PrintJanuary 23, 2006
The Trouble With Newsweek's Cover Story About Boys
In the new millennium, articles describing the intellectual differences between the sexes have been altogether too commonplace. As a result, it wasn't difficult to presage from the cover of Newsweek's most recent issue where the editors were going with a headline like 'The Boy Crisis.' In fact, once inside, the featured piece, 'The Trouble With Boys,' turned into just another in a long line of 'exposes' depicting girls as being smarter than boys.
After a pleasant introduction, author Peg Tyre began her laundry list of male deficiencies:
'By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special—education classes. High—school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001,...(Read Full Article)
