Tuesday, December 13, 2011

What I learned growing up

I grew up in the 1960s, and learned some things:
"Look Ma, no hands" often are the last words uttered before a trip to the Doctor (I don't think I went to an Emergency Room until I had kids of my own).

If you fight with your older brother and put holes in the wall, you learn how to hang dry wall.

If you play with green army men with 2cents, you might get your eyebrows burned off.

Camping in February in Maine gives you a chance to play Capture The Flag on the frozen lake.  Oh yeah - nobody freezes to death, because the Scoutmasters show you how not to.

It's really cool when you find a sport that you excel at, to the point where you almost win a race at the state Track Meet championships.

In other words, I grew up as a perfectly unremarkable boy in the 1960s and 70s.  Six looks at today's education establishment, and wonders whether they are essentially criminalizing being boys:
We do our boys no favor by wrapping them in a blanket and protecting them from all of life's ups and downs. We're not protecting them at all, we're punishing them for being boys and setting them up for a life of frustration, depression and failure. We're not teaching that 9 year old to respect women, we're teaching him to distrust women. We're requiring him to grow up misogynistic. And we wonder at the divorce and domestic violence rate in this country. We're not teaching that first grader fairness, we're teaching him that it's better to be a victim than a survivor. Better to lose a fight and take a beating (or worse) than win at all costs. We're teaching them that being a boy is wrong and that they're somehow bad just for being what they are.
I think that we need a group to start filing class action sexual harassment lawsuits against a bunch of school systems.

I look at #2 Son, who asked me to get my Enfield so he could show me what he'd learned at JROTC rifle drill.  I remember #1 Son in Little League, with a fantastic defensive game (four unassisted infield put-outs) so that Coach gave him the game ball for the second game in a row.

Boys need to be boys, for their own sake.  For the sake of the girls who some day will hope to marry decent men.  And for the sake of society, who need men like Six in each generation.

9 comments:

Rev. Paul said...

I have long muted the sound on practically every commercial that features a family: the dad is invariably a clueless dolt who needs some smart-@$$ kid or condescending wife to tell him what to do.

Feh.

Midwest Chick said...

Totally agree. It's why more boys than girls are put on Ritalin as well--trying to drug the boy out of them. It's a crime that's being perpetuated in our K-12 educational system and beyond.

Six said...

Thanks BP. Your boys are indeed lucky to have a dad like you. It's up to us, we dangerous old men, to keep the flame burning and teach our boys how to be men.

Anonymous said...

Guffaw in AZ er the sparkly one is a little more than metrosexual.

Dwight Brown said...

I want to wait until I get home to explain why I'm asking this question, but: Borepatch, have you ever read Ruark's The Old Man and The Boy?

Borepatch said...

Dwight, I haven't. I like his stuff (and own a couple of his books), but not that one.

TOTWTYTR said...

The is part of the "War Against Boys" about which you'll find a lot of posts on Instapundit.

It's why boys are diagnosed with ADHD at a 3:1 ratio with girls.

Modern education is spending a lot of money (ours) and time to make boys more passive and more like girls.

It's time that it stopped.

And yes it's time for some parents to start filing litigation against school systems and their employees.

SiGraybeard said...

This is a story that really doesn't get talked about as much as it should.

Leftists (who, of course, run public education) decided that girls weren't getting enough attention, and weren't good at the hard subjects because boisterous boys crowded them out. So they started to structure classes to ignore boys. Boys would be passed over to get the girls to answer.

This is part of why boys are over medicated and part of why boys are letting girls be dominant in much of life.

Have you seen The Dangerous Book for Boys? It's an attempt to help parents raise boys.

David said...

The other day my wife walked outside and saw our 14 year old son and his friend from down the street running along the top of the block wall fence in our back yard. She yelled at them to stop but they just kept going. She ran into the house telling me what she saw and was stunned when my reply was "So what?"

Wife: "Stop them, they could get hurt."
Me: "Yep, probably will eventually."
Wife: "So go stop them."
Me: "Why?"
Wife: "So that they don't get hurt."
Me: "You should be glad they are not trying to ride their bikes along the top of the wall, or building a ramp in order to jump their bikes over it."
Wife: "They wouldn't do something that stupid."
Me: "ten minutes ago you would have thought the same thing about them running on the wall."
Wife: (after a pause) "You act like you don't care."
Me: "I care. I'm the one who is going to have to teach him first aid for whatever he hurts, or drive him to the hospital and sit with him while they stitch him up, or cast him."
Wife: "Then stop him."
Me: "Why? He's a boy. If its not running on the wall he will be doing something else like jumping off the roof..."
Wife: "But, but, um, you..."
Me: (interupting) He's a boy, and regardless of the fact that I constantly tell people that 'boys are full of stupid', he's actually fairly smart, he's athletic, and he's fairly tough (for a 14 year old). But he is a boy, he will survive this. This is nothing, wait until you see what he comes up with over the next 10 years."

About this time both boys walked through the back door. My son was limping and his friend had blood smeared on his forearm. As they walked past us and opened the frig door I asked "Any bones sticking out through the skin?"

My son shook his head "No" as he grabbed a couple sodas.

My wife blurted out "What happened?"

As they ran back out the door, his friend yelled over his shoulder "we fell off the wall."