In my house ADD is considered a personality type, not a mental disorder.

I’ll admit that there were times when homeschooling my boys felt like keeping order in an asylum rather than a classroom. After raising five girls in a row, the two boys that followed stood in stark contrast. In fact, more than once my boys dumbfounded me.

For example, the time I explained a math problem to my son, for the umpteenth time. He had struggled with the concept for several days. This time, I secretly impressed myself. A mental news roll streamed through the back of my mind. “Brilliant explanation,” I thought. “This makes it all so crystal clear.” Just as my self-congratulatory thoughts began, I saw it. That flash of light in his eyes that showed actual brain activity.

“I got it!” he blurted.

“Yes!” I thought to myself. Waiting with the anticipation usually reserved for Christmas morning, I leaned in.

“Mom, you know that motor on the old lawn mower? Can I put that on my go-cart?”

As my over-inflated bubble of expectations burst into flames, all I could muster was, “No. However, you can go outside. Don’t come in for at least 30 minutes.”

Your first impression might be that I just gave up on the boy and sent him outside to play–and you would be wrong. I released him from captivity to burn off energy. It was a necessary move so that he could come back in and concentrate.

This is where a homeschool setting has the advantage over a public educational system simmered in cultural Marxism. Unlike teachers, mothers are not required to pound their boys into a cultural and political mold.

Rather than being appreciated for the future explorers, warriors and leaders they were designed to be, boys are viewed as defective little girls. Teachers want them to love reading and play nice, and no one wants to know where their hands have been. What is the real trouble with boys? Well, simply put, they are not girls.

Boys are no longer judged by their developmental standards. We have lost sight of a very basic tenet of humanity, one that our ancestors understood since the beginning of time: girls are very different from boys. Boys with uniquely masculine strengths, once prized, are no longer valued. In fact, these traits of boyhood are considered dangerous, even pathological.

Schools, steeped in the feminist agenda, have been instrumental in furthering what Susan L.M. Goldberg calls“gendercide” for some time now:

Should it come as any surprise that the idea of medicating away behavioral problems would be associated with a feminist movement….Medicine is the solution to eliminating those pesky biological and psychological problems an ineffectual ideology fails to confront.

She’s exactly right, and it all started in 1990.

J.M. Stolzer explains that back in 1990, Carol Gilligan, a “difference feminist” and author of In a Different Voice,published a series of case studies that became widely accepted as fact. According to Stolzer, Gilligan hypothesized that it was the masculine bias deeply rooted in the American school system that was causing girls to suffer severely both psychologically and academically.

Gilligan garnered unprecedented exposure and acclaim from policymakers and academia–all accepting her theory without question. The cultural Marxists did what Marxists do best–they created an underclass of victims. What more compelling victim to raise money and change policy for than sweet little girls?

Women’s groups rallied and lobbied, and government agencies responded with funding, policy changes and programs. The “girl crisis” became a commonly held belief: girls are at a significant disadvantage in the American school system because a masculine bias tilts it.

All this happened with under an ounce of peer-reviewed scientific evidence. Instead, it fit the narrative of what Thomas Sowell calls “the vision of the anointed”–and the paradigm shifted.

As it always does with cultural terrorists, the remedy implemented for the manufactured crisis has created a real crisis.

Stolzer writes,

Never before in the history of the American education system have we accepted a theoretical premise that suggested that males and females would follow similar developmental pathways. It appears that recently the female “way of learning” has become the gold standard in public schools and that those who deviate from this standard are assumed to be developmentally delayed, behaviorally disordered, and/or learning disabled. … For millions of years, males have been perfecting the art of “maleness,” and this maleness was considered throughout historical time to be extremely valuable to the functioning and maintenance of society (Stolzer, 2005). What are we to do now that, for the first time in the history of humankind, we have defined these ancient and uniquely male traits as pathological? The answer is that we have constructed a myriad of disorders (i.e., behavioral disorders, learning disabilities, and so on) that are currently rampant in the education system and in many instances require that male children use pharmaceutical drugs in order to alter their behavioral patterns so that they will conform to the scripts set forth by their female constituents (Stolzer, 2005). Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 10, Number 2, 2008

The “female way of learning” has become the standard for both sexes in the classroom, and the gold standard for behavior in general.

Just as we will never fully comprehend the emptiness in the world that an aborted child might have filled, so, too, the world suffers the loss of modern-day knights, and leaders subdued in boyhood.

As long as male traits are considered defective, boys will be left to sharpen their skills in the fantasy world of a video game. While the real world, in desperate need of heroes and bravery, is content to have him sitting quietly on the couch.

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Photo credits: Shutterstock, Pshenina_m, Lopolo, Merla