More on the Trouble with Boys

Got a nifty comment from a fellow blogger on our fisking a few days back fisking a patently ridiculous Washington Post Sunday Outlook OpEd claiming that rumors of the problems boys are having in the educational system, like reports of Sam Clemens' death, are greatly exaggerated. Rebecca T. digs a little more deeply into the authors' bogus stats and discovers a little "new math" in the process.

Plus, she discusses the other alarming stat glossed over by the authors:

They completely ignore the astonishing facts that boys account for 90% of all ritalin prescriptions and that 1 in 10 ten-year old boys is on medication for ADD.

It could be argued cogently that a great many of these prescriptions are not needed at all, but are forced on some categories of boys because their "boy-ness" needs to be programmed out in order to achieve the feminist ideal of behavior in the classroom, another topic that's rarely approached in the MSM because it violates the feminst orthodoxy.

And there's more:

Then there's the fact that boys are stuck in special education classes at much higher rates than girls, are responsible for most disciplinary problems and on and on. Basically, since the boys who really matter (rich, white, suburban) are doing just fine, we should continue to mindlessly accept the outdated, disproven notion that differences between boys and girls will never be anything other than manufactured societal constraints.

Don't they have fact checkers at the Washington Post? This sort of amateur statistic spinning really doesn't deserve a prominent spot in a prominent newspaper.

Right on, Rebecca T. We can't wrap this up any better than this.