Plenary (Keynote) Speaker
Boys Adrift: Boosting Boys’ Motivation and Achievement
On average, boys lag behind their sisters in every content area K through 12—not because girls are doing so much better, researchers find, but because boys are doing worse. Over the past 24 years, I have visited more than 500 schools. In this plenary, I provide an overview of gender-aware instructional strategies to boost boys’ motivation and achievement so that the same boy who loves football and video games will also love Jane Eyre and Emily Dickinson. You can make your school more boy-friendly without making it unfriendly to girls!
Dr. Leonard Sax is the author of several books including Why Gender Matters, Boys Adrift, Girls on the Edge, and the most recently updated New York Times bestseller, The Collapse of Parenting. He has been visiting schools and speaking to parents for decades. He has appeared on numerous podcasts, including Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan and The Megyn Kelly Show. Most recently, on February 15, 2025, he was a guest on Fox & Friends discussing the dangers of permissive parenting.
A graduate of MIT and UPenn, Dr. Sax has been continuously certified by the American Board of Family Medicine since 1989 and provided primary care to both children and adults at his medical practice in Montgomery County, MD, from 1990 through 2008. He has spoken on issues of child and adolescent development not only in the United States but also in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, England, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, and Switzerland. Since 2001, he has visited and worked with more than 500 schools, universities, juvenile justice facilities, communities of faith, pre-Ks and nursery schools, corporations, community groups and parent groups. He has appeared on the TODAY Show, CNN, National Public Radio, PBS, Fox News, Fox Business, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, New Zealand Television, and many other national and international media.
Dr. Sax regularly argues that the choice of a school is arguably the most consequential decision to be made in the life of a child. You can listen to a sample of his insights on this episode of The HeightsCast, a podcast focusing on raising up young men in the liberal arts tradition.
