There is a growing global trend of boys being punished for the “sins of men” and it needs to stop.
Most recently, a school in Belgium forced the boys to stand during an entire math class as a lesson in supposed “inequality.” This so-called learning experience was performed on International Women’s Day as a way of highlighting what they call inequalities between women and men.
This is damaging and wrong on a number of levels. First, the boys were confused as they had done nothing wrong. Why were they being punished? As any parent or teacher knows, children do not respond well to be punished unfairly. Second, the whole notion that somehow women are unequal to men in society is simplistic and not accurate. As the data show, boys and young men are actually underperforming compared to girls and young women in a number of areas, including high school graduation, college attendance and graduation, and in health measures such as life expectancy. And while there are certainly important issues in regards to girls and women, more appropriate teaching methods could be employed as part of a balanced curriculum that also explores issues that affect boys and men.
There have been other examples of this alarming trend:
- As reported in the Washington Examiner, a school in Australia forced all the boys to apologize to girls for all sexual assaults committed by men against women. Again, this is wrong on multiple levels: the boys themselves did nothing wrong, and the entire exercise neglected to mention male victims or female perpetrators of crime.
- In the Seattle, Washington region of the U.S., a teacher prohibited boys in kindergarten (yes, kindergarten!) from playing with Legos because it would supposedly give boys an unfair advantage in spatial reasoning and math.
What’s equally disturbing is that these are not instances of a few teachers going rogue. Instead, all three of these examples included administrative decisions from the highest levels at the schools involved as part of a program to punish boys, simply for being boys, due to poorly constructed notions in what constitutes equality.
We wanted to bring this ongoing problem to your attention so you can be on the lookout for similar transgressions in your schools, whether it be your place of work or where a boy in your life attends school. No boy should be punished for simply being a boy.