Regarding the education of American boys, the news of late seems rather bleak: our boys are struggling in school. As Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men points out, 45,000 fewer boys than girls are graduating each year from high school, amounting to a gender gap of 6%. The gender gap in higher education is even wider, with young men earning only 42% of the degrees. In the average school district, according to Reeves, boys are almost a grade level behind girls in English language arts.

These discouraging statistics track with Reeves’s other observations from the social science data. Distinct from previous generations, young men today “see feminism as having metastasized from a movement for equality for women into a movement…against masculinity,” Reeves notes. He continues: “young men are struggling on lots of fronts, especially in terms of education and mental health,” and “feel these concerns are not being addressed, or sometimes even acknowledged, by mainstream institutions.”

All the signs point to the fact that our society in general, and our schools in particular, are failing to present boys with a positive, attractive vision of masculinity to which they can aspire. Though the softness, materialism, and social media focus of our culture adversely affects the development of young boys and girls alike, boys are feeling the brunt of it in many ways that go unacknowledged. Our educators generally do not promote a vision of masculinity that embraces the virtues of fortitude, perseverance, and deferred gratification (or even hardship) for the sake of the greater good, and the capacity to be a loving, dependable father and a productive contributor to society.

Our risk-averse culture communicates to boys a rather vacuous ideal of freedom. They are told to pursue comfort, diversion, and pleasure in whatever way best accords with their personal preferences. It’s hardly an inspiring ideal—and it’s no wonder we see an epidemic of aimless and weak-willed young men for whom video games, social media, and pornography hold more allure than building a career or forming a family. A university culture that coddles young people, teaching them to avoid difficulty and hardship at all costs (even the “difficulty” of encountering opinions and arguments with which they disagree) while turning a blind eye to self-destructive hedonistic behaviors, only adds to the problem.

But our job as educators of young men is not to protect them from risk, which is an inevitable part of living. Instead, we must teach them how to manage risk and assist their parents in helping them become wise, courageous risk-takers. Our culture actually has it backwards: while going to absurd lengths to protect rambunctious boys from physical risks (normal boy activities such as roughhousing or climbing trees), we are remarkably nonchalant about exposing them to grave moral risks, such as those that come with the use of unfiltered social media. Before we have allowed them to develop their will by managing physical risk and exercising judgment in small matters, we throw them in the deep end of a toxic cultural cesspool—and then act surprised when they use that false freedom in self-destructive, or even life-altering, ways.

Young men respond readily to the adventure of growing in virtues—even little virtues like keeping order, punctuality, studiousness, and truthfulness—if it is presented to them not just as a series of arbitrary rules imposed by controlling adults, but as part of a vision of the kind of man they desire to become: truly free, i.e., in possession of oneself so as to be capable of giving oneself in love. C.S. Lewis wrote that courage is not so much a virtue in itself, but rather every virtue at the testing point; it is also every virtue at its growth point. Just as in athletic competition, I have seen boys courageously rise to the challenge of doing a difficult task when they see it as worthy of pursuit.

That so many young men are struggling and failing to find purpose in our society today is not primarily a failure of this generation: it is primarily a failure of educational vision on the part of adults. We have failed to present young men with the image of the man they are called to be—the man they desperately want to become. My 35 years of teaching experience tells me that every boy deeply wants to become a wise, loving, courageous, disciplined protector and provider. And so helping our boys may be more attainable than the seemingly bleak statistics would suggest.