Male Call

Regarding “The Trouble With Boys” (by Michael D’Antonio, Dec. 4): Not only was vocational education once taught in public schools, but working in steel mills and at other physical-labor jobs used to be respected work for strong, aggressive males. Nearly all the classes that once made school tolerable for lively, active boys now have been shut down because of financial cutbacks.

As a school psychologist with the Los Angeles Unified School District--I’ve been with the district since 1960--I haven’t seen a tool cart or large block construction materials at the elementary level in 25 years. These hands-on experiential activities used to be a treasured part of the curriculum.

What’s worse is that we have cut back on physical education, the arts and music, all of which gave children a chance to discover and develop their talents and skills. I’ll never forget the little gang of “hoods” at 36th Street School who made and decorated drums out of large ice cream containers and put on a drum concert for the rest of the school. It changed their lives.

Perhaps the use of Ritalin would diminish if we offered our energetic, wiggly children such creative alternatives.

Josie Levy Martin

Los Angeles

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When I went to elementary school in the late 1960s, I was diagnosed as hyperactive. The other children teased me because I had a slight British accent and a mild case of dyslexia. I was classed as a “mentally gifted minor” and given Ritalin for several years.

My experience with the drug was positive. Far from inducing a slack-jawed, drooling state of somnolence, it made me feel calm and in control of myself. I quickly got over my reading difficulties, managed to get through my daily homework in an hour and was able to spend the rest of the day happily absorbed in a book of my choice. Ritalin really helped my self-esteem.

David G. Barrett

Costa Mesa

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My blood boils every time I hear the term Attention Deficit Disorder used as though it was some rare disease. We’re talking about children who have been overstimulated to the point of being hyperactive. Instead of being given drugs to slow them down, they need to have their lives slowed down and reassessed.

From the moment children emerge from the womb, they are taught to play, play, play. So is it any wonder they have difficulty adjusting to a classroom environment where they’re told they must work, work, work? They’re bored out of their skulls and would rather be playing their video games or watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

It’s time for parents to teach their children that the world does not revolve around them, and that life is not all fun and games.

Maybert Davis

Corona del Mar

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D’Antonio quotes one neuropsychologist’s opinion that girls “score high on tests of communication and social skills,” whatever those tests are and whatever they measure. He also quotes the pronouncement that “men dominate fields such as mathematics . . . (It’s) all in the way we are wired.” Such generalizations, based on nebulous brain research, may have already become self-fulfilling. For example, Grace Hopper, a mathematician and U.S. Navy commodore, overcame her brain topology to invent computer-programming coding in 1952.

D’Antonio concludes that experts “have not yet found chemical solutions for a wide range of disorders facing (boys).” I’ve been a school psychologist for the past 11 years, and I agree that, with supervised prescriptions, a large percentage of students diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder do improve their skills. And that leads to a greater potential for future school success and meaningful work.

Gerald Walsh

Irvine

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I am a fourth-grade teacher. I found it quite frustrating to encounter in D’Antonio’s article that old demon, teacher-bashing, at a time when most educators are working harder than ever to meet their students’ needs. Equally aggravating was the sexism inherent in statements such as “Schools are institutions run by women in which women and girls are seen as disadvantaged and boys are seen as a toxic problem.”

Educators do not lump all students into the same boat. We have long appreciated diversity, individualized attention, hands-on learning and strong male role models. And we need to be able to point out to our students, male or female, when a specific action is cruel, and thus unacceptable, and have the courage to do so without fear of diminishing their self-esteem.

D’Antonio offers information that could broaden our understanding of human beings, particularly of boys, but what appears to be his prejudice against women and educators damages his credibility.

Linda Carrera

Seal Beach

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The trouble with boys stems from two dynamics only marginally addressed by D’Antonio. Both have been media-induced in an assault unprecedented before the latter half of the 20th Century, a wave that drenches the culture and leaves little room for alternative messages.

First, there is the simplistic doctrine that childhood must be a carefree time. That approach is fine for toddlers but destructive to adolescents. Growing boys (girls, too, but the article focused on boys) must be prepared for life more than protected from it, and that preparation must be gradual and begin early. Puberty is too late.

Second, there is homophobia, which prevents boys from making fully committed peer friendships and keeps them from relating to real men, pushing them instead toward plastic action figures and celluloid heroes.

Gerald Jones

Los Angeles

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No one can argue with the economic fact that brawny, uneducated men may have a harder time making a living now than in the 1950s, or that high-tech jobs require different skills than an assembly line. But culturally, boyish tendencies have never been more catered to.

For at least 20 years, the bulk of cinematic dollars have been invested in projects targeted at the interests of boys and young men, areas such as science fiction, action-adventure, etc. And how about all the new toys and games? How many contemporary video games emphasize controlling aggressive impulses or communicating successfully?

Susan T. Wolfson

Los Angeles

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D’Antonio’s article was a stunning mix of shallow neurology and anecdotal sociology, skating along the too-fabulous wave of political incorrectness. In current gender theory (as in current notions of consciousness), difference is accepted, recognized both as inevitable and constructed: Boys will be boys, as boys will become boys. As neurobiologist Gerald M. Edelman (among others) has written, the brain itself, rather than existing as pre-wired hardware, self-creates, in part because of environment. More annoying than the logical flaws of D’Antonio’s tautology is its premise: that boys are being given a raw ideological shake--that in a world where men wield the real economic, political and social power, a second-grade teacher and a confused mommy can “pathologize” madness.

But very bad boys do quite nicely with House speakerships and judicial appointments. The wet blanket that feminism has thrown on the frat party of world history has not put out many man-made fires.

Vanessa Place

Los Angeles

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If young boys are labeled as “in trouble” or “in crisis” for their misbehavior, what do we say about their role-model adult men, ages 20 to 49, whose suicide rate is double that of teen-age boys, whose drug-death level is four times higher than that of adolescent males, who father two-thirds of the babies among California teen-age girls, who are abandoning their families in record numbers and who account for two-thirds of all violent crime in the state? Isn’t this issue a bit bigger than just boys?

Mike Males

Irvine

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Although humans are maturing physically much faster than ever, social and intellectual maturity are not keeping pace. The dilemma is not in how society now condemns aggressive traits but how it has widened the gap between childhood and adulthood, or between the nurturing period and the start of responsibility.

Young people, particularly boys, can graduate from high school without passing algebra, visiting a library or being able to write a coherent essay. Why should they challenge themselves educationally when that would not bring them the immediate benefit that exercising their sexual maturity would?

Nikolas Trendowski

Los Angeles

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More of what’s wrong: short recesses; parents who must, or just choose to work until all hours of the night; unsafe and unsupervised neighborhood parks; too much TV and too few chores; society’s expectations, and a medical-behavioral bent in education that looks for pathology instead of humanity.

D’Antonio is correct when he writes that boys lack empathy and compassion, values once held as important. Now, strength, cunning, “win at all costs,” and even destroying one’s opponents, are considered the roads to success. It would cost much less to reinstate school extracurricular programs than to put more police on the streets, build more prisons or otherwise deal with unfocused adolescent energy.

Peter H. St. Clair

Pacific Palisades