Opinion: PragerU's Marissa Streit Says America's Boys Are Missing Fathers at Home and Men in the Classroom
The PragerU CEO argues the 'boy crisis' is at root an education problem and calls on men to take responsibility for forming the next generation.
This is a summary of an opinion column. The views below belong to its author, Marissa Streit, the CEO of PragerU, not to RightNewsRightNow.
Streit starts from a familiar worry. Young men are falling behind in family and career, and many struggle with loneliness, anger and lack of direction. Her question is who is supposed to be forming boys into men.
Her answer is historical. For much of American history, she writes, boys learned from their fathers, mentors, older relatives and community leaders, and that included scripture, history, duty, courage and self-control. She says that changed when education was standardized under reformers like Horace Mann. Women became the answer to a need for teachers, and Streit says cost was part of it: Mann asked in 1838 why towns should pay male teachers $25 or $30 a month when women would do the job for about half. By 1870, she writes, nearly 90% of Massachusetts teachers were women. Industrialization pulled fathers out of the home and workshop and left them mostly as breadwinners.
Her numbers for today: nearly 80% of public school teachers are women, and about one in five American children, more than 15 million, live with their mothers but not their fathers. From the share of female elementary teachers, she says a simplified model suggests nearly half of children could finish kindergarten through fifth grade without a male teacher. She is careful to say this is not a charge that female teachers do worse. Women "stepped into a space too many men vacated."
Her argument is that the two gaps stack. Many boys lack a father at home and a man at school during the years they build confidence and resilience. She says no new government program will fix it. Her remedy is that boys need more male teachers, involved fathers, intellectuals who treat childhood education as seriously as geopolitics, and politicians who care who shapes a child's mind.
Her closing challenge is aimed at men: many complain education is "too feminine" while treating it as a woman's job. "American education can no longer remain a no-man's land."
Keep in mind this is one advocate's thesis. The historical claims and the statistics are Streit's, and we have not verified them. The column does not weigh other explanations for why boys struggle.