George Gilder on Boy

“Coeducation also allows educators to avoid the problem of finding new ways to meet the sexual identity crises of most schoolboys. As Patricia Cayo Sexton has elaborately documented, it is the most "feminine" boys, by every index, who tend to excel in school. Obedient and submissive in the classroom, their aggressions emerge fitfully in other areas. They raise hell on college campuses, for example. Otherwise they masturbate incessantly, worry about it even more than about their grades, and generally turn their energies inward where they can cause serious distortions of character. Homosexuality and violence are frequent outlets, drugs a frequent pallative. But they do do well in school. Surprisingly to imaginative educators, these types have less trouble in all-male institutions. Contrary to the widespread notion, homosexuality is evident neither at prep schools nor at parochial schools. Boys with masculinity problems are reinforced by an all-male environment, while less competent though virile students are not so estranged from education by their failures. Competition with females is destructive to males in any arena, but nowhere is it so damaging as among impressionable adolescents preoccupied with their intense but inchoate sexuality.”

“Adolescent boys are radically different from adolescent girls. The boys, for example, are at the pinnacle of sexual desire and aggressiveness. In school, what they chiefly need is male discipline and challenge, ideally without girls present to distract them. Girls, on the other hand, are less aggressive and sexually compulsive at this stage and are more willing to study without rigid policing and supervision. Thus a classroom that contains both boys and girls will hurt both. The boys will be excelled and demoralized by the girls; the girls will be distracted and demoralized by the boys. Both sexes will be damaged by the continuous policing that the rebellious and unsuccessful boys require. There are benefits to coeducation, however. It allows our educational system to avoid "sexism," reduce costs, and get rid of rambunctious lower-class males. It conditions a good many boys to compete with women on female terms. The classroom successes of these "grinds" and "apple-polishers" are somewhat tarnished after school or in the men's room, when they are brutally harassed by gangs of unsuccessful male students. But what happens after school- or in the men's room, God forbid- is of little concern to the school management. The only after-school that interests them is college admissions.”

“Let us begin with a few simple, crucial, and apparently unmentionable facts about a typical high school classroom. First and most important, most of the boys and a good number of the girls are thinking about the opposite sex most of the time. If you do not believe this, you are a dreamer. The only thing about a classroom more important to adolescent boys than whether girls are present is whether or not it is on fire. Advocates of coeducation will tell you that the boys are learning to regard the girls as "human beings" rather than as sexual objects. These are the kinds of people who imagine that most males anywhere, under any circumstances- short of affliction by senility, homosexuality, or Bella Abzug- ever refrain from regarding females as sexual objects. These are the "imaginative" types of people who run our schools. They tend to think that their sexual interest in budding adolescent girls is their own secret perversion. It happens to be shared by the boys in the school (as well as by all the other male teachers). If the educator is particularly creative and imaginative, he will suppose that these young "human beings" are learning a lot about life in their work together. What in fact the boys are learning is that unless they are exceptionally "bright' and obedient, they will be exceeded in their studies by most of the girls. Unless you are imaginative, you will see that this is a further drag on their already faltering attention to Longfellow's Evangeline. Clearly in a losing game in masculine terms, the boys react in two ways: They put on a show for the girls and dominate the class anyway, or they drop out. Enough of them eventually drop out, in fact, to disguise the otherwise decided statistical superiority of female performance in school. But they do not drop out soon enough to suit educators for whom aggressive boys are the leading problem in every high school.”