Undead Sexist Cliches: Schools castrate boys!

Echidne of the Snakes tackles a David Brooks column I linked to last week. The gist of the Brooks column, as noted in my previous post, is that boys are doing worse than girls in school because schools discourage manly kids like Henry V (who was the rebellious rogue in his youth) and thereby leave them miserable and over-medicated. What’s needed are “not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.”
First off, I rather doubt Henry would be as miserable as Brooks thinks. Young Hal was a conniving schemer who played the rogue in order to look that much more noble when he seemingly matures and puts away childhood things. If schools required obedient kids, he’d probably be the Eddie Haskell style of suck-up.
But that’s nit-picking. More substantial problems, as Echidne points out, are that even in countries where men dominate, such as Saudi Arabia, girls are outperforming boys; heck, even in Afghanistan, despite Taliban objections, girls are forging ahead. Possibly, as Echidne suggests, it’s because they have no choice: They have to fight tooth-and-nail to get anywhere so the more education the better. But it hardly proves bias against boys. Brooks suggests that maybe it’s genetic—girls mature fast enough to apply themselves—which presumably implies that nothing will change those wild, wayward boys and make them be less rugged (he does mention that restless girls would have a problem too). Why this never happened back in the good old days when schools made you sit down and shut up and learn by rote, he doesn’t explain.
And why the emphasis on martial virtues? Rather than say, adventure, exploration or even rebellion? Is Brooks worried there aren’t going to be enough soldiers the next time he decides we should go fight a useless war (he was a big supporter of the Iraq war and scoffed at the idea there were deep religious divisions in Iraqi society)? Of course, rebellion wouldn’t suit him at all: Brooks complained in an earlier column that one of America’s problems is that we’re bad followers: We fail “to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves” and don’t recognize that “we also elevate those who are extraordinary” to leadership so we should bow down to their judgment (and if we don’t, it’s because we’re too conceited to accept the judgment of great men—like David Brooks, perhaps?). Maybe that’s why he likes the boot camp metaphor—a place where the common horde are trained to obey (he’s big on how our problems are all the fault of ordinary people, not the rich and powerful).