The problem here should be obvious. While George Santayana famously warned of the perils of blindness to history, it's as if we have made forgetting the past an art form. It seems to elude all that scores of years ago, when boys were getting better grades in school than girls, the atmosphere was far stricter. Discipline was by the rule and the ruler; sitting still wasn't a request, but a demand enforced with the rod. Thus, if such structure quashed a boy's spirit and damned him to ignorance, how is it that the West was built on it? How is it that the great inventors and innovators of the last few centuries — virtually all of who were male — cut their teeth in this rigid environment? No, such an explanation for boys' woes doesn't wash, but I will tell you what does.

Any fairly astute person will note that virtually all the revolutionaries throughout history have been men. When I say this, mind you, I mean it with neither a positive nor negative connotation, nor do I just refer to the political/military realm. Both good revolutionaries, such as our Founding Fathers, and bad ones, such as Vladimir Lenin, have been men. Innovators, inventers, and philosophers, who are themselves often revolutionary — just think of Galileo or Socrates — are virtually always men. I would put it this way: Generally speaking, girls are inside-the-box thinkers; boys are outside-the-box thinkers. Girls are more likely to follow the path society prescribes, right or wrong; boys are more likely to cut their own path, right or wrong. It's part of the complementarity of the sexes.

This is why a lack of discipline within academia will cause boys' performance to deteriorate more than girls' (this isn't to say girls aren't affected; however, the grade difference isn't as profound and the other effects will be more subtle). Girls will be more likely to apply themselves even once the reins are loosened because that is what they're "supposed" to do, whereas boys will be more likely to do their own thing. Now let's expand on this.

As any astute parent of boys has observed, they, more than girls, always need to be doing something, preferably of their own design. For instance, while they might commonly immerse themselves in an activity such as building plastic models or rocketry, finding girls with such tunnel-vision devotion is rare. When boys are interested in something, it often becomes an all-consuming passion, and when they're not interested in something, often only the rod can make them do it.

Generally speaking, girls cannot match the zeal for an interest and indifference to dislikes that are commonly exhibited by boys. I put it this way: Boys have a tremendous amount of "creative energy." This force is powerful, and it will either be focused constructively or destructively. If the former, they can be Einsteins; if the latter, they may be Genghis Khans. It may make the difference between being a drug inventor and a drug user. Thus, another tragedy of today's permissiveness is that it greatly decreases the chances that boys' creative energy will be focused correctly.