Minority report

Jul 08, 2024

There is a minority group in the United States whose presence in prison is 1.8x their share of the population - and they are also more likely to be convicted, for longer sentences. They are more than double as likely to be expelled from school, to be homeless, and to die by opioid overdose. They are more than 3x as likely to be murdered and 10x as likely to die on the job. I speak, of course, of men.

Boys and girls are different. That used to be a commonsensical intuition, but society has lost sight of this in its drive to ensure girls feel equal. Well, girls, on average, are now exceeding boys in meaningful ways. According to the economist Mark Perry, for every 100 girls in K-12 who are classified as having a specific learning disability, there are 144 boys. For every 100 girls who take an AP course, 76 boys do. For every 100 women who earn a bachelor’s degree, 73 men do. For every 100 women in graduate school, there are 68 men. The standard school arrangement isn’t working for lots of boys - so the question is: could we do something different for boys to improve?

Figure 1. Blame the Matriarchy!

You may start at the start. The psychologist Leonard Sax insists that, from birth, boys are exposed to feminizing plastics (through the aftermath of mom’s bottled water, in their pacifier, in their toys, etc) that play havoc with their brain development (and may accelerate puberty for girls). For similar reasons, one scientist friend of mine insisted that my wife never pump her own gasoline or handle receipts, tasks she was happy to delegate to me. So, a boys-first homeschooling regime - what I’m coining as a “pioneer” approach - may be especially crunchy to avoid endocrine-disrupting environmental estrogens that, according to Sax, seem to be correlated with prolonged immaturity, obesity, bone brittleness, low motivation, and ADHD-like symptoms with boys.

A common (and true) homeschooling critique of the Traditional curriculum is that standards and performance have dropped significantly over time - one fairly recent institutional response has been to try to start academics as early as possible (i.e. trying to teach 5 year olds how to read and write) to get kids on the right track. Sax says this has created problems for boys, who, on average, even absent chemical contributions, develop at a slower early rate than girls, insofar as they then self-label themselves as “bad” at subjects they would otherwise be perfectly capable of mastering and come to dislike “uncool” school. This same-age gender comparison is not really a problem for homeschoolers, but you may be sensitive to the general difference. Further, the pollster Emily Ekins reports on a Harvard study of 400,000 children that found that those put into school sooner “were 30% more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD”; and, separately, for an extra motivation for homeschooling, “young children who spend long hours in non-relative care are at a significantly higher risk for developing higher rates of aggression, disobedience, impulsivity and risk-taking.” Ekins doesn’t say it, but these issues seem to compound for boys.

The good news is that most homeschool regimes don’t start till age 6 anyway (historic boys’ schools often didn’t even start till 7 or 8 but had higher standards later.) The biggest early-start exception is Montessori - and yet its embrace of physical learning is actually very well-suited for boys. Read lots to your boys early on (more than an hour daily) and seize the moment whenever they express an interest in reading themselves to teach phonics - and it’s okay if that’s later. Of course, if your boys are showing an early conventional academic interest, great - plow on ahead.

Especially once your boys are 7 or 8, Pioneers have to be on guard against the soft bigotry of low expectations - there’s an especially dangerous current of thinking that boys can’t sit still and can’t concentrate. A significant part of the problem is video games, which are especially enticing to boys. But continuously constantly switching to whatever on a screen is most entertaining (often itself with quick cuts to new scenes) is also correlated with ADHD, which Sax insists is dramatically overdiagnosed, resulting in medicalization that leaves boys lazy and disengaged. (Girls, of course, have their own special screen addiction with social media - but that tends to be a problem at a later age). Sensitive to boys’ particular weaknesses, Pioneers throw out the console (purists even the television) and insist that their boys can be entertained through deeply concentrating on great books, frequently exploring the great outdoors, and even through the adrenaline rushes of paintball, martial arts, and go-kart racing in the real world. Worthwhile for both genders, but we’ll reemphasize here: getting your children’s diet and sleep schedule on healthy tracks has dramatic and underappreciated positive effects as well (among many other things, the symptoms of too little sleep can be confused with ADHD). The right leisure, especially that gives boys control of their own actions and time (autonomy) beyond the screen, orients boys’ academic and work schedule toward success.

The truth is that boys not only can focus, they are especially good at it. As the evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven reports:

“Studies show that boys and men are more likely to exhibit a ‘rigid persistence in an activity,’ by which ‘the passion controls the individual’ (‘obsessive passion’ in the literature). In anecdotal terms, we are talking here about the man who drops everything to become, say, a 16-hour-per-day videogamer, or a day-trader, or chess addict. Yes, some women take on these kinds of fixations. But men do it more often, and with greater intensity.”

The trick is to get boys interested. Or as Sax puts it with a fine point on gender differences: girls tend to want to please adults and do homework just because it’s assigned. Boys do homework if it’s interesting. Lots of boys like learning and dislike school (including me!). Any boy-focused education should start with the base rates of what boys are generally interested in - homeschoolers can quickly tailor the curriculum to the unique interests of individual sons. But what are boys generally interested in?

On average, boys are more interested in and better at math than girls. The performance gap has been narrowing for decades, but it still exists. In 2015, despite some of the statistics mentioned at the top of this correspondence, boys, on average, beat girls by 32 points on the math section of the SAT - and for every 100 girls scoring in the 700-800 range (i.e. the top 9%), there were 160 boys. There is related evidence that boys, on average, have a better abstract sense of spatial awareness and systems analysis than girls, which is very helpful in math (meanwhile, girls tend to have an advantage in reading and vocabulary). So, Pioneers prioritize math - and science - to give boys the confidence of competence in socially highly valuable fields.

Figure 2. Especially prioritized may be the science of hands-on experiments and all the better if it involves gooey dissections and blowing things up.

A significant hypothesis for why boys have fallen behind in reading is “largely because teachers discourage them from reading and writing about the things they’re interested in” - especially violence. The documentary Raising Caine illustrates this point in a classroom where small children are invited to invent their own stories: a little girl spins a tale of a lion and panda having a sleepover and becoming best friends; a little boy tells his own story of a horse and unicorn in which the horse is killed and the unicorn takes revenge. All of the little girls objected to the latter story and insisted that, rather than death, only fainting should occur in any story - which quite upset the creator boy, to the point where he had trouble coming up with future stories. Young girls are generally fascinated by relationships, especially en route to harmony, while boys are generally fascinated by conflict (and objects). Leonard Sax reports on a 10th grader who wrote a “carefully researched,” realistic story about the brutal Battle of Stalingrad - and got suspended until “evaluation by a licensed professional” determined he was not a threat to the school.

An analysis of what men and women review on Goodreads reveals again the obvious: men and women like different genres. Generally, men are especially comparatively interested in philosophy, graphic novels, politics, science fiction, history and you can start there and hope to infect them with the bug. Strongly consider shifting from traditional literature into history and nonfiction, and within those categories, more into stories of great men doing great deeds and less about the feelings of victims. Sax suggests that discussions of books need to be especially wary of common-in-modern-school empathy questions like “How would you feel if you were Piggy?” (a fat, bespectacled target of scorn in Lord of the Flies) and instead ask questions like “What would you do in this instance?”

Unpopular to say but Pioneers may also deemphasize humanities as much as they can get away with - yet you’re probably best off limiting alternatives to reading so they turn to it as a source of productive leisure and trying to find the very best quality of whatever interests your particular sons. Political correctness is killing boys’ literacy - but you can do something different by encouraging boys to explore the greatest stories ever told - much of which include violence! Just ensure that your boys aren’t making any specific threats against known individuals but contextualizing violence appropriately in history and genuine fantasy.

Perhaps the most important commitment of a boys-first education is that boys need adult male mentors and teachers. Men are less than 1 in 50 preschool teachers, less than 1 in 9 public elementary school teachers, and less than 1 in 3 public high school teachers. This has a real effect, and not just due to female teachers’ squeamishness about violence. The book Wild Things cites a Harvard study that found “when learning disabilities were identified by teachers… twice as many boys were identified, as compared to girls” but that “when learning-disabled students are identified via diagnostic criteria, there is no significant gender difference between boys and girls.” The Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo reports that “in science, social studies, and English, having a female teacher raised the girls' performance on a standardized test by 4 percent of the deviation while lowering the boys' performance by the same amount—creating a gender gap of 8 percent.” Notably, “when tests are graded anonymously the gender gap decreases by a third.” Zimbardo concludes “Boys and girls both do better in school when they have same-sex teachers.”

A boys first regime means not just the typical defaulting homeschooling to a stay at home mom - but figuring out when dad is available, when grandfathers and uncles are available, finding male tutors, enlisting male coaches, and, at the appropriate age, sending boys to go out and work for men. You presumably know the array of bad statistics correlated with fatherlessness: make sure that your sons have their dads around! Simultaneously, Pioneers argue you need to curate your boys’ heroes through what you expose them to - and, depending on how exactly you want to shape your boys, popular culture is very often your enemy, as James Dobson argues that society idolizes rich workaholics and wayward athletes who set their own families aside while the typical television program emphasizes the stupidity of men. Continuously introduce your boys - both in person and through reading - to male heroes you can both admire and then, if your boys are inspired, help them get on a path to becoming future boys’ heroes.

Figure 3. GPT’s impression of the most stereotypical beneficiary of a pioneer education. The fictional vibe of Pioneer education is probably somewhere between Captain America and King Leonidas from 300.

The next big difference: boys are far more motivated by competition than girls, perhaps 20x as much. Most Pioneer parents are likely convinced of the value of sports for their boys, perhaps especially in the homeschooling context: sports provide opportunities to learn the value of mastery and really see results, socialize with peers and learn teamwork, engage in healthy physical activity, and, often, spend time outside. And sports may also accommodate boys’ much greater inclinations toward risk-taking within a controlled environment. Raising Caine reports that the leading cause of death among teenage boys is not violence but accidents. Dobson insists that you need to "release [boys’] excess energy by getting them involved in activities where fighting, laughing, running, tumbling, and yelling are acceptable," though he also warns that you need to blunt the edge of competition by explaining why you should not win at all costs. Pioneer parents may debate the value of a highly regimented schedule (including academics and organized sports) versus giving boys more substantial free play (including disorganized sports) but it may be sufficient to observe that you can strongly encourage boys to try a sport, you may even insist they finish a season in order to ensure they’re not too easily a quitter, but if a boy is persistently uninterested, drop it and instead pursue his productive interests.

Most parents naturally think of competition in the sports context but be on the lookout for how to take advantage of your sons’ competitive instincts for the main show. This can be a problem for homeschoolers who, at best, can only academically pit different-aged siblings against each other - and that may not lead to family harmony. Unfortunately, the number of academically-inclined competitions has been dwindling, though speech and debate still thrives and there are opportunities online to outscore rivals in math. Christina Hoff Sommers reports on the success of competitions that get boys to read as much as possible - and answer questions correctly to demonstrate they’ve understood the material. You can also of course apply competitiveness more directly to your household: Wild Things suggests making cleaning one’s room a timed event so as to beat high scores. Dobson relates a story about a boy who refused to drink his milk and was stuck at the dinner table; Dad poured himself a glass and offered to race to see who could finish first. When the boy lost, he pleaded with his Dad: “Best two out of three?”

Figure 4. Not recommended but possible: have a contest for whoever can be the best son and the winner gets the largest part of the estate!

When Zimbardo asked boys what they wanted out of school, 3/4 demanded training on real life skills - i.e. not blackboard math, but how to manage a checkbook. Boys may disproportionately enjoy a significant pragmatist streak in their education - though query whether they would prefer to do a problem set or learn the (very useful) skills of how to sew, cook, and other stereotypically feminine abilities. But that brings up perhaps the most common modern critique of a boys-first approach: are you helpfully leaning into what your boys are actually interested in, or imposing upon them a cultural norm that may not reflect their genuine talents? I don’t know that you’ll ever really find an answer - even if you isolated yourself from society, you’d bring along your own assumptions and create additional problems, all of which might be for nought if it just goes to show boys will be boys. Sommers, in an amusing section called “What if Mother Nature is not a feminist?”, even points to evidence that the play preferences of chimps mirror young humans, suggesting a hormonal drive for boys for “rough-and-tumble play.” Of course, if you’re interested in a boys-first approach, you probably dismiss this critique as silly and academic.

Another consideration has to be the greater male variability hypothesis: the abilities and outcomes of women apparently concentrate nearer to the center, while men have more extreme abilities and outcomes (more CEOs and more homeless; more geniuses and more… individuals at the lowest end of the intelligence spectrum). Many education enthusiasts disdain vocational training, especially early, because they believe it locks people out of the potentially higher rewards of further academics - but there are plenty of people, disproportionately men, who simply are better suited for vocational training, probably will be happier without the Ivory Tower academic tasks, and may even earn more if they can find the right professional path. But, practically, even if there are more boys at the lowest end of academic performance than girls, it’s still far more likely that they can pursue a normal academic path than not - especially if you and your spouse were successful in doing so and they don’t have any particular medical condition. Broadly, underestimating boys is the far more common problem today and you probably shouldn’t switch to a vocational track until having given a real go of academics from ages 8 to 15. And yet at 15 it would be perfectly reasonable to make a different choice reflecting your son’s particular strengths, which may include brute strength, though if you go vocational be careful about your state’s academic standards requirements.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably more interested in trying to push your sons into being the opposite: outlier successes (or at least exploring whether that’s possible). Some argue that genius has been on the decline - and one explanation may be that traditional schools want boys to be docile (even if it means they’re doped), but that’s not the way you get extreme outlier performance. Managing boys at their best may be considerably more confrontational than girls. Sax suggests that girls underestimate their abilities and need encouragement while boys overestimate their abilities and need appropriate reality checks; he quotes one coach: “You have to tell that hotshot that he may have some talent, but he’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is. He still has a lot to learn. He’s going to need to put in a lot of work if he wants to make it to the next level… You have to break the boys down.” A high-standards (Yale - Stanford GSB grad) homeschooling boy-mom told me that in the co-ops she has taught, “I have to have high, direct, almost aggressive energy to keep the boys in check. I use a lot of competition to keep them engaged (and ‘strikes’). This is totally unnecessary and even off-putting at times for the girls.” Perhaps the classic masculine/feminine tradeoff: what's more important, truth or harmony? If girls want to please their teachers, boys want to prove them wrong and their agitation can be a drive for excellence that actually needs to be encouraged.

One might think that we could learn quite a bit from all-boys institutions (about 780 in the United States as of 2017). I frankly was shocked in perusing their websites for a few hours how few attempted to articulate what they do differently. Even more complicated, because of the lack of randomization of where students go, is whether they are especially succeeding (Sommers reports on one randomized assignment in South Korea that vindicated boys’ schools, but that may have been because they had disproportionately higher male teacher ratios - and, again, that may be the single most important feature for a boys-first approach).

Here are some highlights: A fairly new Anglican boarding school includes trades education on a working farm and its headmaster says their goal is not “to make careers” but “saints,” favoring “the real over the artificial.” At the nearly century old public Aviation High School, technically now coed but overwhelmingly male, students take apart and build aircraft and are certified as mechanics. Without citation, Maryland’s Gilman insists that “boys are more spatial and visual by nature, and they demonstrate a natural affinity for areas like abstract mathematics. They are also hardwired to learn more easily through action than words” and that “Boys' brains are wired to require movement, space, action, and rest. A typical coed classroom that favors verbal and auditory learning can put an active boy at a disadvantage.” San Diego’s Army Navy Academy suggests, also without citation, their “evidence-based practices” include “stand-up desks, fidget toys, hands-on exercises, project-based learning, interactive technology, movement, music, team-building.” One of Tennessee’s top schools, Montgomery Bell Academy, tries to produce gentlemen, scholars, athletes with themes of “courage, adventure, risk-taking, honor, and a sense of duty” and says there are differences between boys and girls but doesn’t identify them. I was probably most impressed with the Heights, which has an explicit mentoring program guiding boys into asking “what kind of man does he want to be,” “knowing how to respond when inappropriate material is shown to him,” “being a gentleman - especially toward women,” and ensuring friends have become better men because they know him, among many other aspirations. The Heights reading list is also obviously masculine, including a biography of Douglas MacArthur (trigger warning: violent!), the Road to Serfdom, and C.S. Lewis.

The Wall Street Journal broadly reports that at such schools “boys get lots of hands-on learning, frequent breaks and plenty of movement,” some seize smartphones at the beginning of each day, and that “middle-school boys feel freer to make and learn from mistakes when girls aren’t around.” Notably, I’ve read elsewhere something akin to the opposite: that girls perform better in single sex institutions where there is no temptation to dumb down to impress boys while boys perform better in coed institutions where they compete with each other to impress girls. But perhaps boys at all boys’ schools do less dating, for better or worse. Interestingly, many boys’ schools insist that their boys, free of comparisons to girls, are not confined to gender stereotypes - but outside research has suggested that, in fact, boys in single-sex institutions are more conventionally masculine. And then there are institutions like St. Albans in Washington D.C. - tuition $55,468 a year for day school - whose headmaster insists:

“I’m very mindful of the fact, as a boys’ school leader, that as we seek to convince families in the future to send their sons to us, they will rightfully ask me the question, ‘Why should I send my son to a boys’ school rather than a co-ed school? Please assure me that a boys’ school will not be an incubator of male privilege and entitlement and misogyny… And I think we’ve got to have really thoughtful, well-developed answers to those questions.”

Figure 5. Some believe boys need to be sent to re-education camps where their male privilege can be removed. Won’t society be better off when men aren’t flaunting their career choices by paying for dinner dates? These “Mr. Fix Its” need to know that girls just want to talk about how plumbing makes them feel, not actually get the water back on. And, of course, they need to stop their literally violent expectations that a woman wear something different every day.

Someone with a decent grasp of educational history might ask: how can boys be underperforming in traditional schools when traditional schools were designed for boys? Some answers we can already provide: such schools started much later in age and such boys didn’t have chemical interference or electronic distractions. But they also had much harsher discipline. Dobson, who got famous for his initial book Dare to Discipline, insists that “self-discipline may be a worthy goal, but it rarely develops on its own initiative” and that “boys need structure, they need supervision, and they need to be civilized.”

To that end, Pioneers do have to address to what extent boys’ natural inclinations are to be embraced and fought. One father I respect insists “Part of being successful in society as a male is learning to sublimate your brute instincts into productive pursuits.” We’ve already harped on video games. Boys also have a particular challenge with attraction to pornography, the first exposure to which has been happening younger and younger - homeschoolers can be much more atop this prospective problem insofar as they spend much more time with their boys and access points can be in public spaces (but know that most boys report their first exposure is at a friend’s house). Indeed, boys need explicit instruction in the ethics and realities of sex - they will be highly motivated by it, and their education, especially as the most common initiators, should take a different tact than girls. I would also argue that a core part of a boy’s education - in the curriculum, not just modeled or remarked on offhandedly - should be about what it means to become and be a good husband and father.

Boys are also considerably more aggressive (and violent) than girls - though Raising Caine reports that aggression peaks at age 2 and then declines. Adults need to be both attuned to situations where such aggression may get out of hand - but also allow boys to engage in rough and tumble play, including allowing them to resolve conflict themselves (which may mean they cease to play with the worst offenders, teaching the latter responsibility). But one easy boundary can be: never hit a girl. Otherwise, supervision requires judgment, and Pioneers would insist that boys have been too constrained. At the same time, boys may need help in defining their emotions with words to achieve maturity.

If you’re pursuing a boys-first education, reflect deeply what it means to be a man. Dobson suggests being a provider, a leader, a protector, a spiritual guide all qualify. For some conventional takes, what does it mean to be brave, honorable, loyal, resilient, strong, independent, and sacrificial in service of a greater cause? Some readers will bristle at the mention of these as “masculine” - and that is part of the problem, especially in academic social science, that there can be practically no politically correct result in which boys are ever in any way on average better at anything than girls. But if you are looking out for what’s best for your boys, it’s worth contemplating ways in which to frame how he can be the best he can be as a man. If you’re attracted to a boys’ only education - what does that look like for you?

But how might other homeschooling approaches critique and comment on Pioneers? (Note that this is imaginative speculation, not quotation unless specified, from each point of view)

Evidence-based Traditional: While there are clearly different outcomes being achieved for boys and girls in society today, much of the explanation is speculation. You may indulge some of these speculations on the margins - nothing wrong with giving your baby boy a glass bottle rather than a plastic bottle; basically every academically serious pedagogy warns about screentime. Others are dicier - only starting academics at 6 is fine, 8 may be pushing it, some boys can thrive academically much earlier; Montessori very early may be great but research into gender-free “learning styles,” including “kinetic,” has suggested they don’t really exist. It’s certainly not the case that single sex institutions have consistently and dramatically outperformed coed institutions but there may be something to having male teachers and it may be worth prioritizing male adult relationships for your sons. But at the end of the day the evidence points to what works for both genders: direct instruction, 1:1 attention, cultural literacy, etc. And, to put a fine point on it, while it may be valuable to have a male teacher, it’s better to have a female using evidence-based techniques than a haphazard male. There’s also considerable danger if you go the route of deemphasizing humanities if you’re trying to go to college. At the end of the day, we don’t live in ancient Sparta and we’re not hunter-gatherers - we need to train boys to work politely and thrive in an office.
Pragmatists: Of course boys and girls are different. But every boy still needs to learn how to cook and every girl still needs to learn how to balance a checkbook even if, on average, something or another is more interesting. Now certain chores might require more raw strength than another, but all chores need to get done. And there are important differences in how men and women have to approach marriage that should be reflected in their upbringing. Politically incorrect as it is, if a girl happened to really want to be a stay at home mom, advanced academics shouldn’t be crammed down her throat (and the same would be true for a boy who wanted to be a plumber!) Perhaps even less popular: be wary of leaning too much into artificial competition - the transfer of sports skills to other domains is not nearly as helpful as actually working those domains themselves. In the same way you wouldn’t encourage a daughter to really focus on paths to become a princess or influencer, you should be wary of encouraging your son to really focus on paths to become a professional athlete or rock star.

Figure 6. It’s long odds, but you could at least try to set up your daughter to be a princess. You’d want to look at prospective royal boys who were born a few years before your girl and concentrate on teaching her the relevant languages and cultures. You might want to be especially attentive to families that have historically married commoners and have lots of sons to work with as options. Looks matter, of course, and a decent intermediate profession, which may have other uses, may be actress (see Grace Kelly, Megan Markle, and others). If it’s not looking good for matchmaking, you can at least pivot to trying to appear in a movie as a princess. Or, worse comes to worst, some countries sell titles.

PhD Dad Art Robinson: The basics require all three Rs, not just one. Math should be prioritized (for both genders) not because it is interesting but because it is important - we need to be wary of a complementary “feminine” education that would deemphasize it. Getting skilled just takes raw hours and concentration, and compelling your children to do that, six days a week, is the key to education. It’s perfectly fine for a child to be more educationally carefree until age 7, but after that, all but institutionalized children do have the ability to concentrate and, just as importantly, self-teach. They can then compete with themselves to reduce errors over time. Science is a perfectly fine extracurricular for the young - you can get them a chemistry set or ant farm to play with - but it should not be on the curriculum until your children are truly numerate. And don’t forget that sugar may be driving some of these boys’ problems, too - so get rid of it!
PhD Dad Bryan Caplan: If you publicly embrace a boys-first approach, your biggest problem may be what you’re signaling to a feminist society. If this approach is of interest, you may be better off secretly pursuing it while claiming to do something more bland. An early delay of academics won’t really ever be known, so if it works, great. Caplan’s own twins were turned off by the arts and crafts of traditional schools and happily embraced a math and interest-based reading regime. The screentime assault is probably too harsh - most top performing kids probably consume screen leisure in moderation rather than not at all. The least performing kids will indeed be better off on a non-academic track.
Unschooling: While you may get an idea of what a child might be interested in based on gender, don’t prejudge. Just follow their interests, wherever that leads. Your children are individuals, not archetypes of their sex. Delaying boys’ formal academics - to 6 or 8 or beyond - is perfectly okay because the basics of elementary school can be taught very quickly when boys become interested. Lean heavily into giving your boys the autonomy to decide their own time and video games will be much less of a problem. Organized sports may limit the conflict resolution abilities of your boys and otherwise be too constraining - certainly don’t force your boys to try out for anything they don’t want to. Be especially wary of adopting some sort of authoritarian regime of military discipline “to make men.”
Montessori: Delighted to get the endorsement for early years - though Montessori is not just for boys, of course. There’s certainly a mind-body connection that Montessori taps into and can orient children toward the real rather than the virtual while giving them self-mastery. And Montessori has always been sensitive to the right materials for children. But Montessori doesn’t have to just be the preview - this boys-first regime may find deeply attractive the Montessori vision of high school that focuses on real skills. Perhaps the biggest dissent is that Montessori rejects competition in favor of pursuing peace and harmony.
Charlotte Mason: The most important task of any pedagogy needs to be the cultivation of good habits, which Pioneers seem to be open to but should emphasize. Though some may think of Mason as feminine given the focus on reading, the extraordinary dosage of nature - six plus hours a day before six, all afternoon after - is extremely well-suited for boys. And Mason’s explicit commitment to teaching in small dosages may be especially suited for some of the claims regarding boys’ attention. But otherwise Pioneers have completely the wrong idea about reading - it should not be deemphasized or geared toward individual interest - specifically curated books of great adventure must be introduced and then narrated back by the child in order to curate their taste. Similarly, vocational training would be a huge mistake - every person doing every profession will be better off having pursued a fuller education in the humanities. The Pioneer focus on math is fine but unnecessary - drudgery should not determine one’s fate.
Specialists: Gender can inform what you choose to specialize in - though choosing something unconventional for a gender is more likely to attract college admissions officers (i.e. the boy passionate about ballet). As soon as you know what you want your children to specialize in, you should be thinking about how to set your child up for it without delay - you only have so many hours! But the emphasis on competition is great and specialization will lean into that than any other pedagogy. If the variability thesis or the claim that boys are more obsessively focused are correct, specialization may be especially appropriate for boys.

Figure 7. Specialists may controversially argue that while it may be politically correct to say winning isn’t everything, Vince Lombardi was correct to say it was the only thing. And that may even better suit boys than the Pioneer attempt to hold them back in pursuit of a masculine social ideal that isn’t in fact the most masculine.

Unit studies: If you think gender is important, it can affect every unit study. If you don’t, it doesn’t have to. But it’s a limited lens - we shouldn’t just think of everything from the perspective of our gender. Certainly unit studies offers greater opportunity for hands-on scientific experiments than virtually any other pedagogy - and can accommodate boys’ risk taking in enthusiasm for entrepreneurialism.
Mentors: Totally makes sense that boys benefit from male adult mentors and that they are too far and few between - but don’t limit your boys’ mentors to men when the right women are available. Pioneers are also too enthusiastic about activities with other boys (including sports, Boy Scouts, etc.) rather than focusing on adults - modern boys spend more time with other boys their exact same age than ever, and it has had deleterious effects on maturity. Socratic dialogue is easier at 7 or 8 but that doesn’t mean you can’t try earlier and see what happens.
Classical: Education needs to shape men, not give into their base instincts, and that means a special focus on humanities. And yes, it will involve great men history - but it will also involve the best literature ever written and it’s worth reading regardless of what interested you before you knew greatness. This attraction to “real skills” is nonacademic - there’s a whole civilization to inherit and your boys need to be given Aristotle and Caesar to admire. And, certainly, the ancient world has meaningful things to say about gender that modern society has forgotten or purged.
Cyberschoolers: Rather than forbidding video games, why not lean into boys’ interest and gamify education? Math is especially easy to rack up points and compete online - but cyberschooling can also offer deep personalization and training for the economy as it exists today. Pioneers also have to wrestle with what exactly their output is - isn’t the ideal “man” in the eye of the beholder?
Bible first: The sexes were created to be different but complementary and that alone is important to teach in a curriculum. Most of this Pioneer program is fine but it will fail if it doesn’t take into account God’s intentions for men and women and how they have different sensitivities to sin and different strengths. You need to start as soon as possible teaching your children about God and, while it’s great for your sons that men are disproportionately interested in theology, you also need to be sensitive to limiting interests that are harmful and secular, especially on impressionable young minds. Always bear in mind that your son bears the image of God and draw your example from His Scripture.

My own takeaway is that gender differences are real and you should be aware of them and base rates may be good starting places but ultimately your individual sons are going to be different from the average boys. While these questions can be thorny for institutions, even those only with boys, they are far easier in a homeschooling context that follows the talents and interests of the child to any degree, because gender questions will tend to naturally work themselves out.

Writing this piece has been a challenge because I have not found a great guide for how to run a boys-focused program from first principles - at best, boys’ advocates tend to identify a few things to alter from the standard curriculum or generally lambast modern society’s demeaning of boys without an alternative construction from scratch. I also don’t necessarily recognize myself in some of the base rates regarding men and women - I’m very confrontational without being especially competitive, I prefer books to numbers and relationships to things, but I don’t think I’d be considered “feminine”.” That may go to show the importance of dealing with individual boys. Still, time and again when I’ve asked parents what interests their sons, the most common, often exacerbated, answer is “video games” - and that seems common enough to deal with as a potential problem. While creating a “pioneer” approach, I don’t think of it as my favorite launch point for homeschooling my sons, but nothing my wife and I are planning is especially in contrast to it, either: lots of time daily outdoors, substantial math, high quality reading based on interest (including, if applicable, violence), practical skills, and attentiveness to virtue sound great!

There’s also a question of: what would a girls first approach (“Suffragette”?) look like? I have not looked nearly as closely into this, mostly because girls are academically thriving with the current system - if anything, that should mean, if you’re homeschooling, you should be hesitant to make too drastic changes from Traditional school at home if you’re trying to maximize your girls’ academic success. There are seeds of what you might lean into in this essay - e.g. you might expect to start formal academics early, make sure to have a high standards curriculum where girls are aspiring to your approval, and set up female mentors, all of which are consistent with the Traditional system at its best. More off the beaten path, you may think of what the ideal feminine virtues are, conventionally understood to be traits like compassion, grace, empathy, and diligence, and think about how to incorporate them into your curriculum. You should be very much on guard about social media and the prospect of comparing and despairing. And, perhaps the most important thing missing from the standard curriculum: girls need to be highly aware of marriage economics so that they can optimally make one of the most important decisions in their life at the right time (earlier than most think). I only have sons so far and I do find myself hoping that one day I’ll be able to walk a daughter down the aisle!

Grant Reads Books

Minority report