Anybody who are ever witnessed a teacher gathering her kindergarten class around in a circle for a lesson has seen first hand the difference between boys and girls. The boys pay attention for a second or two and then begin poking their neighbor on the circle mat. The girls are the first to raise their hands and gaze on their teacher with adoring eyes. Of course, this is a gross generalization. There are plenty of boys who can sit still and plenty of girls who are poking their neighbors, but IN GENERAL, that’s what happens.

In recent decades, as other forms of sexism have fallen away, girls have taken this behavioral advantage and have kicked academic ass. Go, girls!

But what about the boys? Should we care? Girls become women who drop out of the workforce to have kids, and men dominate all areas of power. As I look at the masthead of my favorite journals and magazines, men outnumber women by huge numbers. Academia, government, business, medicine, law are still male-dominated fields. So, should we care that schools don’t seem particularly accommodating to the wiggles and short attention span of boys?

Dave Leonhardt in the New York Times says we should care, because in the past, the most wiggly of boys had a safety net of working class jobs. You could bomb out in school, but still have a nice job when you graduated. Those jobs do not exist anymore. To survive in the new economy, boys need to survive school. So, schools will have to figure out how to educate boys or the culture of boys will have to change.