Where the Boys Are...

Well, for sure, they're increasingly either far from the top of their class if they're even in school at all, USAToday reports. And in college, the ladies are also shouldering the gents aside:

Cause for celebration — or for concern?

Before you answer, consider the perspective of Jim McCorkell, founder of Admission Possible, a St. Paul program to help low-income high school kids prepare for college. Last year, 30% of the students were boys. This fall, that has inched up to 34%, but only because "we actually did a little affirmative action," McCorkell says. "If we had a tie (between a male and a female applicant), we gave it to a boy."

As women march forward, more boys seem to be falling by the wayside, McCorkell says. Not only do national statistics forecast a continued decline in the percentage of males on college campuses, but the drops are seen in all races, income groups and fields of study, says policy analyst Thomas Mortenson, publisher of the influential Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Since 1995, he has been tracking — and sounding the alarm about — the dwindling presence of men in colleges.

Why are we not surprised? America's education system seems, particularly in liberal urban areas, to be geared to favor girls over boys in a misguided attempt to redress an alleged historical grievance. Fact is, as an unbiased sociologist or psychologist will tell you (if you can find one), rambunctious boys actually need a little more attention than girls in school where boys' naturally restless natures allow them to be easily distracted. Girls are generally more inclined to pay attention in class and deport themselves with some decorum. (Although admittedly, there is increasing evidence that even this gender-based niceness is unraveling in inner city schools across the US.)

This perhaps surprising gender disparity actually gets worse in college where the percentage of males admitted vs. females is now dropping well below 50%, a ratio that's even worse when you count the number of males who are humanities majors.

Of course, as Larry Summers found out at Harvard, we're playing with fire by even hinting that something's amiss. But something is, and it gets continuously swept under the carpet with only occasional media surfacings like this one. Could it be that all the anti-male drivel we've endured from academia for the past quarter century is finally coming home to roost? Could these results be attributable at least in part to the relentless male-bashing prevalent on college campuses, promoted by doctrinaire feminists less interested in teaching Sylvia Plath's poetry than in using her as the poster girl for Male Awfulness and Gender Victimhood? Could it be that the media, with its endless glorification of the banal, is far more intent on promoting a female president in 2008 than it is in doing its job to foster a discussion of the issues?

It's probably all of the above and a whole lot more. The culture is, in the end, the milieu in which we live, and that culture has become increasingly curdled by our patriotic friends on the left who've taken control of our schools, courts, and cultural institutions with devastating effectiveness.

Bad results are what you get when a hard-left educational establishment, left unsupervised and resistant toward the thought of accountability, devotes far more energy and taxpayer dollars to social engineering than it does to doing its job--teaching kids to read, write, calculate, and comprehend. You can't spend decades rewriting textbooks to service a discredited ideology--while bashing a race or a gender mercilessly--without eventually causing some kind of drastically negative effect in the populace of designated bashees. (Luther may have an opinion on this as well.)

Meanwhile, a hat tip to Instapundit, where we found this useful story--which, however, comes to a sunnier conclusion in lefty-dominated USAToday than it does in HazZzmat.