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December 1, 2004
The War Against Boys
by Kevin Swanson
You may have seen a recent news headline: "New
scientific research indicates - Boys are Different from
Girls." That assertion should be laughably obvious to the
rest of us, but what is laughably obvious happens also to be
a serious flaw in the predominant worldview operational
today. Unfortunately, we have not taking this basic
assumption into account in the education of our children.
We give girls and boys the same education, the same toys,
the same teachers, the same expectations, and the same
functions and goals in life, and then we wonder why they
are frustrated, angry, aberrent, and purposeless at 25, 30, or
40 years of age.
Dr. Christine Hoff Somers is the author of an eye-opening,
new book called, "The War Against Boys." While
interviewing her on my weekly radio program,
"Generations," she told the listening audience that the
modern school is dangerous for boys. It is producing boys
that are feminized, awkward, rebellious, or otherwise
ill-prepared for life. Only 43% of students attending
college today are boys and that number continues to drop.
Schools are increasingly designed for girls. Meanwhile,
boys are disenfranchised and disinterested. The removal of
a boy's unique purpose and preparation in life, and setting
him in a girl's world, putting him in competition with girls,
will only produce devastating consequences for our social
and economic systems. Actually, this devastation is
already here. The number of children born without fathers,
where the father is nowhere to be found, has risen from 5%
to 35% only in the last 30 years.
This problem is not limited to conventional schools. It's
happening in homeschools too. We woke up to this reality
when my wife and I hit a crisis point with our son. We had
read somewhere that boys in the homeschool easily give
way to docility, laziness, and sometimes rebellion, and it
was plain that these issues were already hitting a little too
close to home. While, it is important to hold a young man
responsible for his own sin, we wanted to hold ourselves
accountable for the proper raising of our son. As I listened
to dozens of other stories, I came to discover that this
problem is rampant throughout the homeschooling
movement. The reality crashed in on us like a ton of bricks.
We had inadvertently bought into an egalitarian viewpoint
on education, and it was hurting our son. What my son
needed was a man in his life. And God was pointing at me.
First, we should resolve the matter that differences in
natural abilities and designed purposes do not contribute to
an essential difference in value. A man can not birth a
baby, and therefore has a different function. It would be
futile to complain about it. He should just accept the fact.
But the fact that a man cannot birth a baby and a woman
can, does not mean that a woman is essentially better than a
man. The same can be said for any other distinctive
purposes God has instituted for men and women.
Goals - What We're Shooting For
When I trained my son to shoot guns, I would tell him, "If
you can't see the target, it's doubtful you'll ever hit it."
The same thing applies to raising children. Unless you
have a clear and correct target in your mind's eye for those
children, the arrows may very well fly far affield. You need
to have a goal in mind, because the goal will shape the
preparation of a child for life and eternity. I would
recommend that every family start with the Bible, if they
want a clear vision for the raising of children. It is far more
important to review the Creator's Operations Manual
before launching out to do anything as important as raising
children. So what's the vision? What's the goal?
In some ways, we are raising our children for the same
purpose. We want every one of our children to glorify God
and enjoy him forever. We want them to pursue his
kingdom's interests.
But it is pretty obvious from the Bible that from the
beginning there was always a difference between the girls
and boys in nature, function, and goals. Of course, man has
perverted these differences and the end result is feminism,
abuse of women, feminization of men, and the rest. Today
we sit in a gender blender. For parents with vision, for
parents who take the raising of their children seriously, we
must go back to the Owner's Manual, and define a vision
for raising our sons and daughters.
God's Goals for Girls
The woman was created to be a "helper" for the man
(Genesis 2:18). This is the broad target or goal we have in
mind. A more narrow target subsumed in the function of
"helper" is "home manager" (Titus 2:5). While the term is
translated in some Bible versions as "keepers at home," it is
better rendered "home manager." Part of the woman's
capacity of "helper" is to be a "home manager." Some will
jump to the conclusion that this means a girl is limited to
classes on changing diapers and how-to-wear-an-apron.
But that conclusion is to limit the vision to the Titus 2:5
role. Her role is far more comprehensive than that. She is
a "helper," which, according to Proverbs 31, includes
buying fields, taking care of the poor, and a number of
other things. Of course, central to her God-given duties is
the managing of the home. But her broad purpose is to be a
"helper" to her husband. She may, in the future, help her
husband in missionary medical work, because she has
learned medicine in an RN or an MD program. Therefore,
the preparation of a young lady must keep these two goals
in mind. One day she will be a helper and a home manager.
If her preparation ignores these important goals or if her
homeschooling and college-level work trains her NOT to be
a good helper and a good home manager, it will be a
defective preparation. It is hardly worth mentioning that
much of today's preparatory programs for young women
not only ignores these goals, but despises them. That is
because the worldview of the broad culture today is
definitively egalitarian.
God's Goals for Guys
These being the specific, creation-mandated goals for our
young ladies, what then are the goals God has laid out for
our young men? Briefly, here is a list.
1. Dominion - Gen. 1:26. (Dominion is effectively ruling
the world about us. We take rocks and oil and turn them
into cars and computers. We make wise use of the animals,
property, environment, family, church, and state, by
applying the absolute principles of truth and right found in
the Bible.)
2. Responsible for Material Sustenance for his Family -
Exod. 21:10, 1 Tim. 5:7,8
3. Fighters - Deut. 20:1-5, Neh. 4:14, Ps. 144:1
4. Heads (Leaders) - Eph. 5:23
5. Sacrificial Lovers - Eph. 5:25-28
6. Resident Theologians - 1 Cor. 14:34-35
While the Bible directs these tasks to men, of course there
are times when women are called to do these same things.
But these are the normative functions of men (as defined by
God), and therefore must be the special focus to which we
train our boys. If our boys are raised without a vision for
dominion, without a sense of responsibility for taking care
of a family, without a sense of protecting the family,
without leadership experience and training, without
learning how to let his sister go first in the food line (in the
quintessential act of boyhood sacrifice), or without the
basic ability to teach the doctrines of the Bible in the home,
then he has not been trained to be the man that God wants
him to be. His preparation will be defective and he will not
be trained to be a man. If this vital preparation is neglected
on a widespread basis, we will have a nation without men.
Turning a Boy into a Man
If the goals of a girl and a boy are different, then it would
make sense that their preparation would be different.
There are several practical ways in which the training of a
boy differs from the training of a girl:
1. When a boy is young he does spend more time with his
mother, but as he gets older, he will need a man to properly
mentor him into manhood. If a boy is to grow into a man,
the best mentor that can show him how to be a man will
always be a man. Ideally, this will be his own father. If,
for some reason, it is not possible for a father to invest
concerted time into his boy's life, his parent(s) should seek
out an internship, an apprenticeship, or something like it
under the tutelage of a godly, dependable man in the church
or perhaps in the homeschooling movement that can serve
as a mentor. This has been the tradition in human society
for thousands of years prior to the importation of a statist
education system (Matt. 4:21, 1 Sam. 17:15, 2 Kg. 4:18,19,
Exod. 13:14, Deut. 6:20-25, etc.).
2. A boy should learn to treat girls different than how he
treats boys. As the sacrificial lover, he must learn to treat
girls with a tender respect, "as the weaker vessel" (1 Peter
3:7). Several weeks ago, we took care of a couple of young
boys whose parents needed a little extra help. From the
outset I told the boys that they could wrestle with my son
and punch him around a little. They could even sit on him
if the situation called for it. "But," I told them, "That
doesn't go for my daughters. I don't want you hitting these
girls."
The same rule goes for debate. We can teach girls to fight
like boys in debate or we can teach boys to hurt girls by not
allowing for differences. Both young men and young
women should learn to debate. But if we do not allow for
the differences, debate will be thoroughly feminized, which
doesn't do boys any good. Or it will be thoroughly
masculinized, in which case women are left out, or they
will be forced into an unnatural masculine mold, or they
will be mistreated. The way a boy debates with a girl will
differ from how he debates with a boy.
3. The environment of learning for a boy may be a mixture
of home, classroom, or business. He should be trained for
the environment in which one day he will find himself - and
that is business and home. While classrooms may have an
occasional use (such as for training in rhetoric), the
principle of life-integration is often lost in that
environment. As a home educated boy gets older, he should
spend more time outside of the home. He should learn
what it takes to take dominion and provide a sustenance for
his own family.
4. A boy is a fighter, by nature. He turns a doll into a gun,
and runs around the house shooting the bad guys.
(Meanwhile, his sister takes the toy guns and turns it into
play dolls.) I have encountered both liberals and
conservatives alike that want to suppress this God-given
ability in their sons. The problem, however, is not with the
boy's inclination to fight. Like everything else in our
children, this inclination needs to be shaped and honed
according to the standards of God's laws. Boys need to be
taught two things about fighting - what to fight and how to
fight. They should learn to fight their own sin, bad
worldviews in the realm of ideas, and real enemies. While
there is a place for self defense and real warfare, our boys
need to know that the hottest war of all is the war of ideas.
The greatest fighters of all time were stalwarts like
Ambrose, Augustine, Patrick, Boniface, Martin Luther,
John Knox, William Wilberforce, and missionaries like
William Carey and John Paton. Over the centuries of the
Christian church, courageous men of faith have brought
down strongholds of Satan's kingdom and bastions of
man-centered power-bases by holding up the Word of truth,
and casting down imaginations and every high thing that
exalts itself above the knowledge of God. These should be
the real role models for our boys. I highly recommend
biographies such as the "Leaders in Action" series, as a
terrific way to transfer this vision to our boys.
In Conclusion
Our worldview does make a difference. If we build our
children's education on the egalitarian worldview that most
of us have learned from our university training and the 6:00
news, and if we ignore the Maker's Instructions, we will
pay. Our children will pay. When rains come and floods
rise, the house that was built on the sand, the house that
was NOT built on the words of Jesus in the Bible, that
house will come tumbling down. It may not be ten years
now. It may be forty years from now. But the house will
come down. Let us build our house, let us build our
children's future on the Rock.
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