Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2001/01/15/a_call_to_arms.php
Monday, January 15, 2001
'It's a bad time to be a boy in America,' begins Christina Hoff Sommers' vigilant book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. A nightmare for feminists and progressive educators, The War Against Boys unmasks modern shibboleths about American education, looking past politics toward a veracious account of education and gender in America. 'In the war against boys, as in all wars,' Sommers states, 'the first casualty is truth. In the United States, the truth about boys has been both distorted and buried.'
Sommers begins her first chapter with a critical look at the past decade and the magnanimous amount of attention the country has paid to the supposed tragic state of American girls. In 1990, Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education, 'announced to the world that America's adolescent girls were in crisis... Within a very short time the allegedly fragile and demoralized state of American adolescent schoolgirls achieved the status of a national emergency.'
The claim that girls in schools across America were being 'psychologically depleted, socially 'silenced,' and academically 'shortchanged'' spread like wild fire. Via countless books, newspaper stories, and magazine articles the conjecture that girls are at a disadvantage embedded itself in the mind of educators across the country—with the concomitant belief that boys are systematically advantaged and need to be 'taken down a notch in importance.'
Ironically, with even a cursory look at the facts, one will discover what any student who has been to high school recently can tell you: 'it is boys, not girls who are languishing academically. Data from the U.S. Department of Education and from several recent university studies show that far from being shy and demoralized, today's girls outshine boys. Girls get better grades. They have higher educational aspirations, they follow a more rigorous academic program and participate more in the prestigious Advanced Placement (AP) program... The representation of American girls as apprehensive and academically diminished is not true to the facts.'
Furthermore, 'more boys than girls are involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs. Girls attempt suicide more than boys, but is boys who actually kill themselves more often.' It should also be noted that 'males dominate the dropout lists, the failure lists, and the learning disability lists.' Sommers provides numerous studies indicating that it is our American boys, and not our girls, that are in a truly dire education plight. As educators continue to commiserate over a girl crisis, the very real educational need of American boys is neglected and entrenched.
What do teachers think about the predicament? 'Many of them concede that in the classes they teach, the girls seem to be doing better than the boys, but they do not see this as part of a larger pattern. After so many years of hearing about the silenced, diminished girls, the suggestion that boys are not doing as well as girls is not taken seriously even by teachers who see it with their own eyes in their own classrooms.'
Perhaps most revealing of all was a study conducted by the American Association of University Women, the same organization that published inconclusive studies indicative of a girl crisis. But the AAUW mysteriously chose not to publish their findings, though they were more accurate than previous conclusions. According to the study, if there was a crisis going on, it escaped the attention of the very girls it ostensibly affected most. 'Surveying the perceptions of schoolboys and schoolgirls, the AAUW had learned that it is boys who feel neglected and girls who feel favored by their teachers.'
As Sommers states, 'a boy today, through no fault of his own, finds himself implicated in the social crime of 'shortchanging' girls. Yet the allegedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be a better student. She is not only more articulate, she is probably a more mature, engaged, and well-balanced human being. He may be uneasily aware that girls are more likely to go to college. He may believe that teachers prefer to be around girls and pay more attention to them. At the same time, he is uncomfortably aware that he is considered to be a member of the unfairly favored 'dominant gender.''
Sommers message is explicit. America's boys are behind academically in this
country, and they desperately need to catch up. But while feminists and gender-fairness leaders have finally acknowledged that there is something wrong with boys in the U.S., their proposed solutions could cause far more harm than good. These 'progressives' see maleness as a defect, a social disease, that needs to be corrected. The provenience of this ludicrous belief is another false notion: namely, that gender is a ductile social construct and thus can be constructed differently. Some feminists and academic theorists have taken it upon themselves to construct a new gender identity for boys—one that's more like girls'—which can be implanted in them at school.
Yet, regardless of what impervious-to-fact feminists like Nancy Marshall want to argue, men and women do differ biologically, mainly because men produce more than ten times as much testosterone as most women do, and because this chemical profoundly affects physique, behavior, and mood. While the average woman has up to 60 nanograms of testosterone in a deciliter of blood plasma, an average man has up to 1000, while a teenage boy can have as high as 1300 nanograms per deciliter. In fact, testosterone turns a fetus with a Y chromosome into a real boy, making his brain and body distinctively masculine. As Andrew Sullivan recently affirmed in the New York Times Magazine, the fact that men account for the vast majority of violent and non violent crimes is most likely due to the aggressiveness, energy, and strength that testosterone is responsible for.
But while men may be more aggressive and have greater physical strength than women, not all men are criminals, like the feminist Katherine Hanson—who once made a laughable, grossly invalid claim that violence is the leading cause of death among women—would have us believe. Sommers sees that 'in American society, healthy, normal young men (which is to say, the overwhelming majority) don't batter, rape, or terrorize women; they respect them and treat them as friends... Unfortunately, many educators have become persuaded that there is truth in the relentlessly repeated proposition that masculinity per se is the cause of violence.
'Beginning with the factual premise that most violence is perpetrated by men, they move hastily (and fallaciously) to the proposition that maleness is the leading cause of violence. By this logic every little boy is a potential harasser and batterer. Of course, when boys are violent...or injurious to others, they must be disciplined, both for their own betterment and for the sake of society. But most boys' physicality and masculinity are not expressed in antisocial ways.' What feminists don't understand is that 'being a boy is not a condition or defect in need of a cure.' Sommers' solution is not to reconstruct masculinity; she believes rather that what boys need is 'strong moral guidance' and 'firm codes of discipline.' According to Sommers, the problem with American schools 'is poor discipline and too many children acting maliciously with impunity.' The bottom line is that 'boys are just as insecure as girls and just as vulnerable to humiliation and mistreatment.'
Progressive attempts to revolutionize education are also hurting boys, Sommers argues. The whole notion that children's self-esteem and freedom should be placed before morality is hurting not only the children of our country, she notes, but all of us. They're children, after all. Sommers' view is that the mindset of today's educator is essentially a triumph of the philosophies of Rousseau over those of Aristotle. Rousseau thought children were good and pure from the beginning, and it is society that corrupts them, while Aristotle and many Christian philosophers and theologians have argued that children are by nature constituted to develop moral virtue, but are not born with it—that is the job of the parents and educators of the child.
Who was correct? According to Sommers, 'Aristotle wins the argument in the court of common sense and historical experience... Throughout the world, mothers and fathers never cease to work at habituating children to the exercise of self-control, temperance, honesty, courage. But it is Rousseau who powerfully dominates the thinking of the theorists whose influence pervades modern schools of education.' The shootings in Littleton suggest that the value of a moral education has been tragically underestimated. Those children didn't benefit from Columbine's lack of a moral mission and tolerance of their 'self-expression' (such as wearing swastikas and producing grotesquely violent home videos). Sommers asks, 'What happens when educators celebrate children's creativity and innate goodness and abandon the ancestral responsibility to discipline, train, and civilize them? Unfortunately, we know the answer: we are just emerging from a thirty-year experiment with moral deregulation.'
Sommers' argument that allowing children to be overly 'free' and 'creative' has led to a lack of morality amongst America's future leaders is quite convincing. But clearly there needs to be a balance between allowing children to express themselves creatively as individuals and good, old-fashioned moral discipline. Sommers, however, does not seem to promote a country full of automotons; she merely draws attention to what has been left behind by educators in recent years.
Sommers ends her book with a call to all parents and teachers, begging them to stop trying to reconstruct differences that are part of human nature and to once again place importance on morality. The fact that she addresses parents as well as teachers indicates that it is not the job of teachers alone to morally educate children; parents must play the primary role. 'Instead of doing things that do not need doing and should not be done, we must dedicate ourselves to the hard tasks that are both necessary and possible: improving the moral climate in our schools and providing our children with first-rate schooling that equips them for the good life in the new century.'