                        Most boys are rowdy and rambunctious
                            by nature and Joe Manthey thinks they
                            shouldn't be made to feel guilty about it.

Pacific Sun Feature Story
Bringing Up Boys: Joe Manthey believes that boys require gender-specific education.
December 1 - December 7, 1999
Marin - Sonoma - San Francisco Counties, California

Teacher argues that the real trouble with boys is a system failing to address their needs.

Once upon a time, Joe Manthey had a message: After three decades of feminists advocating for women, isn't it time to start standing up for persons of the male persuasion? Manthey soon learned that saying this out loud was an invitation to be reviled. A way to get called names like obnoxious, reactionary, enemy of women, angry white male. Over the years, Joe Manthey's message hasn't changed much, but these days his words earn something different: respect. Instead of getting called names, now he gets called back.

What a difference a few student massacres make. In the wake of school shootings resulting in the murders of over 20 people and the wounding of 46 others, all carried out by boys, more and more observers are reaching the same conclusion: Our boys are in trouble as boys. Many lack impulse control; others lack the ability to distinguish between right and wrong; some seem not to have the faculty called conscience. And then there are those who simply say they can't get understanding or respect from a culture that increasingly fears even normal male development.

Before Littleton, Joe Manthey found himself regularly dismissed when he declared that we need to help boys direct their energies in ways appropriate to them as young males. After Littleton, school administrators found themselves calling Manthey for clues about the sex-specific challenges that boys face.

"For years, we've been telling ourselves that boys have it made, that girls have all the problems," said Manthey, a Petaluma public school teacher who also leads a training program for educators called Kid Culture in the Schools. "But we can't keep pretending that boys are getting the gender-specific education and development they need. Boys are getting ripped off -- inside the classroom and in society at large."

"Gender-specific" was the loudest phrase in Manthey's remarks. I wasn't sure if this was because he had pronounced the words with special emphasis, or rather because I can't help becoming suspicious whenever gender differences are cited, directly or indirectly, to justify cultural preferences, practices and plain ideology. It wasn't all that long ago that the "nature" view -- that biology determined male and female options -- served to explain why girls aren't cut out for higher education, and why boys aren't suited to be nurses or childcare professionals.

"I'm not saying that biology is destiny," Manthey piped up, as if sensing my dissent. "Rather, biology is proclivity. We educators have got to do everything we can to help boys feel comfortable developing their own ways of doing things. The alternative means teaching boys that their core self is inadequate by nature. How much more evidence do we need before we realize that boys brought up this way will take revenge on a society that refuses to welcome them?"

* * *
CLAIMS THAT BIOLOGICALLY inherited brain and hormone differences fundamentally control the way males and females operate are controversial. For instance, Johns Hopkins University researchers Camilla Benbow and Julian Stanley studied 100,000 boys and girls, focusing on sex-different approaches to learning and living. In the late 1980s, they announced their results: "After fifteen years of looking for an environmental explanation and getting zero results," Benbow said, "I give up."

Other researchers kept going. Ten years later, University of Pennsylvania researcher Roger Gorski discovered marked differences in physiological structures between the male and the female brain. In turn, UCLA brain researcher Laurie Allen has discovered that in at least seven of the measured brain structures there are structural differences between female and male brains.

One such structure is the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the brain's right and left hemispheres. Though the female brain on average is 10 percent smaller the male brain, within the smaller girl's brain is a larger corpus callosum than in the larger boy's brain. Sheila Moore and Roon Frost, in their book The Little Boy Book, summarize how this happens:

"During fetal life when the brain and the nervous system are being organized, the female cortex (brain) develops in advance of the male cortex. The left half of the cortex (the part of the brain that controls thinking) develops somewhat later than the right (the part that works with spatial relationships). In males, though, there is an even greater lag. 'As a result,' one neurologist says, 'when the right side is ready to hook up with the left side (by sending over connecting nerve fibers), in the male the appropriate cells don't yet exist on the left. So (the fibers) go back and instead form connections within the right hemisphere. You end up with extremely enriched connections within the right.'"

One result of this structural difference is increased focus in the male brain on spatial relationships and activity. "Little boys, much more so than little girls, manipulate objects like blocks to see how they use up space," writes Michael Gurian in the book The Wonder of Boys. The larger female corpus callosum makes possible greater cross-talk between the right and left hemispheres of the brain than does a boy's brain. The brain that can draw more heavily on both sides of the brain at once, which is what reading requires, is the brain that will read better. Hence, boys in general do less well in reading than girls, owing to the smaller corpus callosum. Identifying with accuracy the emotions on another person's face is enhanced when more of the brain is being used; thus researchers speculate that the smaller corpus callosum in boys is one of the reasons boys find this a difficult activity.

University of Pennsylvania researcher Rubin Gur, using brain-scan equipment to generate computer photographs of brains in use, confirmed that the male brain is set up to be intensely spatial, while the female brain is not. On the other hand, Gur used this same process to show how the male brain is not set up to be verbal but the female brain is. Gur also found that the female brain is at work in more sections practically all of the time than the male brain. He proposes that the primary reason males are so "task-oriented" is -- to use an analogy to a machine -- the male brain turns on to do a task, and then turns off. Gur suggests that the constantly "on" female brain correlates with female skill in "multitasking."

And then, there's the T-Factor? Testosterone. Michael Gurian puts it this way: "If you have a 'normal' boy -- meaning, he is an XY (chromosome) boy whose body and brain were created by appropriate testosterone surges -- he will himself be dominated by the hormone that made him what he is." In behavioral terms, this shows up as greater irritability, aggressive tendencies and motor activity. Boys (on average) turn toys into swords or guns more often than girls do. Boys hit more, try to one-up more and tend more toward provocative first-responses to others' pain and less toward empathic first-responses.

* * *
JOE MANTHEY BECOMES animated when explaining what he's not trying to do: set up men and boys as a new class of victims, or compete with feminists about which group -- females or males -- receives the shortest end of the societal stick. Yet he leaves no doubt about his commitment to making the classroom a more boy-friendly environment.

"Most school programs are efforts to make boys less aggressive, the assumption being that aggression equals violence. There are biological and neurological factors in boys that make them rowdy, rambunctious and competitive. Statistics make clear that boys get lower grades than girls on average, get labeled 'learning disabled' twice as often as girls, get sent to the principal's office and get medicated for learning problems about eight times more often than girls. Boys play into this by openly expressing their boredom, confusion or frustration by acting out in ways that create discipline problems and lead to negative labels."

Manthey pauses and smiles. "Speaking of labels, the ones I've gotten most often is 'blames women' and 'angry at women.' But I'm not blaming women when I point out that 90 percent of elementary teachers are women, and that many of them probably weren't brought up with brothers or have not raised sons.

"I'm not angry at women, including women teachers, when I point out that most of them are trying to create androgynous classrooms for elementary-age children -- and that when these efforts don't work, the student most likely to fail is the boy. But I do admit that I'm angry.

"I'm angry at an educational system that expects second-grade boys to act and speak with the verbal and emotional skills of a 7- or 8-year-old girl for whom squirming and fidgeting isn't much of an issue."

Here Manthey emphasizes that the typical classroom, with its organization in neat rows and its emphasis on students sitting still and being quiet, is thereby biased toward "the female mode of learning." He advocates not that this mode be eradicated, thereby placing girl students at a disadvantage, but instead finding ways and means to accommodate learning styles appropriate to both genders and their respective brain orientations. "I'm also hopeful that change is possible," he says, noting that female teachers "are usually the first to tell me that the way they've been taught to teach doesn't work very well for boys."

These days Manthey is spending a lot of time consulting with administrators to create ways for boy culture to thrive in classrooms. "I always say that the first step is to accept that boy culture will form whether we like it or not, because boy culture is a creation of the male brain," he says. "it's fruitless to ask why don't the boys in my class sit still. It makes a lot more sense to accept that boys need to compete and feel tested in the physical and interpersonal world. As parents, teachers and mentors, are we willing to help them navigate this need?"

In the final analysis, this is a need for inherent worth and value, Michael Gurian told an audience of 400 educators, psychotherapists and fathers and mothers at a Sonoma State University conference organized by Manthey in November. "No culture is as loose as ours in the way it raises its boys. We are not directing our boys to meaning. They have no mission. 'Why am I here on the Earth?' They need to know that."

Gurian continued, "At a biological and hormonal level, boys and girls don't experience this search for self-worth in exactly the same way. The human female is geared internally toward creating and caring for her own new self -- her child. At puberty, the female hormonal cycle begins reminding her each month of her potential to conceive, carry and birth a child. This inherent path to self-worth is something that males don't have the advantage of being born with."

Gurian became silent, as did the audience. Then he spoke about the film Saving Private Ryan.

"Captain John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, sets out with a few others to find Private Ryan in France and bring him to safety. They find Ryan but are not sure he's worth saving. Nearly everyone in Miller's group is killed in battle. As Captain Miller himself is dying, he tells Ryan that he must now earn his life by living it in a manner that proves he was worth saving. The final scene is the most powerful one. Ryan is in his 70s and standing over Miller's grave, and he says to his wife, 'Tell me I've led a good life. Tell me I'm a good man.'"

"That's how it is for boys and men," Gurian continued. "nature doesn't provide a blueprint for worth and meaning and value. Our schools are filled with persons who were born male, but that's barely the first step. They need guidance toward the value of the man. It's the work of a lifetime."

- Adolescent males are four times more likely to commit suicide. Suicide statistics success rates for boys are rising; suicide rates for girls have dropped 50 percent since 1970. Not only are they the primary victims of violence in the schools, buy they exhibit the majority of academic problems as well. Statistically, there is only one area of healthy activity where males out number females: sports.

- Boys are twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed as learning disabled. Two-thirds of high school special-education and handicapped students are male. Adolescent males drop out of high school at four times the rate of peer females. (This includes females who drop out to have babies.)

- Ninety percent of discipline problems in schools are males, as are most suspensions and expulsions. Boys on the average receive lower grades than girls. The minority of salutatorians now are male. Boys are significantly more likely than girls to die before the age of 18, not just from violent causes but from accidental death and disease.

- Boys are significantly more likely than girls to die at the hands of their parents or stepparents.

- Adolescent boys are 15 times more likely than adolescent girls to be victims of violent crime.

- Boys are four times more likely than peer females to be diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. The majority of juvenile mental patients are male.

- Most of the longest lasting and deadliest mental problems experienced by children are experienced by adolescent males.

- Boys significantly outnumber girls in diagnoses of most conduct disorders, thought disorders and brain disorders.

- One out of five males reports having been sexually abused by the age of 18. The actual amount is much higher.

2. Redesign schooling and teaching methods to be more physical, energetic and challenging.

5. Be alert to the fact that problem behavior can be a sign of learning difficulties, and investigate this as soon as possible.

6. Educate ourselves on how emotionally fragile boys are, how they hide their fragility in bravado, aggression or silence.

Sources: Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys and A Fine Young Man; Steve Biddulph, Raising Boys.