Sunday, April 08, 2007

Survey Finds Girls Morally Superior to Boys

An article in today's NYTimes states:
The wink-wink methods have filtered down to the students, as this survey of high school athletes found.

¶43 percent of boys and 22 percent of girls said it was proper for a coach to teach basketball players how to illegally hold and push.

¶41 percent of boys and 25 percent of girls saw nothing wrong with using a stolen playbook sent by an anonymous supporter before a big game.

¶37 percent of boys and 20 percent of girls said it was proper for a coach to instruct a player to fake an injury.

¶29 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls said it was acceptable for a coach to urge parents to allow an academically successful athlete to repeat a grade in middle school so that the athlete would be older and bigger for high school sports.

¶6.4 percent of boys and 2 percent of girls admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs.


Imagine if the genders were reversed - I have no doubt that the headline would be screaming something about boys' moral superiority. But here the gender discrepancy is explained as the result of school sports. So it's not the boys' fault. Just as girls beginning to surpass boys in academics is also not supposed to be boys' faults - our school system is just too "feminine" and punishes natural male vigor and curiosity - although the system doesn't seem to have changed since the days when boys surpassed girls.