Saturday
Dec012007
Boys Adrift - audio cast on MPR
Saturday, December 1, 2007 at 11:41AM 
Family physician and psychologist Leonard Sax, author of Boys Adrift, was interviewed on a recent Mid-Morning show on Minnesota Public radio. The audio is worth a listen.
One comment he made was that when asked about being a "gentleman," today's boys will respond with "that's who goes to gentlemen's clubs (strip clubs)."
Neil Postman predicted this in his One Big Room theory!
Some of the callers - game addicts - were pretty scary. Maybe my daughter's veto of getting the grandson a handheld video game at age 6 was a very good move.
Reader Comments (1)
Doug,
I followed your link over to your article at Education World and wanted to comment here.I'll start by saying I agree that denying kids access to social networks and web 2.0 tools is way off base and I do not support the legislation.
On the other hand, I support filtering pornography. I have heard the arguments about proper supervision and teaching kids not to go to these sites; but have had many experiences where kids are doing harmless searches and end up at really hard core sites unexpectedly. There are 19,600,000 Google results for pornography. It is ubiquitous on the web. Filters aren't perfect, but if they can do anything to prevent access to these sites, it sure makes sense to me. No school librarian would allow this material in print form in their library, so I wouldn't expect for the digital versions to be there.
The only other comment I would like to make is that I have never been a fan of "inevitability" arguments.You know how they go...'we may not like what is happening; but it's going to happen anyway so get used to it'. When my girls were 9 and 10 we had issues with neighbors renting R rated movies for their kids and inviting ours over. I feel the same about unbridled affluence, self-absorption, the sense of entitlement that seems to pervade our culture. I would never abdicate to the cultural tide. Maybe we need to fight the tide, shelter our kids appropriately, and, as you say, educate and prepare them for the "big, bad world".
pete