A kindergarten teacher named Ms. Jefferson stood at the front of the room one morning holding wooden skewers, cotton balls, and craft glue, and announced that everyone was going to make a pussywillow.
A little boy named Jason had other plans. "I don't wanna make a pussywillow," he said. "I wanna make a lightsaber." She ignored him. So Jason glued a cotton ball to the end of his skewer, pointed it at her, and delivered the only line the situation called for:
"I find your lack of faith… disturbing."
She sent him to the principal.
By the end of his second week of kindergarten, Jason had been sent to the principal's office four times. He came home crying.
"School is stupid,” he said, “I hate school."
That story comes from Dr. Leonard Sax, a physician, psychologist, and New York Times bestselling author of Boys Adrift, who's spent the last 25 years visiting more than 500 schools.
Here's what he’s observed in school after school: The normal things boys have always done—pointing a finger and going "bang, bang," drawing a picture of a sword, throwing a snowball, turning a craft project into a lightsaber—have all been reclassified as misbehavior. The stuff that used to get an eye-roll now gets a behavior plan and a reputation as a troublemaker (or worse) and a five-year-old boy learns, faster than you'd believe, that the place he’s supposed to spend his days is a place where being a boy is a problem.
When Sax graduated high school in the late '70s, boys outnumbered girls among the top students (valedictorians, honor roll students, and award winners) and not just at his school, but nationwide. Back then people were rightly worried that schools were shortchanging girls, and a lot of good work went into fixing that.
But we blew right past 50-50. Today it's flipped, and hard.
Girls now outnumber boys more than two to one among high school valedictorians. In the top 10% of students in the country, it's two girls for every boy. Girls are outperforming boys by wide margins in every subject, K through 12—including math and science. And young women are now much more likely than their brothers to go to college at all.
This gap didn't open up because girls suddenly got dramatically smarter. As Sax puts it, the gap is growing not because girls are doing better—scores are cratering across the board—but because boys are doing worse. Put simply, the boys are checking out. A lot of them are checking out as early as kindergarten.
I tell you because it points at something a lot of parents feel but can't quite name—that sense that your child, and maybe your boy especially, is being asked to squeeze himself into a mold that doesn't fit, and getting punished for the parts of himself that stick out.
The entire idea behind all of our products and resources is that learning should be shaped around the actual child in front of you: how he thinks, what lights him up, and what makes him perk up instead of check out. A kid who's decided he hates learning isn't broken—he’s often just accepted what the adults in positions of power have told him about himself.
But give a boy like Jason a story with some adventure and some stakes and a reason to care, and watch what happens to the kid who says he "hates school."
You’ll learn really quickly that he was never the problem.
Our Back to School sale is still going. It’s the biggest one we run all year, up to 70% off our best-loved resources. If you've got a kid who's started to believe that learning is something that happens to him instead of something he gets to do, this is a pretty good week to try something new:
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Back to School Bundle — $119.88 (down from $419.44). All 14 children's books, plus every workbook, parent guide, and audiobook.
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Family Starter Pack — $229.95. Everything above, plus all three volumes of America's History with the full curriculum.
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Mega Bundle — $529 (down from $1,371.20). The whole library, teen guidebooks and Choose Your Consequence novels included.
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Business Basics Grade 3 — $39. Our new financial literacy course for 8- and 9-year-olds.
Somewhere out there right now is a five-year-old holding a cotton ball he wishes were a lightsaber, being told to sit down and make a pussywillow.
It’s up to us to raise kids who never stop dreaming of lightsabers.
We’ve got to protect them from people and places that punish them for just being kids, and who see danger instead of beauty in boys and girls being different in real ways.
— Connor
