Also read: What Our Schools Are Doing

There's a war against boys going on in the public schools across the country that has its origins in the most famous colleges in Massachusetts, says a respected, former professor at Clark University in Worcester.

Some of the professors at these schools have shaken the foundations of our society so dramatically that many startling defects have occurred and will continue to occur. 

In their desire to change the world in their own image, the feminists had to do two things. They had to make the females appear to be shortchanged and they had to "reconstruct" the males, says Prof. Sommers. 

We'll tell how they're reconstructing the males in the next issue.

These academics have used unreliable data that is not validated and have misled the American people. The colleges involved are Harvard, Wellesley, Harvard Medical School and Tufts. 

Even worse, we're still looking to these same failed institutions for more guidance about the problems which they caused in the first place. 

This "re-education" of boys is being fueled with many millions of dollars from the federal government.

The Clinton/Gore administration is using the earnings of parents themselves, and other taxpayers, to fund this "re-education" of boys at the local level, despite lack of constitutional authority - or public demand - for any such social engineering by the federal government.

These charges are made by Christina Hoff Sommers in her nationally acclaimed book, The War Against Boys, How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. She is also the author of Who Stole Feminism? and has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brandeis University. She is presently the W. H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and is married with two sons.

It Started In 1990
It started in 1990, when we began to hear that girls are being "shortchanged" at school.

It became serious in 1994 when Congress passed the "Gender Equity in Education Act" as a consequence - to help all the girls who were in trouble. 

This hoax on the American public was initially perpetrated by a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Carol Gilligan, who was the first professor of gender studies at that institution, says Prof. Sommers. 

Sommers says: "Carol Gilligan announced to the world that America's adolescent girls were in crisis. Popular writers, electrified by Gilligan's discovery, began to see evidence of a girl crisis everywhere." A New York Times columnist reported how Gilligan's research cast an ominous shadow on her daughter's second birthday.

But it was all false, continues Sommers.

She says: "Gilligan, who compares her methodology to Darwin's, presents very little in the way of data to back up her claims. Most of her published research consists of anecdotes that are based on a small number of interviews. Apart from those interviews, her data are unavailable for review, giving rise to some reasonable doubts about their merits and persuasiveness.

"Despite the glaring lack of published data, Gilligan's conclusions have largely gone unchallenged. The skeptical judgment of the many scholars who don't take Gilligan seriously are buried in obscure academic journals. Meanwhile, her bold theories and the 'groundbreaking' empirical research that presumably backs them up are widely referred to and routinely celebrated in the popular media."

Many of the serious problems in our country started with those falsehoods, comments Sommers.

Tragedy in Colorado
The feminist zealots in Massachusetts, both men and women, began their war against boys after the tragedy at Columbine High School occurred. 

As an example she cites a psychologist, William Pollack, from Harvard Medical School who is telling audiences around the country that all the boys in America are in serious trouble. He tells them, "The boys in Littleton are the tip of the iceberg. And the iceberg is all boys."

This is absurd, says Sommers, because 99.5% of our boys are excellent citizens. Any problems with the rest of them are because the feminists, both women and men, have seized control and are implementing their plan to change boys into girls.

It is her contention that any problems we may have with boys are because there is no longer any discipline or structure in our schools which boys find so necessary. 

She says there has been a struggle for many years between those who believe that children need training and discipline, as opposed to those who believe that children are strong, moral beings when they are born. The latter believe that children will become good citizens if left to pursue their own desires. But the struggle became serious in the 1990s when the professional-feminists were able to take control.

Meanwhile, the professional-feminists are getting rich from books they write and from millions of dollars in grants from the federal government.

Now Going After Boys
The book tells the story of "how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world."

First, Harvard Lied About Girls
The myth that boys are in "trouble" started a few years after 1990 when false information from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard flooded the nation that girls are suffering because they are neglected in school. This shocked the nation. The Washington Post was so upset that it wrote, "The most heroic, fearless, graceful, tortured human beings in this land must be girls from the ages of 12 to 15." 

This unreliable, unscientific data came from Prof. Carol Gilligan, says Prof. Sommers.

"Contrary to the story told by Gilligan and her followers, by the early 1990s American girls were flourishing in unpresidented ways," says Prof. Sommers, who has serious questions about the research from Gilligan:

"Gilligan's reputation as a media figure is not in doubt. Her scholarly reputation, however, is quite another matter....Most of her published research consists of anecdotes that are based on a small number of interviews. Apart from these interviews, her data ... are unavailable for review..."

Wellesley College Happily Joined In the Deceit
Wellesley College joined with its own study in 1992, "How Schools Shortchange Girls" by its "Center for Research on Women." It was commissioned by the American Association of University Women, which spent $100,000 on the study and $150,000 promoting it to the media. The New York Times printed an uncritical, "puff" article about the "tragedy" that had struck the nation's girls. 

The AAUW wrote a retraction in 1995, but no newspaper reported it. When the author of the Times' article was questioned seven years later by Prof. Sommers, the author said she should have written it differently. In 1998, the Times finally ran a story that questioned the validity of the Wellesley report.

However, Congress had already passed the "Gender Equity in Education Act" (1994), which categorized girls across the country as an "under-served population," on a par with other discriminated-against minorities. The genie was out of the bottle.

Harvard Medical School Added Boys to the Fable
Both Harvard and Wellesley started to enlarge the fable by saying that boys in the U.S. are disturbed and troubled as a group. They were joined by a psychologist at Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital, William Pollack, who is Director of the Center for Men. He had written a book, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, but it did not get much attention until the tragedy at Columbine High School. After that, he ran from television show to television show, from Oprah to Dateline NBC, to say, "The boys in Littleton are the tip of the iceberg. And the iceberg is all boys."

'Boys' Project' at Tufts University is "Reconstructing" Boyhood
One of the Harvard studies has been moved to Tufts University by Prof. Barney Brawer, who was one of Gilligan's associates. It has been renamed the "Boys' Project." Brawer says, "We've deconstructed the old version of manhood, but we've not [yet] constructed a new version." In the spring of 2000, the Boys' Project at Tufts offered five workshops on "Reinventing Boyhood." 

Professor Sommers says: "Questions abound. What sort of credentials do the critics of masculinity bring to their project of reconstructing the nation's schoolboys? How well do they understand and like boys? Who has authorized their mission?"