This post is a talk I gave earlier this week — Boys Are Falling Behind: Overschooling Is the Reason. Here’s a LINK to the slides.
Below is a brief overview of the argument, but I recommend looking at the slides to get the full story.
- Males are increasingly falling behind in our educational system
- Compared to females, males:
- Get worse grades and lower test scores
- Graduate high school at lower rates
- Are less likely to attend and graduate from college
- Have higher rates of mental illness
- Are much more likely to suffer deaths of despair
- Experience more social isolation
- The most common HS grade for girls is A; for boys it’s B
- 88% of girls graduated from high school on time (i.e., 4 years after enrolling), compared to 82% of boys
- The male graduation rate is only a little higher than the 80% among poor students
- Boys make up 65% of students in special education
- They are 4 times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD
- 70% of high school valedictorians are girls.
- Women account for:
- 60% of college undergraduates
- 60% of graduate students
- 80% of vet school students
- The majority of students in dental, medical, and law school
- College admissions officers routinely admit boys with lower academic records than girls in order to keep a roughly even sex ratio
Maybe this is a SCHOOL problem
- Schools are all about control
- The biggest fear teachers have, especially newbies, is losing control
- Other professionals work with voluntary clients
- Teachers work with conscripts, compelled to be in the classroom
- By law, by parents, and by the job market
- They work alone
- They’re vastly outnumbered
And, oh yes, students don’t like all this control, and for good reason
Testosterone is anathema to school control
- Boys are inherently more prone to aggression and physical activity
- Schools have no tolerance for either
- Teacher wants you to
- Sit still at your desk
- Keep quiet until you’re called on
- Ask permission for anything you want to do – and expect no for the answer
- This is not natural for any young person, and especially boys
We’re overschooling our young people
- No one would ever say that Americans are overeducated, but perhaps we are overschooled
- School devours a huge portion of our lives, when we’re constantly preparing for a future that is continually being deferred
- It sharply constrains personal development during our long years in the little seats
- It’s teaching kids to keep out of trouble and avoid taking risks
- Social and economic progress depends on a population that is willing to take risks and rebound from failure
- Exactly the kinds of actions that schools teach students to avoid
- If we inflict less schooling on children, we may be more effective at ensuring that they will become better educated
Dear David
Can you cite an empirical basis for this assertion?
We were ‘over schooling’ boys for centuries before girls were allowed a place in the school.
Rather, you might study, and then comment on, progressive societies – e.g., the Nordics, New Zealand, US states and Canadea etc that have closed the gender gap in terms of educational attainment.
At the rate the US is going right now, a range of ideologies will continue to be presented to young men – at the expense of their education, in its broadest, most progressive and academic sense. I’m not sure that could be termed either ‘schooling’ or ‘education’.
Respectfully Regina
On Thu, 11 Sept 2025 at 14:00, David Labaree on Schooling, History, and
We were indeed overschooling boys for years before girls were allowed in schools. And as you note, males are being inundated with ideologies that are socially dysfunctional. But schools are structured in a way that is unhealthy for young people — sitting all day being talked at and told to sit still. We’re rewarding compliance more that learning, and boys in particular are not wired to take this sitting down.
I appreciated the analysis of the current environment and would agree that America’s and, by extension, the West is it over educated. I might or agree that we are over schooled.