Men

Ross Douthat notes the recent deaths of Ted Kaczynski, Silvio Berlusconi, and Cormac McCarthy with a meditation on men in the contemporary world (NY Times):

There is a lot of talk lately about a crisis of manhood, manifest in statistics showing young men falling behind young women in various indicators of education and ambition, answered from the left by therapeutic attempts to detoxify masculinity and from the right by promises of masculine revival. The root of the problem seems clear enough, even if the solutions are contested: The things that men are most adapted for (or socialized for, if you prefer that narrative) are valued less, sometimes much less, in the peacetime of a postindustrial civilization than in most of the human past.

In a phrase, when we talk about traditional modes of manhood, we’re often talking about mastery through physical strength and the capacity for violence. That kind of mastery will always have some value, but it had more value in 1370 than 1870, and more in 1870 than it does today. And the excess, the superfluity, must therefore be repressed, tamed or somehow educated away.

I raise this because this is now a commonplace view in our society, and it is always worth asking, every once in a while, whether our commonplaces are true.

I would start with some a basic corrections. First, violence and hard labor are not the traditional role for all men, but specifically for young men; consider the image brought to your mind by the words "tribal elder."

Second, the traditional dichotomy between men's and women's work is only partly about strength; much of it is about whether the work is done within the home or outside it. Women's work was traditionally constrained to what they could do while caring for babies or small children, which meant staying close to home. Work that involved being away from home, especially for long periods – hunting, fishing, lumbering, trading – was done by men. There are plenty of societies in which all farming is done by women, even when it involves hard labor like digging up cassava roots. Hunting with a bow or blowgun, by contrast, is often more about stealth than strength.

Another idea you see a lot these days is that women have an advantage in the modern workplace because they are more agreeable and therefore have better interpersonal skills. But to that I say that being agreeable is just one mode of interaction, and being aggressive also has advantages in a lot of work situations: negotiation, high pressure sales, boot camp-style training, climbing the corporate ladder.

I could go on for a while, but let me make just one more point: ever since we started making machines, all the way back to the first wheeled carts, the mechanical has mainly been the province of men.

All of that is to say that I am not convinced that teenage boys are lagging in school because of a genetic program that says they should be out hunting buffalo. I think we need to look at much narrower and more specific disconnects. I don't want to sound dogmatic about anything I am going to say on this topic, because I regard it all as complex and confusing. But I have toyed with a few ideas.

I think the problem boys have with school is specifically about school as we now organize it. First, school is all about sitting still, and sitting still is certainly torture for many boys. (And not a few girls.) It also tends to be abstract, and many boys have a particularly preference for the concrete. And no, it is not true that the modern workplace demands a lot of abstract thinking skills; the biggest problem I and my more intellectual work friends have had with corporate life is that it demands an obsession with concrete details and waves off anything that might pass for real thought. My own work involves a lot of writing, but I work all the time with highly paid engineers and managers who can barely write a sentence, let alone a report. There are in fact many successful CEOs and corporate founders who are so dyslexic they have trouble reading. So I wonder if maybe a different way of organizing school might help more boys succeed at it.

But the thing that keeps looming up in my mind is the question of rewards. What if boys do worse in school, and young men worse in the workplace, because they don't see the point? Because the rewards we offer "successful" people don't appeal to them? Because a life of bourgeois discipline leading to a nice hourse or apartment with nice furniture and a wife with her own career doesn't seem like much of a goal? Part of my interest in such notions comes out of my own experience as a parent. I raised two teenage sons who were so turned off by what they knew about adult life in America that the only fantasy they could enjoy was building a cabin in the woods and escaping from the whole mess. They could not think of any work they might enjoy, any sort of education they might want to pursue. To them, a disciplined life of regular work and a regular house and a regular car and a regular family seemed like a death sentence. If that is how you feel about the rewards our society offers, why would you throw yourself into school? 

In my sons' telling, high school was all about adults trying to terrify teenagers into studying by telling them that only good students who go to good colleges ever get to have good adult lives. Their response to this was to say, I don't want that kind of life, so to hell with all of it.

So I wonder if maybe "boys are failing in school" is a small piece of a much bigger problem, that we live in a world that many people find depressing in its very nature