A Brief Note on the “War on Boys”

Is the “War on Boys” occurring in the schools actually a problem? Higher education is not for everybody and one of the tasks of schools is to ensure that unscholarly people stop wasting their time. The traditional school does that very well as far as boys are concerned.

The problem is that the traditional filter against unscholarly boys does not work for unscholarly girls. Even unscholarly girls are willing to sit in one place and do desk work. Maybe we need a “War on Girls” as well.

On the other hand, the emergency back-up filter against unscholarly girls is working just fine. Unscholarly girls who insist on higher education anyway are shunted into degrees that are easily identifiable as meaningless, similar to unscholarly boys on the football team. (If you can reliably identify a ‘side’ you are supposed to take in class, the degree is meaningless.)

Addendum: Is the emergency back-up filter working too well? Could it have caused the decline in women computer science grads? Maybe it needs debugging…