culture

Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America’s Boys

by

American boys are falling behind in academics as early as eight years old. It’s a gap that only grows as those boys become men. This special On Point series explores why America’s boys are falling behind in school and what can be done about it.

Episode breakdown

Episode 1. Do we treat boys like malfunctioning girls? Boys are falling behind academically from the earliest ages. What’s happening in elementary schools that’s leading to that — and what would it take to fix it?

Episode 2. Troublemakers There’s a discernible difference in the behavior of boys and girls at elementary school age. Yet expectations about how they behave and perform in the classroom are the same. What are the differences, and how do they shape the years to come for boys and men?

Episode 3. The opportunity gap By every academic metric, Black boys are falling even further behind than white boys. They graduate at lower rates, have lower test scores, higher rates of special education, and are suspended and expelled more often. On Point goes into classrooms that are bucking that trend to find out what they are doing, and what other schools could learn. Hear the episode on April 16.

Episode 4. Where have all the men gone? Today, male teachers make up less than a quarter of the public school teaching force. And while the number of male teachers joining the profession has only been declining over the past few decades, the number of male teachers leaving it has been increasing. What’s driving men away, and what would it take to bring them back? Hear the episode on April 17.

WATCH: On Point Live With Meghna Chakrabarti | Events
WATCH: On Point Live With Meghna Chakrabarti

Episode 5. ‘We’re in jail with our emotions’ Teenage boys learn men are supposed to be strong, and vulnerability isn’t strong. Believing that makes it hard to identify when mental health is suffering. On Point takes listeners inside a school that’s created a culture around building strong, emotionally vulnerable men. Hear how those lessons can help teen boys before they enter adulthood. Hear the episode on April 18. 

How to listen

Radio

  • From April 14 to April 18, listen to installments of Falling Behind on your local NPR station during On Point.
  • We also air live through our site at 11 a.m. ET here.
  • Find more ways to listen to On Point here.

Podcast

  • After the show airs, you’ll find the series in On Point’s podcast feed, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Source: Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America’s Boys | On Point

Robert Frank

by

Robert Frank (1924–2019) London, 1951–53

Soon after his emigration to New York in 1947, Alexey Brodovitch hired Frank as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. The position brought many occasions for travel, and Frank’s impressions of the United States, in comparison to other places, impacted his work. After receiving his first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955, Frank embarked on a two-year trip across America during which he took over 28,000 pictures. Eighty-three of those images were ultimately published in Frank’s groundbreaking monograph The Americans, first by Robert Delpire in 1958 in Paris, and a year later by Grove Press in the United States. Frank’s unorthodox cropping, lighting, and sense of focus attracted criticism. His work, however, was not without supporters. Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg felt a kinship with Frank and his interest in documenting the fabric of contemporary society. Eventually The Americans jettisoned Frank into a position of cultural prominence; he became the spokesperson for a generation of visual artists, musicians, and literary figures both in the United States and abroad.

Pace Gallery

So ’90s: Why Derry Girls is the best nostalgia trip in town

by

Derry Girls '90s Culture

And so Derry Girls hop-scotches into the sunset after a successful second season (the last episode is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm). Once again, the biggest surprise about the Lisa McGee hit is not that a late-period Troubles comedy could be a rich source of chortles. It’s that we all so very desperately miss the ’90s.That seems to be true even of people too young to have meaningfully experienced the Nineties first time around. For some reason, the decade of grunge, boybands and cynicism pouring from our pores and through the walls continues to exert a deep fascination. Why this should be so, is a matter sociologists could spend forever and a day interrogating.

What’s unquestionable is that Derry Girls paints a halcyon picture of a time when the music was better, the fashion was… more interesting and selfie moments weren’t a thing.

In her portrait of female friendship in the pre-social media age, McGee pleads a powerful case, moreover, that life before the internet was in many ways superior. Nobody had a mobile phone constantly distracting them and a Twitter storm was what happened when a flock of birds took fright en masse.

How far have we come in the interim? Not quite the distance we might like to think, is the implication. So what have we leant?

1 The music was just better back then

From The Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’ to Cypress Hill’s ‘Insane in the Brain’, at its most assured Derry Girls is a valentine to the pre-internet music era. The soundtrack brims with nostalgia – season one, for instance, treated us to ‘Alright’ by Supergrass, ‘Unbelievable’ by EMF and ‘No Limit’ by 2 Unlimited (which yielded surely the greatest nineties pop couplet in “I’m making techno” and “I am proud”).

This was a golden age for pop, the show quietly argues – perhaps the last golden age. Rap-metal was coming over the hill and then music downloading would bring the industry to its knees. But in 1994 we’d never had it so good.

Most impressive of all is the way Derry Girls conjures the era without resorting to clichés such as grunge or early Britpop (which was just about twinkling on the horizon circa 1994). Even techno cheese-mongers D:Ream come away with their reputations burnished.

Read more