The results of the recent presidential election give a rare opportunity to those who care about the strength of the family, the education of boys, pragmatic liberty, and real friendship across racial divides. It had better be seized. For the pundits were stunned to find that a little under half of Latino men voted for Donald Trump, along with about a quarter to a third of black men, who have been voting reliably for the other party. A telltale, I think, is the contempt with which Latino men (and women too) hold the awkward and stupid term “Latinx,” invented to efface the natural differentiation between the sexes that shows up to some degree in almost all human languages, and in a marked way in Spanish. Evidently, those men do not approve of the linguistic castration. I suspect that they do not approve of a sort of educational castration, either. I am trying to imagine what the excellent crew of Portuguese-speaking painters and carpenters we recently hired to do work on our house — I am too old now for it, and a lot of it was beyond my knowledge and skill anyway — would say about having drag queens parade their fetishes in front of little boys at the local library. I know what the chief of the crew would do. He is intense, intelligent, and intolerant of nonsense; for him, everything must be done to perfection. He would furrow his brow, shake his head, and say, “That is wrong.” Well then, quite a lot has been wrong about how we treat boys. It has been a dogma of the “identitarian” Left that differences in outcomes over a large population must be the result of some underlying animus against those who do poorly, or some unwarranted favoritism toward those who do well, or a combination of both. When it comes to results in school, which is a great testing ground for what works and what does not, regardless of whether those in charge of the schools heed the lessons that their own results should teach them, the Left insists that more funding for schools in poor districts will solve the problems. In vain have critics pointed to other and strong contributory causes of failure, whether cultural or economic: fatherlessness, chaos in the home, material poverty, no books in the house, and so forth. But there is one division of the population where none of those cultural and economic causes differentiate: boys and girls. They come from the same families. They have the same books at home. They enjoy or they suffer the same material wealth or poverty. If one boy is not doing well in school, we may assume, at least to start with, that the problem is his. But if this is the case across the board, that is, if it seems obvious that the boys in general are not living up to their intellectual potential, then the problem is the school’s. And when we meet this phenomenon across a whole nation, the problem is not with the particular schools but with the way school itself is set up. What subjects are taught, and how? Who are the teachers? What is the order of instruction? Can that order be shelved or breached for boys who clearly want to run away with a certain subject? What is the culture of the school? Is it built on honor? On friendly but fierce competition? On a kind of platoon-building for some difficult and many-sided aim — not “group work,” which, in my experience, is usually a dreary exercise in conformity? What I have in mind is nothing less than that men, with the support and encouragement of women who appreciate the male sex for what it is, should take back the education of their sons. More: that they should make a point of its uniting men and boys across racial divides. That is, such unifying should be central to the school’s mission and its whole social ambiance. Still more: that they should adopt an unashamedly masculine approach to education, with a strong emphasis on work with the hands — for many of these boys, skilled trades will be calling, and just at the point when many a college major is a negative intelligence test, beginning with ignorance and ending in a stupidity that unassisted Nature could never produce on her own. And still more: the subjects to be studied should harmonize with and energize the natural interests of boys. Geography, military history, mechanics, epic poetry, art and music on a grand scale, architecture, and draftsmanship come readily to mind. I am thinking of the kinds of study and action that produced people like Robert Falcon Scott, David Livingstone, William Sherman, Michael Faraday, Alfred Tennyson, Johann Sebastian Bach, A. W. N. Pugin, and, with all the odds against him, George Washington Carver. (READ MORE: Welfare? How About a Log Cabin?) I have long noticed that, when it comes to healthy relations between men regardless of race, baseball teams manage to do what our colleges fail so miserably to do. That is because friendships among men are forged by a common commitment to get important work done, by competition, by showing skill and courage, by having fun even in the hardest or most dangerous work, and by doing so in an atmosphere that laughs at insults and which assumes that your personal feelings aren’t all that important. Such an atmosphere liberates. Thus we would want such schools to transcend, by far, the petty envies and ambitions of contemporary politics. Fratres in laboro — Brothers in Work; that might be a good motto. I have not mentioned anything specifically religious, but I do think that Christian churches can unite and contribute resources for such schools. For there is nothing like the common worship of God to bring men together most closely and decisively. I am not speaking here of ideas floating in the head. I mean kneeling, praying, singing together, or going forth to do charitable work together under the aegis of the faith. Men and boys by nature do not want to sit around examining their feelings. Many of us understand by instinct that a lot of such feelings are ginned up by the examination itself, and are eight parts self-deception, one part deception of others, and one part truth. If there is work to be done, we want to work, and we want other people not doing the work to clear out. If we are going to worship, we want to stir the soul with solemnity, as when of old a thousand men at West Point would rise as one to sing “God of Our Fathers,” the national hymn. We want to make the roof tremble. Who will gainsay us? The Left? Let them try. Or let the Left abandon its sexual madness. In the cause of the good of the poor themselves, let them come to their senses. READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Welfare? How About a Log Cabin? Common Core Undermines the Search for Beauty We Seek the Truth The post Reclaiming Education for Boys appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.