Saturday, August 16, 2008

Boy Scouts and High School Graduation

The other day, I followed a Puppy Blender link over to a post on the blog Why Boys Fail. It's written by Richard Whitmire who is a journalist specializing in education. The blog has all kinds of statistics and anecdotes about how boys are falling behind in this category or that. It's quite interesting. Or at least it was until I came across this post, which completely dismissed Kathleen Parker's new book, Save the Males. Here's an excerpt.
(Kathleen's conclusion summarized): As long as men feel marginalized by the women whose favors and approval they seek, as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts, as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honor, and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.”

(His reaction): Wow, cultural suicide. Never realized I was living so close to the Kool Aid abyss. I need to stock up on canned tuna and rice.
Ha ha! What a witty response! Let's all mock Kathleen Parker. I'll bet we could get intellectual giants like Keith Olbermann to join in. After all, it's all very chic and open-minded.

Until you get to the scoreboard.

The current national high school graduation rate for boys is 65%. For boys who participate in Boy Scouts it's 91%. The score is 91 to 65. At my son's Catholic, all-boys high school, the graduation rate is closer to 98% of which all go on to a college of some kind, 80%+ going to 4 year colleges.

Scoreboard, Rich.

Still don't think it's cultural? What do you say about a nation that allows the gays to persecute the Boy Scouts, chasing them out of one public location after another? Think that's OK? What does that say to you about our culture? Try this post on for size and follow the zombietime link if you dare. That's the kind of people we're supporting in their relentless attacks on the Boy Scouts.

That score again, 91-65.

The truth of the matter is that those of us who cling to God and Guns are doing just fine, thank you very much. It's not our boys who are failing, it's the ones whose parents have followed the Pied Piper of secular humanism and moral relativism.

91-65. In the Olympics, the USA men's basketball team beat Russia by a score of 90-68. That's a smaller margin than the graduation rate. Anyone want to say that the US and Russia are essentially the same at basketball?



Some highlights comparing the Boy Scouts to the general population.

As for cultural suicide, take a look at these quotes from our secular humanist role models, the Euros, on the recent Russian rape of Georgia.
"The Russians have been in breach of international law. There will be consequences of some sort," said Bildt.

But any such moves will trigger resistance in a divided EU. Brussels' attempts to play the key mediating role also limit its scope for taking sides.

"We don't have time now to get into long discussions on blame," said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister.

"We shouldn't make any moral judgments on this war. Stopping the war, that's what we're interested in," said Kouchner. "Don't ask us who's good and who's bad here."
Think that's not cultural suicide? Want some facts and figures instead? Try this.

No worries, Rich. There will still be boys going to college and taking leadership positions. There will still be high-grade husband material for the ladies. That's got to be good news for you. It will give your boys someone to work for while they save their money to buy more Internet porn.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't that facile? The graduation rate in North Dakota is 84%, maybe we should all just move there. Mormons seem to drop out less than other folks, perhaps we should enroll or kids as Latter Day Saints. I suspect the correlation has more to do with who the peer group references are and the diligence of the parents.

I also don't think that anyone is attacking the Boy Scouts, just saying they shouldn't get preference greater than that of other private groups, like the Mormons for instance.

Best,
Brian

K T Cat said...

And what do these groups and locations have in common? Are they following the 1960s, love-the-one-your-with, open-minded, multicultural, let's-get-it-on, secular humanist lifestyle?

You don't think anyone's attacking the Boy Scouts? Ever heard of the ACLU? Have you seen what they're doing in Philadelphia?

DammitWomann said...

"As long as men feel marginalized by the women whose favors and approval they seek, as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts, as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honor, and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide."

Truthfully, I think you can exchange all the "male/boy" references to "female/girl" just as easy. I don't see it as a gender problem, as much as a universal problem. It's the way our generations have changed. Good, bad, indifferent? You decide.

Rose said...

With ya 100% on this one, KT.

So much to say - it's funny, when we agree we find it so much harder to weigh in. Why is that?

Anyway, one of the little blurbs on the Olympics, talking about Phelps, the guy who is winning all the swimming medals, said that he had been diagnosed with ADD - but didn't like the medication, so he took up swimming.

If ever there is proof that you shouldn't drug the boys, there it is.

Anonymous said...

Yours was surely a facile comment, Brian, missing - perhaps deliberately - the point about culture.

And I hope for your sake that you are never sued in federal court by an organization with effectively infinite legal resources like the ACLU. If you are, though, I'm sure it will broaden your understanding of what constitutes an "attack".

Dean said...

KT, I generally concur with the points that you make in your post. However.... when I read about the "culture wars" and specifically the "wars on manhood" there is this nagging thought/question in the back of my mind that runs along the lines of, "Well, doesn't 'manhood' have to be earned?"

Instead of tracking and killing the proverbial lion, isn't the modern day equivalent of this rite being able to navigate one's way through all the cultural relativism and "attacks" to become a "man" in full on the other side?

Anonymous said...

In Philadelphia they are essentially being funded by the government through a sweetheart deal as it says. They choose to discriminate membership based on both religious and sexual orientation, so they get treated like any other group. If the Utah government started handing out sweetheart leases to the Mormon Church, is that acceptable?

Also if a High School diploma is the single litmus of a healthy culture, does that mean we have been on a steady upturn since the 1900's? Over the past 50 years the trend has continued upwards, just when we would expect our Sodom and Gomorrah culture would be wreaking havoc. Over the last ten years I think there is some debate over whether rates are increasing or decreasing, but clearly the needle is relatively steady.

You know correlation and causation are not necessarily wedded and yet this is laid out as though they are. Gay folks graduate college at a much higher rate than average and earn much higher wages; I'm betting you won't be willing to label that as a cultural strength. Again, it just strikes me as far too simplistic.

Brian

K T Cat said...

Brian, the Boy Scouts built the building in Philadelphia. The ACLU, egged on by the gays is pushing them out of it. Regardless of how the land got to them in the first place, it's the gays plus the ACLU persecuting the Boy Scouts.

Yep, high school diplomas are just one metric. Like the secular apostate said, you're missing the point. There are some things the Mormons, the Boy Scouts and the boys at our Catholic high school all have in common.

If you want to use the gays as role models for your kids, feel free. Here's a tidbit for you from a very pro-gay website.

A 1995 study of Minnesota teens published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that lesbian and bisexual girls were more likely to become pregnant and more likely to have multiple pregnancies than heterosexual girls.

Good luck with that.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure I'm missing the point, I think rather I'm questioning the evidence. By the way, this is not a lawsuit by Gays and the ACLU, this is an action taken by the entire Philadelphia city council on a vote of 16-1. These are public officials, it is the Scouts that are resorting to the courts. That they cannot mobilize the people to either get their elected officials to modify their position, or elect pro-Scout representatives says something.

If the Scouts want to feed at the public trough, it seems reasonable to ask that they don't discriminate. When the Scouts decide that their core values are more important, that's fine, but it means they must become more self-reliant. They did put up the building, but that is not really the issue, the city is looking at ways to compensate them for the building.

As for the website, are you saying that is representative of all gay culture? As a group they are less homogeneous than you would have it, I hear tell that there are even some good Republicans that are gay. It would be rather easy to find a wife swapping website and similarly decry the institution of marriage as a bad thing. As for promiscuity, I think it might be interesting to see if there are changes once legalized unions are more widely available.

K T Cat said...

Question the evidence all you want. Feel free to help the ACLU and the gays chase the Boy Scouts out of any place you'd like. Year after year, the scoreboard will read just about the same.

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