What Will the Church Do After Scouting?

This article originally ran before the June 28 Supreme Court ruling

For many years, the Boy Scouts of America has provided the core of the LDS Church's program for boys in the U.S. But we're on the verge of losing the Scouting program entirely.

If the courts follow the normal pattern of hostility to religious values even in private organizations, Scouting will be compelled to accept homosexual Scoutmasters. And the day that happens, there is zero chance that the LDS Church will continue to affiliate with a morally defenseless BSA.

And without Scouting in the church, is there really anything for boys at all?

And does anybody care?

You see, boys don't have it as easy as some hyper-feminist mythmakers would have us think.

Remember back in 1992 when we were flooded with news stories about how psychologists had discovered that girls were being downright persecuted in the public schools? According to the latest research, we were told, girls who enter the middle grades full of enthusiasm are stifled and silenced because boys are always getting called on in class, while girls are ignored.

Wow. Something had to be done, everyone could see that!

The trouble was, this flew in the face of my own experience.

I was an eager-beaver boy in school, but I learned quickly that the only way I'd get along with my (usually female) teachers was to act just like the smart girls did. The boys who didn't were always getting in trouble.

I found out for myself, years later, when I was given a "problem" primary class to teach. The wicked 9-year-old boys had driven three female teachers to quit in the past couple of months. In those days, when primary met in the afternoon, male teachers were unheard of. But as a self-employed writer, I could take them on. Guess what? The boys were no problem at all. I wasn't bothered that they needed to bounce out of their chairs now and then. I understood their need to compete and show off. We had a great class.

Growing Up in a World Run by Women

These days, male teachers are more common in both grade school and primary, but the majority of teachers in both institutions are women. And that means that boys grow up in an environment, at school and at church, where their normal behavior is viewed as a problem, while the normal behavior of girls is considered perfectly acceptable.

A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly (Christina Hoff Sommers, "The War Against Boys") demonstrates that the claim that girls are being mistreated and put down in the schools is not only bad science but is the opposite of the truth. Because the research fit the preconceptions of the politically correct, it was promulgated through the press almost without a single doubt or question. But in fact, all the credible, peer-reviewed research shows that it is boys who enter school eager and hopeful, and come out of it far more likely to have been put down, shackled, discouraged, broken--too often turned into "failures" or "problems" by a system determined to make them behave in ways that are completely foreign to their nature.

And even though many educators and researchers are beginning to call attention to the oppression of boys in the educational system, there's still plenty of pressure in the other direction, from people who believe that the only cure for all of society's ills is to get boys to behave like girls.

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