Lost sheep in the classroom

In my home, as may be the case in yours, back-to-school rituals take place this time of year: shopping for school supplies, buying new clothes, and meeting new teachers. It is easy to forget that our communities and schools are failing a significant portion of our population: boys and men. 

As the Brooking Institution points out from the center-left of the political spectrum in a 2021 commentary (“The male college crisis is not only in enrollment, but completion”): 

The gap in college enrollment is now getting overdue attention. But this is just one part of the story. Men are also less likely to graduate high school in the first place and less likely to complete college after enrolling. The ten percentage point gap in four-year college enrollment is only compounded by the gap in college completion rates. 

The Heritage Foundation, in a commentary last April (“Lost Boys”), contributes the following from the center-right:

Despite the presence of polarizing reactions, we cannot overlook the fact that our boys are floundering and bereft of purpose. Young men commit suicide at six times the rate of young women, and as the knowledge economy grows, and boys fall behind academically, even their IQs are dropping. The absence of fathers, technological and economic shifts, and an education system that does not nurture boys, are all contributing factors begging for commensurate solutions. 

The Brookings Institution article has valuable data related to the crisis among men in college. The Heritage Foundation piece has an essential overview of recent writing about the challenges facing boys and men that is worth your time. 

Many of our institutions are failing boys and men. As the Heritage Foundation article explains: 

According to The Boy Crisis, written by political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray, the primary driver of the boy crisis is the absence of strong fathers and male role models in the community (single-sex spaces can help offset the missing example of a parent).

We also need to remember that the most important, the first, and the continuing forum for educating our children is in the home. As the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio by Pope St. John Paull II explains: 

Christian marriage and the Christian family build up the Church: for in the family the human person is not only brought into being and progressively introduced by means of education into the human community, but by means of the rebirth of baptism and education in the faith the child is also introduced into God’s family, which is the Church.

The father is the primary role model for our boys, and that relationship will help determine what kind of men boys will become. To enter heaven, we must know God the Father. To help boys enter adulthood as rightly-formed men, they must know their fathers to be godly husbands and men. The good news is that every father can begin to improve his son’s education — no matter what stage it is in right now — by resolving to be a man after God’s own heart. 

Education begins at home. So does education reform.