Over the past 15 to 20 years, feminist scholars, the media, and various governmental agencies have asserted that girls are facing an unprecedented crisis in the American education system. According to this relatively recent feminist-based theory, the American public school system is built on an oppressive, patriarchal foundation, and as a direct result of this foundation, an innate and measurable masculine bias exists in schools throughout America. This article challenges feminist theory constructs and instead focuses on male children and the problems that they are currently experiencing in the education system throughout the United States. Political, economic, neurobiological, contextual, phenomenological, cultural, and evolutionary corollaries are explored in depth in order to gain new insight into the gender differences that exist in the American education system. The goal of this article is to offer a theoretically sound alternative to current feminist theory and to challenge the existing perceptions of maleness in the American school system.
Embracing Education and Contesting Americanization: A Reexamination of Native Hawaiian Student Engagement in Territorial Hawai‘i’s Public Schools, 1920–1940