“The Grim Future for British Boys”

In recent decades, school curricula have been deliberately changed to be more girl friendly. These major efforts have aimed at narrowing the supposed “pay gap” between men and women. Scholarships have been established to boost female university participation. Women’s health is often prioritized in policymaking. Some governments, like that of Great Britain, even have a “Minister for Women.” Yet, one of the big casualties of this one-sided effort is that boys and men are failing abysmally.

As the Sunday Telegraph announced, boys in Britain are facing a “grim future” (The Telegraph, March 31, 2024). For decades in the developed world, women have graduated from university at far higher rates than men. Boys’ standardized test scores are significantly lower than those of girls, and men are dropping out of the workforce at record levels. Despite these alarming statistics, few seem to care. Why are boys and men stuck in this downward spiral while girls and women are constantly improving? Some suggest that boys’ failure in school leads them to expect to underperform in the workplace. Andy Eadie, assistant headteacher at Cardinal Langley school in Rochdale, UK, observed that many teachers “write off” boys when they enter the classroom, and thus make no effort to help them succeed. Low expectations can also breed low performance. And the increasing number of boys growing up in homes without fathers means many young men have no role models for success.

While the idea of the intact family, with a married father and mother, has been devalued and put down for decades, even secular research has concluded that children from intact families are more successful and healthier than those from single-parent homes. This principle is clear in the Bible as well. God created the first family with both a mother and a father. As our civilization experiments with novel social roles and politics-driven values, our children and ultimately society suffer the consequences. To learn more about this sobering trend, watch our Tomorrow’s World Viewpoint video “The Suppression of Males.”