A Path to Manhood by Paul Cumbo (Book Excerpt)

Is the Intellectual Playground Closed for Boys and Men?

If you’re like most young guys—at least in the United States— there’s a good chance school doesn’t feel much like an intellectual playground. For a lot of teenage boys and young men, school seems like the opposite of adventure. This can be pretty discouraging, and I think it’s important to see how it’s affecting this generation of young guys.

We can look at a few statistics that suggest something is going on in education, and it doesn’t look great for boys and men. Consider reading, which is one of the most fundamental elements of education. First off, everyone knows that boys on average don’t read as much as girls, which is probably as much temperamental as cultural. Second, academic achievement gaps are big, particularly in verbal areas, and boys aren’t faring well. Richard Reeves (now president of the American Institute for Boys and Men) and Ember Smith authored a 2022 Brookings Institute research brief that puts this in stark terms, outlining a number of statistics. Among the most striking is the gap in reading achievement from grades four to eight: “Girls outperform boys in reading by more than 40 percent of a grade level in every state. In ten states . . . girls are more than a full grade level ahead of boys.” The same document highlights the gap in on-time high school graduation rates, where the researchers estimated girls were ahead by 6.5 percentage points based on 2021 data.

And then there’s college enrollment. As the aforementioned Richard Reeves has rather famously pointed out, the gender gap has not only reversed; it has also widened. There was a 13 percent gender gap in college enrollment in 1972 in favor of men when the education bill Title IX was passed to try to address it. That gap has not only reversed, but it has also grown wider today than it was back then. There are many more young women enrolled in college than young men. The latest data, which traces back to US enrollment in fall of 2021, indicates that for full-time undergraduate enrollment, it was 58 percent women and 42 percent men, and the available projections suggest a similar gap will persist for the next decade.

In terms of who is actually graduating from college within six years (or, for that matter, at all), the percentage reflects a notable female majority. Considerably more women than men are entering both medical school and law school in the United States.

What about reading, beyond the context of education? Research from more than a decade ago showed most books are purchased, borrowed, and read by girls and women. While more recent research from the Pew Research Center asserts that women are still more likely to read in general, it does suggest that when it comes to digital format books (e.g., ebooks and audiobooks), men and women are equally likely to read. I find it interesting that these different media formats appear to be more appealing than print books to some men. Anecdotally, I know that listening to audiobook versions of the works I assign in class has benefited a good number of my male students. Some of them, who would probably not read print books voluntarily, have embraced audiobooks outside of school, too. This seems to be a positive development, but there’s still work to do when it comes to encouraging boys and men to read.

Any one of these facts indicating an educational gap might not bear much significance on its own, but taken together, they clearly suggest boys and young men are trending away from the kind of intellectual pursuits at the heart of formal education— especially at the university level. What does this mean about the kind of thinking—the depth of thinking—men are doing? Boys and men make up half of the global population—are we spending enough time in the intellectual playground? Maybe not. I want boys and men to rediscover the joy of learning.

Before I go any further, I want to be sure to mention that learning takes many forms, and that there’s more to it than reading. I am not of the camp that believes everyone needs to go to college. While I am troubled by the declining numbers of young men enrolling in and graduating from college, I also acknowledge that there are many reasons for that. Our culture would do well to encourage boys and young men to pay more attention to other potential paths, including military service, as well as trades like electrical maintenance, carpentry, plumbing, transportation, and construction. Richard Reeves, whose research I mentioned earlier, has offered some insightful recommendations about alternatives to college—specifically apprenticeships—that might provide ideal paths for young men to pursue.

Regardless of whether young men are pursuing college or some other vocational path, though, we have to be careful not to fall into the same trap that much of our culture does, which is to draw some artificial distinction between “intellectual” men and “real” men. Our contemporary cultural narrative has succeeded to some extent in portraying the arts, for example, as inherently feminine pursuits—and that reductive mentality is not good for men or women. Spending time in the intellectual playground isn’t mutually exclusive of “non-intellectual” endeavors, whether you’re a college guy or not. You can be an electrician and study Aristotle. You can go hard at football and lose yourself in poetry. You can be into hunting and be fascinated by geometry. You can love both comic books and Shakespeare.

It’s (apparently) controversial to suggest it, but I think one of the things that would help this situation for boys is to have more male teachers. The K–12 teaching workforce is overwhelmingly female, and that may suggest something to boys about who school is “for.” Imagine how the educational landscape might be different for boys if they had a more balanced combination of men and women teaching them, and saw both as embodying what it means to teach and learn. At the private high school for boys where I teach, for example, the breakdown is roughly 50 percent male teachers and 50 percent female—and I think our young men benefit from that balance of faculty influence.

Paul Cumbo is an author, teacher, and entrepreneur. He owns an editorial services company and co-founded the Camino Institute, which offers service and retreat programs in the Dominican Republic. He lives with his wife and three children near Buffalo, New York. Visit: https://www.globepequot.com/books/9781493089000