The War Against Boys?
Some of the clearest evidence of this vulnerability is the current "boy crisis" in schools. The evidence is overwhelming that boys of all ages are having trouble in school. They are underachieving academically, acting out behaviorally, and disengaging psychologically. Many are failing to develop those honorable traits we often associate with masculinity—responsibility, thoughtfulness, discipline. Boys drops out of school, are diagnosed as emotionally disturbed and commit suicide four times more often as girls; they get into fights twice as often. Boys are six times more likely to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and Hyperactivity Disorder. They score consistently below girls on tests of reading and verbal skills and have lower class rank and fewer honors than girls.
Yet while everyone agrees that boys are in trouble, we don't necessarily agree on the source of the crisis and thus we strongly disagree about its remedies. To hear some tell it, the source of boys' problems is, in a word, girls, who have eclipsed boys in school achievement and honors, college admissions and attendance. This is not the fault of the girls themselves, others argue, but the fault of "misguided" feminists who, in their zeal to help girls get ahead, have so transformed elementary and secondary education as to make it a hostile environment for boys.
Boys seem to "have lost" out to girl power, and now "the wrong sex may be getting all of the attention in school." Pop psychologist Michael Gurian claims schools "feminize" boys, forcing active, healthy and naturally rambunctious boys to conform to a regime of obedience, giving them the message, he says, that 'boyhood is defective." Another pundit writes that "school is a terrible place for boys. In school they are trapped by "The Matriarchy" and are dominated by women who cannot accept boys as they are. The women teachers mainly wish to control and suppress boys."
By far the most sustain fusillade against feminist as the cause of boys' woes comes from Christina Hoff Sommers, formerly a philosophy professor and now a resident anti-feminist pundit at the American Enterprise Institute. In her 2000 book, The War Against Boys, Sommers claims that schools are an "inhospitable" environment for boys, where their natural propensities for rough and tumble play, competition, aggression and rambunctious violence are cast as social problems in the making. Efforts to transform boys, to constrain and curtail them, threaten time-tested and beneficial elements of masculinity and run counter to nature's plan. These differences, she argues, are "natural, healthy, and by implication, best left alone." The last four words of her book are "boys will be boys"—to my mind, the four most depressing words in educational policy discussions today. They imply such an abject resignation: Boys are such wild, predatory, aggressive animals that there is simply no point in trying to control them.
The idea that feminist reforms have lead to the decline of boyhood is both educationally unsound and politically untenable. It creates a false opposition between girls and boys, assuming that the educational reforms undertaken to enhance girls' educational opportunities have actually hindered boys' educational development. But these reforms—new initiatives, classroom reconfigurations, teacher training, increased attentiveness to students' processes and individual learning styles—actually enable larger numbers of students to get a better education, boys as well as girls. Further "gender stereotypes particularly those related to education", hurt both girls and boys, and so challenging those stereotypes and expressing less tolerance for school violence and bullying, and increased attention to violence at home, actually enables both boys and girls to feel safer at school.
What's more, the numbers themselves may be deceiving. First, more people—both male and female—are enrolling in college than ever before. Female rates are going up rather than male rates, but both are increasing. Second, while it's true that more women than men are enrolling in college, that discrepancy has more to do with race than with gender. Among middle and upper-income white students there is virtually no gender gap at all in college enrollments, which suggests that boys' suffering-at least the furring of the boys those pundits are talking about—isn't as widespread a disaster as they predict According to Jacqueline King at the American Council on Education, half of all middle and upper-income white high-school graduates going to college this year are male. (Book was published in 2008). What accounts for the gender gap are the statistics regarding working class, black, and Latino college students: In all three groups, women are far more likely than men, to go to college.
