words!
The book ends with a list of references to professional journals and websites which illustrate and support her main points. These can be used for further study.
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