The Problem With Boys

Marty Nemko:

What changes would you recommend if I told you that African-American children were:

• four to eight times as likely to be drugged with Ritalin and other stimulants, which pediatrician Leonard Sax, calls “academic steroids.”
• reading much more poorly than are other students.
• five times more likely to commit suicide.
• two and a half times as likely to drop out of high school.
• severely underrepresented in college and even more so among college graduates, thereby locking them out of today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, knowledge economy.

You’d likely invoke such words as “institutional racism” to justify major efforts to improve African-Americans’ numbers.

All of the above statements are true except for one thing: I’m not talking about African-American children. I’m talking about children of all races, indeed half of all children, half of our next generation: boys.

Read the whole thing.