If your boys hate school it might be because Americas schools have been designed to tear down young men

Ms.Jefferson, the kindergarten teacher, held up wooden skewers, cotton balls, and craft glue.

“Today we’re each going to make a pussywillow,” she told the children. “I don’t wanna make a pussywillow,” Jason said.“I wanna make a lightsaber.” Ms.

Jefferson ignored him.Jason glued a cotton ball to the end of his wooden skewer.

“I find your lack of faith – disturbing!” he said to her, channeling his inner Darth Vader, brandishing the skewer.She sent him to the principal. Jason was sent to the principal’s office four times in the first two weeks.

At the end of the second week, he came home in tears.He told his mom, “School is stupid.

I hate school.” Deborah Stipek, former dean of education at Stanford, has found that kids form attitudes toward school early.Those attitudes, once formed, are stable and non-contingent.

That’s a fancy way of saying that once a boy decides that he hates school, he’s not likely to change his mind.And he doesn’t think there’s anything he can do that’s going to make a difference. Over the past 25 years, I have visited more than 500 schools.

I have seen first-hand how schools have become unfriendly to boys.Boys doing things that boys have always done – pointing fingers at each other, saying “bang bang you’re dead.” Drawing pictures of weapons.

Throwing snowballs.All that now gets a boy in trouble.  When I graduated from my public high school in Ohio in 1977, boys outnumbered girls among the highest achievers — not only in my high school, but nationwide.

Thirty years ago, Myra and David Sadker published their book “Failing at Fairness: How our Schools Cheat Girls,” documenting that achievement gap and showing how schools were keeping girls down. That was then.Times have changed.

Girls now outperform boys by wide margins in every content area K-12, including math and science.Girls now outnumber boys by more than 2-to-1 among high-school valedictorians.

Young women are now much ...