That men are an “endangered species” has in recent years become a trope of the culture wars fought on the battlegrounds of gender and identity.
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, Ben Shapiro and other influential voices on the right tell us that men are failing in mind, body and spirit. To support their arguments, they point to data indicating that boys and men are underachieving in school, withdrawing from the workforce, postponing marriage, experiencing falling testosterone levels and suffering from depression and suicide and other deaths of despair at far higher rates than girls and women.
Hawley and Shapiro reject the liberal notion of “toxic masculinity” and criticize so-called woke ideologies for negatively judging masculinity and pressuring men to suppress natural instincts to procreate, provide and protect. They believe that assaults on traditional notions of what it means to be a man threaten to bring about civilization’s decline.
The right-wing script focuses on the collapse of maleness and masculinity rooted in simplistic notions of biology — in what is “natural.” Conservatives seek to restore men to traditional patriarchal roles that we might assign to either the Old Testament or to 1950s sitcoms.
Ultimately, the conservative solutions revolve around what society can do to properly shape the biologically determined “character” of men and boys. This concern with character-shaping has become the flashpoint for culture wars in public school classrooms and libraries centered on what gender means.
The focus on character is a red herring, based on the assumption that each of us possesses some essential moral identity rooted in “values.” In fact, people are remarkably changeable, depending on the context and circumstances of their daily lives. If we each possess an irreducible core, it is psychological and emotional and rooted in neurophysiology and early childhood experiences. This core is not “moral” or rooted in “values,” and it is not gender-specific.
Ironically, in most schools and for most children, the culture wars are barely observable. Most of a child’s school day is about what it has always been about — learning to read, write and calculate. Whether schools are succeeding in that mission is a separate issue. But the right-wing notion that schools devote the school day to character-sapping and “wokeness training” is a hallucination.
These culture wars do exist outside the schools, however — for politicians seeking to build their careers, for media outlets looking to attract an audience and for parents susceptible to emotional agitation rooted in the fear-and-loathing part of our brain. These battles affect teachers, librarians and other staff members who are under stress not of their own making that has become similar to that of combat.
For this reason, we should be asking these questions. Are primary and secondary schools a significant cause and a meaningful solution to the challenges faced by males, both in childhood and later in adulthood? And if they are not, where do we turn our attention?
The answer to the first question is “no.” There is no evidence that schools are responsible for stripping boys of the trappings of their masculinity and transforming them into squishy men. And adding the preservation of the entitlements of masculinity to the list of social ills schools are asked to address would catastrophically burden teachers and staff members.
The fundamentals of education are a legitimate basis for evaluating the success of any school. But equally important is what students learn when they are away from the boundaries of home and family.
Children acquire tools for life from interacting with peers and making choices during these interactions while in a socially dynamic environment. We remember our school years and our relationships during that time so vividly because of these profound experiences.
Success in life depends on more than just education. The social-emotional skills children learn in the classroom, on the playground, on the athletic field or on the bus also count enormously.
Right-wing culture warriors such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo — who evidently prefer the “masculinity” of the schoolyard bully — deride social-emotional learning. But nearly all evidence indicates that incorporating this skills training into school curricula can make a huge difference
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for children.We generally ask far too much from our public schools. Imagine whether circumstances at home and in the family are more important for life outcomes, including whether one graduates from college. We should investigate specifically the impact of these circumstances on young males.
Having a college degree counts significantly affects life outcomes. In 2010, more men generally had obtained college degrees than women. By 2021, women had surpassed men in educational attainment, and it wasn’t even close. High percentages of men continue to lack a college degree.
While women continue to make remarkable strides in education, the economic prospects for men without a college degree have altogether collapsed. And because two-thirds of men older than 25 lack a college degree, the consequences are deep and structural.
Research strongly correlates the relationship between being raised in a two-parent household and higher educational attainment later in life. Children from two-parent families are twice as likely to graduate high school and attend and graduate college compared with those from single-parent families.
Parental education levels also matter. Children with two college-educated parents are nearly three times as likely to get a college degree compared with those whose parents lack college experience. If we focus just on single-parent homes, data indicates a significant gender gap in bachelor’s degree attainment rates between boys and girls from single-parent households.
If we want to save our endangered boys and men, rather than beating up on our schools, teachers and librarians, we should focus on family structure and early childhood development and education.
Peter H. Schwartz is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. He has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley.
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