November, 2000

These soundbites from The War Against Boys tell, in Christina Hoff Sommers own words, how professional-feminists in the most illustrious Massachusetts colleges have deceived the American public. The headlines are by the staff of Massachusetts News.

We're Turning Against Boys Because Research Is Riddled with Errors
[W]e 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.... 

That boys are in disrepute is not accidental. That did not happen all at once. For many years, women's groups have been complaining that boys are benefiting from a school system that favors boys and is biased against girls.... 

The research commonly cited to support the claims of male privilege and sinfulness is riddled with errors. Almost none of it has been published in professional peer-reviewed journals. Some of the data are mysteriously missing. Yet the false picture remains and is dutifully passed along in schools of education, in "gender-equity" workshops, and increasingly to children themselves. 

Harvard Leads the Way in a 'Profound Revolution'
Shaping the gender identities of schoolchildren is a heady enterprise. And it is inspired and informed by the ideas of gender experts in some of our great universities. Preeminent among these is Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They see themselves as participating in a profound revolution that will change the way society constructs young males. Once boys are freed of oppressive gender roles, they foresee a change in boys' play preferences. 

Gilligan Compares Herself to Reformation; 'Fundamental Structure of Authority is About to Change.'
Gilligan and others at the Harvard Project see themselves as defining the principles of a needed revolution that will change the way young males are socially constructed. As Gilligan told The New York Times Magazine, "We might be close to a time similar to the Reformation where the fundamental structure of authority is about to change." Gilligan has nailed her preferred structure of authority to the door of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The stakes are high, she says. She is calling for a new and healing pedagogy to free boys from an errant masculinity that is endangering civilization: "After a century of unparalleled violence, at a time when violence has become appalling ... [w]e understand better the critical importance of emotional intimacy and vulnerability." Gilligan asks us to reflect on these vital questions: "What if the equation of civilization with patriarchy were broken? What if boys did not psychologically disconnect from women and dissociate themselves from vital parts of relationships?"

But other questions could also be asked: What if Gilligan's theories about boys are a travesty of scientific objectivity? What if the programs and policies she and her colleagues recommend turn out to do more harm than good? And what, if anything, can be done to protect boys from the trusting educators who faithfully accept Gilligan's view that boys are too stereotypically male and need to have their "gender schemas" rearranged?

Gilligan Announced Boy 'Crisis' in 1995
In 1995, Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education inaugurated the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology, Boys' Development and the Culture of Manhood, a three-year program of research on boys. Within a year, Gilligan was announcing a boy crisis that was as bad as or worse than the one afflicting girls: "Girls' psychological development in patriarchy involves a process of eclipse that is even more total for boys."

Change Is 'Deeply Authoritarian'
This movement to change our children's concept of themselves is unacceptably invasive - indeed, it is deeply authoritarian.

Gilligan Ignores the Need for Fathers 
Restoring fathers to the home is nowhere on Gilligan's list of priorities. Instead, Gilligan and her Harvard associates concentrate on changing things like boys' play preferences. In an interview for Education Week Gilligan talks of a moment when each little boy stands at a crossroad: "You see this picture of a little boy with a stuffed bunny in one hand and a Lego gun in the other. You could almost freeze-frame that moment in development." The interviewer reports Gilligan's comment on this crucial development period in boys' lives: "If becoming a boy means becoming tough, Gilligan says, then boys may feel at an early age that they have to hide the part of themselves that is more caring or stereotypically feminine." 

Lots of Money for Gilligan
According to the New York Times, Gilligan's chair carries with it a half-million-dollar research endowment. 

Gilligan's Thesis Is: Speculative Psychology; No Reasonable Argument for Radically Reforming the Identities of Boys
But before anyone enlists in Gilligan's project of getting boys in touch with their inner nurturer, he or she would do well to note that Gilligan's central thesis - that boys are being imprisoned by their conventional masculinity - is not a scientific hypothesis. It is an extravagant piece of speculative psychology that sometimes finds acceptance in schools of education but is not creditable in most professional departments of psychology.

Gilligan appears to be making the same mistake with boys that she made with girls. She observes a few children and interprets their problems as indicative of a deep and general malaise caused by the way our society imposes sex-role stereotypes on them. By adolescence, she concludes, the pressure to meet these stereotypes has impaired, distressed, and deformed both sexes. In fact, with the important exception of boys whose fathers are absent and who get their concept of maleness from peer groups, most boys are not violent. Most are not unfeeling or antisocial. They are just boys - and being a boy is not in itself a defect.

Does Gilligan really understand boys? She finds boys lacking in empathy, but does she empathize with them? Is she free of the tiresome misandry that infects so many gender theorists who never stop blaming the "male culture" for all social and psychological ills? Nothing we have seen or heard offers the slightest reassurance that Gilligan and her colleagues are wise enough or objective enough to be trusted to lead the field in devising new ways of socializing boys.

We have yet to see a single reasonable argument for radically reforming the identities of boys and girls. There is no reason to believe that such reform is achievable, but even if it were, the attempt to obtrude on boys and girls at this level of their natures is morally wrong. The new pedagogies designed to "educate boys more like girls" (in Gloria Steinem's phrase) are not harmless. Their approach to boys is unacceptably meddlesome, even subtly abusive.Gilligan's latest work on boys is even more reckless and removed from reality. The myth of the emotionally repressed boy has great destructive potential. If taken seriously, it could lead to even more distracting and insipid school programs designed to get boys in touch with their feelings. More ominously, it could lead to increasingly aggressive efforts to feminize boys - for their own sakes and the supposed good of society.

In the mid-nineties, the new and equally corrosive fiction that boys as a group are disturbed was already accompanying the myth of shortchanged girls. How our culture binds boys in a "strait-jacket of masculinity" had suddenly became a fashionable topic. Prominent intellectuals, wielding great influence in education circles, gave respectability and power to the burgeoning save-the-males movement. There are now conferences, workshops and institutes dedicated to transforming boys. Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes of the problem of "boys' masculinity ... in a patriarchal social order." 

Gilligan Says Roughhousing Is Not 'Natural'
In 1996, The Boston Globe described a joint lecture on boys by Gilligan and her associate Elizabeth Debold before "a standing-room-only crowd in the 250-seat auditorium" at a private school in Watertown, Massachusetts. Gilligan and Debold explained that so-called male behaviors - roughhousing and aggressive competition - are not natural but are artifacts of culture. According to Debold, "Children don't start knowing what boys and girls are ... it takes time to learn that boy/girl is a category." Superheroes and macho toys, she said, cause boys to be "angry and act aggressively." Showing the way to rectify this, Debold reported on their studies of three- and four-year-old boys who are comfortable playing dress-up and house with girls.

Gilligan Associate, Barney Brawer, Moves to Tufts to 'Construct a New Version' of Boys
Barney Brawer, director of the Boys' Project at Tufts University [and former associate of Gilligan's], told Education Week, "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." The planners promised emotionally exciting sessions: "We'll laugh and cry, argue and agree, reclaim and sustain the best parts of the culture of boys and men, while figuring out how to change the terrible parts."

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?

Pollack of Harvard Medical School Seeks Sensational Press 
In a May 1998 Newsweek cover story on boys, Pollack warned readers, "Boys are in silent crisis. The only time we notice is when they pull the trigger." ABC's 20/20 aired a segment on Pollack and his disturbing message, "Why Boys Hide Their Emotions." People ran a profile of Pollack in which he explained how boys who massacre their schoolmates are the "tip of the iceberg, the extreme end of one large crisis."

On July 15, 1998, Maria Shriver interviewed Pollack on the NBC Today show.

He informed the program's mass audience of the results of his research:
Shriver: You say there is really a silent crisis going on with, quote, "normal boys." As a parent of a young boy, that concerns me, scares me a lot.

Pollack: Well, absolutely. In addition to the national crisis, the boys who pick up guns, the boys who are suicidal and homicidal, the boys next door or the boy living in the room next door is also, I have found in my research, isolated, feeling lonely, can't express his feelings. And that happens because of the way we bring boys up.

Pollack's easy slide from "boys who pick up guns" to "the boy next door" - who, he assures us, is not very different inside - scared a lot of parents. This slide from abnormal boy to normal one, is, of course, illegitimate. There is not a shred of evidence in Pollack's research that justifies his "tip-of-the-iceberg," "boys-are-in-crisis" hypothesis. Yet Pollack glibly tossed it into the media echo chamber.

Pollack: Boys Should Stay in Doll Corner
The idea that boys ought to be more comfortable in feminine activities is in vogue among academics in the emerging field of men's studies.... [T]he practitioners of men's studies are concerned about the bad effects that masculine stereotypes have on the psyches of the nation's boys. According to William Pollack...and Ronald F. Levant (a Boston University psychologist and cofounder of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity), the reconstructed psychologically healthy boys of the future will be raised without pressures to conform to masculine archetypes: "As we raise the next generation, the boys who will become men in the twenty-first century, we look forward to a time when these boys will be able to safely stay in the 'doll corner' as long as they wish, without being taunted...."

Harvard Medical School Released Pollack's Study Based on 'News Value'
On June 4, 1998, McLean Hospital, the psychiatric teaching hospital of the Harvard Medical School, issued a two-page press release announcing the results of a new study of boys. The release, headlined "Adolescence Is Time of Crisis for Even 'Healthy' Boys," reported that researchers at McLean and Harvard Medical School found that "psychologically 'healthy' middle-class boys" are anxious, alienated, lonely and isolated - "despite appearing outwardly content."... 

The press release listed the study's major findings. Among them:
"As boys mature, they feel increased pressure to conform to an aggressive dominant male stereotype, which leads to low self-esteem and high incidence of depression."

"Boys feel significant anxiety and sadness about growing up to be men."

"Despite appearing outwardly content, many boys feel deep feelings of loneliness and alienation."

We must bear in mind that Pollack is not talking about a small percentage of boys who are seriously disturbed and lethally dangerous. He is attributing pathology to normal boys, and his conclusions are expansive and alarming. "These findings," he said, "carry massive implications for what appears to be a larger national crisis, one that we are now seeing can occasion serious violence." This national emergency called for a major social reform: "The time has come to change the way boys are raised - in our homes, in our schools and in society."

It is unusual to find such sensational claims and recommendations issued from a staid research institution such as McLean. McLean is routinely ranked among the top three psychiatric hospitals in the United States, and its research program is the best endowed and largest of any private psychiatric hospital in the country. Any study bearing its imprimatur automatically and deservedly receives respectful attention. But this one strained credulity. 

I requested a copy of the "Listening to Boys' Voices" study from McLean. A few days later, a thirty-page typed manuscript arrived. It had not been published, nor was it marked as about to be published. It had none of the usual properties of a professional research paper. Unlike most scientific papers, which alert readers to their limits, Pollack's paper was unabashedly extravagant, declaring that "these findings about boys are unprecedented in the literature of research psychology." . . .

Its conclusion, which reports on a "national crisis" centering on boys, was based on a battery of vaguely described tests administered to 150 boys. Pollack gave no explanation of how the boys had been selected or whether they constituted anything like a representative sample.

Pollack's reaction tells us more about his own limitations as a reliable guide to the nature of boys than it does about what boys are really like.

In sum, Pollack's paper does not present a single persuasive piece of evidence for a national boy crisis. I do not know whether "Listening to Boys' Voices" has been submitted for publication in a professional journal. Its sparse data and its strident and implausible conclusions render it unpublishable as a scholarly article.

Why did a research institute such as McLean give what amounts to a seal of approval to such dubious research? The press release speaks of "findings" and "correlations" and gives readers the impression that "Listening to Boys' Voices" is a study that meets McLean/Harvard standards for responsible, data-backed research. McLean requires investigators to submit research projects to a twelve-member Institutional Review Board for approval. According to Geena Murphy, a member of this board, approval is granted "on the basis of the study's scientific merit."

Pollack's study, with its outsized claims and lack of evidence, could hardly have been approved on the basis of scientific merit. How did it get past the board? In conversations with psychiatrists, I learned that because of managed care, hospitals, administrators, and staff are continuously looking for ways to generate revenue and publicity for their institutions. Members of the McLean Institutional Review Board might have decided that an attention grabbing "boys-are-in-crisis" study produced by McLean's Center for Men, which Pollack codirects, would bring favorable attention to the hospital. If so, scientific merit, usually indispensable for a McLean study, may have been compromised. 

I asked Dr. Bruce Cohen, chief psychiatrist at McLean, how Pollack's "research" had managed to receive McLean's endorsement and was told, "I prefer not to talk about this at this time." Had he read Pollack's study? I asked. "I don't read every study that comes out of McLean," he answered. I explained that this study was quite unusual. Pollack claims to have uncovered a national crisis; his findings are "unprecedented in the literature of research psychology." Surely that must have come to Dr. Cohen's notice. I asked how it was that, without having reviewed Pollack's evidence, McLean had issued a press release giving Pollack's work the cachet of genuine science. Cohen told me someone would get back to me. But before he hung up, I asked him for his opinion "as, a clinician" of Pollack's description of the nation's boys as "young Hamlets who succumb to an inner state of Denmark." "That's in there?" he asked, in the worried tone of a high school principal inquiring about what seniors have put in the yearbook.

The next day, I received a call from Roberta Shaw, director of public relations at McLean. She explained that the decision to issue a press release had been based on the "news value" of the study. "We ask ourselves, 'Is it of public interest?'" She also assured me that Pollack "had several journals interested in publishing his study." She didn't know what they were. She suggested I call him directly. I did, but he never returned the call.

When medical scientists and journalists see a McLean press release reporting a significant research finding, they assume that the research meets the standards for which McLean is noted. If that assumption is wrong, McLean's office of public relations should caution the public that a "McLean study" simply means a "newsworthy" finding. Alternatively and preferably, Dr. Cohen should change his institution's policy and make scientific soundness a necessary condition for McLean's stamp of approval.

U.S. Pays Millions to Extreme Feminists to Spread Falsehoods
Katherine Hanson is director of the Women's Educational Equity Act Publishing Center. The WEEA Center serves as a national clearinghouse for and publisher of "gender-fair materials." It is also the "primary vehicle" by which the U.S. Department of Education promotes gender equity. As director, Hanson works with schools and community organizations to "infuse equity" into all education policies, practices, and materials.
In February 1993, an exultant Hanson announced that the WEEA center had just been awarded a new five-year contract with the Department of Education that offered "exciting new opportunities to become a more comprehensive national resource center for gender equity." She also told WEEA subscribers that her center had been commissioned by the Department of Education to write a report for congress on the status of women and girls in schools. Hanson wrote . . . 

• Every year nearly four million women are beaten to death.
• Violence is the leading cause of death among women.
• The leading cause of injury among women is being beaten at home.
• There was a 59 percent increase in rapes between 1990 and 1991.

If Hanson were right, the United States would be the site of an atrocity unparalleled in the twentieth century. Four million women beaten to death by men! Every year! In fact, the total number of annual female deaths in the entire country from all causes combined is approximately one million. Only a minuscule fraction of these deaths is caused by violence, and an even tinier fraction is caused by battery. According to the FBI, the total number of women who died by murder in 1996 was 3,631.

Hanson, Stein, and other "gender-fair" activists regularly whip themselves into an anti-male frenzy with their false statistics. They use their lurid "facts" to devise and justify programs and curricula spreading the gospel of gender equity. "The leading cause of injury among women is being beaten by a man at home. . .Violence is the leading cause of death for women." Shockers like these are used by some advocates to make the case for radically resocializing boys. 

For the record, the leading cause of death among women is heart disease (c. 370,000 deaths per year), followed by cancer (c. 250,000). Female deaths from homicide (c. 3,600) are far down the list after suicide (c. 6,000).

Male violence is also far down the list of causes of injury to women. Two studies of emergency room admissions, one by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and one by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggest that approximately 1 percent of women's injuries are caused by male partners. Hanson's other factoids are no more reliable: between 1990 and 1991 rapes increased by 4 percent, not 59 percent, and the number has gone down steadily since. 

Federal Law Gives Wellesley and Others Great Power to Harass
How much does it matter that experts in the Department of Education, the WEEA, and the Wellesley Center disseminate so much false information about males in our "patriarchal culture?" Does it matter that they assume that men must be violent, that some think of little boys as protobatterers in need of intervention programs and a new kind of socialization that avoids masculine stereotypes? 

None of these things would be of much moment if the zealous women promoting these views were not a major force in American education. Schools have to listen to Hanson, Stein, Sattel, and their colleagues to avoid running afoul of complicated federal laws concerning sex equity. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in any educational institution that receives public funds. The WEEA Center's mission is to "provide assistance to enable educational agencies to meet the requirement of Title IX." Eager to avoid charges of discrimination that trigger the punitive provisions of Title IX, many schools and school districts have hired trained "equity" coordinators."

Since 1980, the Women's Educational Equity Program (which funds the Equity Center) has received approximately $75 million in federal funds. This and several other federal equity programs have created a cottage industry of gender-bias specialists. Researchers at the Wellesley Center received WEEA grants, as did Myra and David Sadker and staff at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. In turn, these activists did studies and disseminated information that have led to ever more expansive and aggressive interpretations of Title IX.

In 1998, the WEEA Center received a new five-year government contract. At the same time, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women was chosen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to codirect its new national center on Prevention of Violence Against Women. Nan Stein, who is co-directing the research, explains, "My focus will be to strengthen collaboration between school personnel and sexual assault and domestic violence staff working in schools."

Supportive officials in the Department of Education and at the CDC do not appear to mind that Hanson and Stein and company are committed gender warriors. All the same, it is not easy to understand how statistically challenged, anti-male organizations such as the WEEA Center and the Wellesley Center keep being awarded federal government funds to promote their anti-male brand of "gender equity." 

Convinced that we are living in a girl-destroying, male-dominated society, and empowered by schools that reasonably fear running afoul of Title IX, the gender-bias researchers and coordinators are engaged in reforming the nation's "sexist" boys. Most parents have no idea what their children are facing in the gender-charged atmosphere of the public schools. 

Nan Stein, the Wellesley Center schoolyard harassment expert (and contributor to Quit It!), appears in an antiharassment video produced by the National Education Association. When she was asked how school administrators are reacting to government policies on sexual harassment, she smiled and replied, "I'd say they are in a panic.... There have been so many lawsuits with so many monetary damages.... They are panicked."

The fear of ruinous lawsuits is forcing schools to treat normal boys as sexist culprits. 

Girls: Victims of 'Predators?'
The girl-crisis advocates have succeeded in projecting an image of males as predators and females as hapless victims. They have convinced school administrators, leaders of teachers' unions, and officials in the U.S. Department of Education to support them and fund them.

It is precisely in drawing this conclusion that they go badly wrong, for they fail to distinguish between healthy and aberrant masculinity....Healthy young men express their manhood in competitive endeavors that are often physical. As they mature, they take on responsibility, strive for excellence, achieve and "win." They assert their masculinity in ways that require physical and intellectual skills and self-discipline. 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. 

Girls Cause Much Misery
Too many of our schools are rife with incivility, profanity, and bullying; most of the hurtful behavior and intimidation is in fact nonsexual. And girls do their share of it. Almost any junior high school girl will tell you that girls can create as much misery as boys, especially among other girls.

What we are facing in the schools transcends sex. But even when the misconduct is specifically sexual, it is not a manifestation of the sexist oppression of women. Hostile Hallways is the best-known study of harassment in grades eight through eleven. It was commissioned by the AAUW in 1993 and is a favorite of many harassment experts. But this survey revealed that girls do almost as much touching, grabbing and graffiti writing as boys. According to the study, "85 percent of girls and 76 percent of boys surveyed say they have experienced unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior that interferes with their lives." Four scholars at the University of Michigan did a careful follow-up study of the AAUW data and concluded, "The majority of both genders (53%) described themselves as having been both victim and perpetrator of harassment - that is, most students had been harassed and had harassed others." And these researchers draw the right conclusion: "Our results led us to question the simple perpetrator-victim model." The simple male perpetrator/female victim model is, of course, the bread and butter of the gender-equity activists.

The theory that sexual misconduct in our schools is part of a general endeavor by males to keep women socially subordinate is not far short of paranoid. Moreover, it conveniently ignores the fact that girls do almost as much harassing as boys. It assumes that boys have more power than girls in our schools. But boys are just as insecure as girls and just as vulnerable to humiliation and mistreatment. The root problem in our schools is poor discipline and too many children acting maliciously with impunity.

Recess Is Eliminated
Recess - the one time during the school day when boys can legitimately engage in rowdy play - is now under siege and may soon be a thing of the past. In 1998, Atlanta eliminated recess in all its elementary schools. In Philadelphia, school officials have replaced traditional recess with "socialized recesses" in which the children are assigned structured activities and carefully monitored. "Recess," reported The New York Times, "has become so anachronistic in Atlanta that the Cleveland Avenue grammar school, a handsome brick building, was built two years ago without a playground." Dr. Benjamin Canada, the Atlanta school superintendent, acknowledges that many parents "still don't quite get it. They'll ask, 'So when are we getting a new playground?' and I'll say, 'There's not going to be a new playground.'"

The move to eliminate recess has aroused little notice and even less opposition. It is surely not a deliberate effort to thwart the desires of schoolboys. Just the same, it betrays a shocking indifference to boys' natural proclivities, play preferences, and elemental needs. Girls benefit from recess - but boys absolutely need it. Ignoring differences between boys and girls can be just as damaging as asserting differences that do not exist. Boys, especially, are hit hard by any move to curtail or eliminate recess. Needless to say, school officials today would never act in a manner equally dismissive of girls' characteristic desires and needs, for they know they would immediately face a storm of justified protests from women advocates. Boys have no such protectors.

Contrast with the Eighties
In 1984, Vivian Gussin Paley, a beloved kindergarten teacher at the Chicago Laboratory Schools, published a highly acclaimed book about children's play entitled Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner. It is hard to imagine a book like that being well received in today's boy-averse environment. Her observations are worth dwelling on if only to remind ourselves how teachers used to talk about boys. Paley felt free to express her fondness for them as they are, warts and all. She also accepted and enjoyed the clear differences between the sexes; she has no illusions about the prospects of success for any efforts to do away with these differences: "Kindergarten is a triumph of sexual self-stereotyping. No amount of adult subterfuge or propaganda deflects the five-year-old's passion for segregation by sex."

In one passage she describes the distinctive behavior of some nursery school boys and girls in the "tumbling room," a room full of climbing structures, ladders, and mats: "The boys run and climb the entire time they are in the room, resting momentarily when they 'fall down dead.' The girls, after several minutes of arranging one another's shoes, concentrate on somersaults ... after a few somersaults, they stretch out on the mats and watch the boys." 

When the girls are left alone in the room without the boys, they run, climb, and become much more active; but then, after a few minutes, they suddenly lose interest and move on to other, quieter activities, saying "Let's paint" or "Let's play in the doll corner." Boys, on the other hand, never lose interest in the tumbling room. They leave only when forced to. "No boy," says Paley, "exits on his own." The "raw energy" of boys delights this teacher: "They run because they prefer to run, and their tempo appears to increase in direct proportion to crowded conditions, noise levels, and time spent running, all of which have the opposite effect on the girls."

At the time Paley wrote her book, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader were all the rage with the boys in her kindergarten class. The more she studied and analyzed the boys' play, the more she grew to understand and accept it; she also learned to be less sentimental about what the girls were doing in the doll corner, and to accept that as well. Not all in the doll corner was preparation for nurturing and caring. She learned that girls were interested in their own kind of domination: "Mothers and princesses are as powerful as any superheroes the boys can devise."

The boys' imaginative play involves a lot of conflict and violence; girls' play, on the other hand, seems to be much gentler and more peaceful. But as Paley looked more carefully, she saw that there was, in fact, a great deal of conflict, discord, and antisocial behavior in girls' fantasies. The doll corner was in fact a center of "jealousy-ridden, disagreeable, exciting" play. "All sorts of pesty characters have tantrums: sisters quarrel, babies cry and throw dishes on the floor, pets topple chairs, mothers threaten and spank." 

Absence of Fathers Is the Real Problem
But are boys aggressive and violent because they are psychically separated from their mothers? Thirty years of research suggest that it is the absence of the male parent that is more often the problem. The boys who are most at risk for juvenile delinquency and violence are boys who are literally separated from their fathers. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reports that in 1960, 5.1 million children lived with only their mother; by 1996, the number was more than 16 million. As the phenomenon of fatherlessness has increased, so has violence. As far back as 1965, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called attention to the social dangers of raising boys without benefit of paternal presence. "A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos."

In Fatherless America, the sociologist David Blankenhorn notes that "Despite the difficulty of proving causation in social sciences, the wealth of evidence increasingly supports the conclusion that fatherlessness is a primary generator of violence among young men." William Galston, a former domestic Policy adviser to the Clinton administration (now at the University of Maryland), and Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer at Harvard's J. F. Kennedy School of Government, concur. Commenting on the relationship between crime and one-parent families, they say, "The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature."

It showed up, for example, in 1998, when Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara McLanahan of Princeton University studied the incarceration rates of six thousand males aged fourteen to twenty-two between 1979 and 1993. Boys who lived in homes without fathers were twice as likely to have spent time in jail. These results held even after the researchers controlled for race, income, and parents' education. (Having a stepfather did not decrease the likelihood of incarceration.) 

Fathers appear to be central in helping sons develop a conscience and a sense of responsible manhood. Fathers teach boys that being manly need not mean being predatory or aggressive. By contrast, when the father is absent, male children tend to get their ideas of what it means to be a man from their peers. Fathers play an indispensable civilizing role in the social ecosystem; therefore, fewer fathers, more male violence. 

According to Blankenhorn, effective fathers need not be paragons of emotional sensitivity. In fact, they may possess qualities that would distress the gender experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The typically masculine dad who plays roughly with his kids, who teaches his sons to be stoical and competitive, who is often glued to the television set watching football or crime dramas - is in fact unlikely to produce a violent son. As Blankenhorn explains, "There are exceptions, of course. But here is the rule. Boys raised by traditionally masculine fathers generally do not commit crimes. Fatherless boys commit crimes." Given Gilligan's general animus toward the "patriarchal social order," it is not surprising that her research appears to attach no importance to fathers. All the same, the more we learn about the reasons for juvenile violence, the clearer it becomes that the progressive weakening of the family - in particular, the absence of fathers from the home - plays a major role. 

Boys Need Structure
The shift away from structured classrooms, competition, strict discipline, and skill-and-fact-based learning has been harmful to all children - but especially to boys. 

In recent years, a growing number of British educators have become convinced that progressive methods in education are a prime reason their male students are so far behind the girls. There is now a concerted movement in Britain to improve boys' educational prospects by going back to a traditional pedagogy. Many British educational leaders believe that the modern classroom fails boys by being too unstructured, too permissive and too hostile to the spirit of competition that so often provides boys with the incentive to learn and excel.

• More teacher-led work
• A structured environment
• High expectations
• Strict homework checks
• Consistently applied sanctions if work is not done
• Greater emphasis on silent work
• Frequent testing
• One-sex classes

Bonnie Macmillan, a British education scholar, has researched the decline in literacy in the primary grades. Her conclusion in Why Schoolchildren Can't Read is the same as Byers's: progressive education methods - especially whole language - put boys at special risk.

Schools In America Are Frightened by Courts
When American schools try to develop special programs for boys, they find groups such as the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union poised to oppose them. In 1989, threats of lawsuits from both organizations prevented the Detroit public schools from proceeding with plans for all-male academies for at-risk urban youths. When schools in Dade County, Florida, were considering establishing two all-male classes for underachieving boys, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights blocked them.

In 1994, Senator John Danforth tried to address this impasse. He offered an amendment to an education bill proposing that ten school districts be permitted to experiment with same-sex classes without threat of lawsuit. The amendment passed the Senate but was rejected in conference with the House of Representatives. Says Danforth, "I was stunned at the organized opposition to the amendment. Opponents argued vehemently that the provision would result in injustice to young girls, despite the amendment's requirement that same-sex classes be offered to both boys and girls."

Harford Heights Elementary School, the largest elementary school in Maryland, is in a poor section of Baltimore. No one at the school has read the report of the British headmasters; but Harford teachers and administrators, determined to find ways to help young males succeed academically, have found their own way to many of the practices recommended in Can Boys Do Better? 

Since the mid-nineties the school has experimented with same-sex classes for both boys and girls. These classes are optional. Parents and teachers jointly decide who will most benefit. In selecting students for the all-male classes, school officials give boys with behavior problems and boys from fatherless homes priority. (These two groups often overlap.) 

As in Great Britain, the all-boy classes are taught by male teachers, and the boys' natural competitiveness and high-spiritedness are not discouraged but channeled to good ends. As the former principal who initiated the program said, "The boys become competitive rather than combative."

Walter Sallee, who has taught an all-boys class at Harford Heights for three years, uses many of the old-fashioned methods favored by the British headmasters. His classes are highly structured. He teaches phonics, grammar, and diction. He carefully monitors student progress. He uses a lot of boy-friendly materials; for example, he has developed math lessons based on Jackie Robinson's baseball statistics. His students, like boys everywhere, are fascinated by sports and sports stars, so these lessons are a great success. In gym class, his focus is character education through sportsmanship.

Sallee works hard to exploit the boys' natural competitiveness to promoting academic achievement. He breaks his class (twenty-seven ten-year-old boys in 1998-99) down into "teams." He turns classroom activities into contests. There is an elaborate point system. There are prizes. School uniforms are optional at Harford, but most of the boys in Sallee's class choose to wear them. Teams get extra points when all members don the uniform.

The boys in his all-male classes are mostly poor and African American. Sallee is concerned about their self-esteem and confidence but he does not rely on gimmicks or therapeutic methods. The boys gain confidence by mastering skills, becoming good sports, being team players and young gentlemen. One of Sallee's primary aims is to help his students develop their social skills. They learn to express themselves with confidence, and they learn manners. Several times a year the all-boy and all-girl classes take part in shared events. One favorite occasion is a Thanksgiving banquet. The boys escort the girls to the table, help them into their chairs, and engage in polite conversation. The children love it-especially the girls. 

Sallee's students are at risk for every kind of academic and behavioral problem. But in this all-male environment, such problems nearly vanish. Should a boy neglect to do his work or misbehave, he hurts his team and disappoints his teacher. School disengagement is a problem for many boys, but it is especially severe among young black males. The boys in Sallee's class are the very opposite of disengaged. They are enthralled. As Sallee told me, "They love the positive attention they get in the class. They look forward to it and hate to miss a single day."

Harford Heights offers same-sex classes in grades three, four, and five. The classes are a great success with parents, who are asking for more of them. It is easy to see why. Millions of parents, rich and poor, from all ethnic backgrounds, would welcome an opportunity for their sons to attend a class like Mr. Sallee's. Boys everywhere need structure, phonics, diction, grammar, and a competitive environment. Mr. Sallee's deliberate efforts to teach ethics through sportsmanship and good manners could be the making of many boys. But the likelihood of many parents having such an opportunity is remote. The forces arrayed against public, same-sex education for boys are formidable indeed.

Black Boys in Harlem Are Damaged
American Educators who wish to help boys face formidable obstacles. Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., includes several poor, mostly black public schools. According to one school board member, many of the boys "are at the bottom in every respect, in every academic indicator, every social development indicator." To help such boys, the county organized a "Black Male Achievement Initiative." Beginning in the early nineties, approximately forty young men met two weekends a month with a group of professional men for tutoring and mentoring. The program was popular and effective. But in 1996, it was radically restructured by order of the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, which found that it discriminated against girls. The woman who chaired the Prince George's County School Board was pleased: "The point here is that we were shortchanging female students, and we're not going to do that anymore." 

In the United States, a proposal to do something special for boys usually gets plowed under before it has a chance to take root. In 1996, New York City public schools established the Young Women's Leadership School, an all-girls public school in East Harlem. The school is a great success and many, including The New York Times, urged then Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew to establish a "similar island of excellence for boys." Crew rejected the idea of a comparable all-boys school. He regarded the girls' school as reparatory for past educational practices that neglected girls. That made it permissible. As he told the Times, "This is a case where the existence of the all-girls school makes an important statement about the viable education of girls. I want to continue to make that statement." Presumably the statement would lose its force and point if an all-boys school were allowed to exist alongside.

What do such statements say to the boys in East Harlem? 

U.S. Supreme Court Added to Damage
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that the Virginia Military Institute was violating the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution by excluding women, it dealt an almost fatal blow to same-sex education for boys. In the majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court retained full protection for any female-only programs that could be said to compensate for the disabilities women suffer: "Sex classifications may be used to compensate women 'for particular economic disabilities [they have] suffered,' to 'promote equal employment opportunity,' to advance the full development of the talent and capacities of our Nation's people. But such classifications may not be used, as they once were, to create or perpetuate the legal, social and economic inferiority of women."

In light of this ruling, all-girls programs could still be seen as compensatory; all-boys programs, on the other hand, are regarded as discriminatory. The ruling puts a chill on all special initiatives for boys. However, while it discourages them, it does not strictly prohibit them. Programs that separate the sexes while offering each the same resources and opportunities remain permissible. At least, that is how the U.S. Office of Civil Rights seems to be interpreting the law. Programs in Maryland, Virginia, and California have so far survived legal challenges from the Office of Civil Rights because they cover both boys and girls and are voluntary. In practice, however, single-sex education is an allowable option for girls, but rarely for boys.

Courts Have Eroded Discipline in Schools
In recent decades, the courts have done their share to erode teachers' and school officials' power to enforce traditional moral standards and discipline. In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines School District, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Iowa school authorities had violated students' rights by denying them permission to wear protest armbands to school. Justice Abe Fortas, in the majority opinion, found the action of the school authorities unconstitutional: "It can hardly be argued that students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." 

Justice Hugo Black dissented. Though a great champion of First Amendment rights, he pointed out that schoolchildren "need to learn, not teach." He wrote, presciently, "It is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary... Turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against their teachers ... it is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools."

Abigail Thernstrom, a political scientist at the Manhattan Institute [and a member of the Board of Education in Massachusetts], cites Tinker as the beginning of the end of effective school discipline. She also sees it as an unfortunate example of Rousseauian  romanticism in the courts. According to Thernstrom, "[Fortas's majority] opinion was a romantic celebration of conflict and permissiveness, even within the schoolhouse walls - as if the future of democratic government and American culture could be placed in jeopardy had the students been told to stage their demonstration elsewhere." 

In 1975, a second case that would further diminish the authority of school officials to correct student behavior reached the high court. In Goss v. Lopez, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for schools to suspend students without due process. Justice Byron White, who wrote the majority opinion, strongly favored extending students' rights. Justice Lewis Powell opposed the ruling, fearing that it would ultimately be harmful to students. Thernstrom has aptly characterized the two opinions: "White had raised the specter of schools as institutions with potentially 'untrammeled power.' Suspension - even for just one day - was a serious event' that deprived students of their right to an education. Justice Powell believed precisely the opposite; he assumed that suspension created the conditions under which children could learn."

Justice White prevailed, and the judiciary thus joined the progressive educationists and many parents in holding that "students' rights" trump the traditional prerogative of teachers to require compliance with school discipline. The Goss ruling helped bring on the era of permissiveness that Justice Black had warned about. From the loftiest of progressive motives, the educational system was robbed of the ability to enforce its codes and rules.

By the mid-1970s, we were on our way to becoming the first society in history to use high principle to weaken the moral authority of teachers. Soon, local officials throughout the county . . . would be powerless in the face of delinquent students and litigious parents.

Teachers in Littleton Failed Their Students
Teachers, too, would have acted differently. Had K-12 teachers in the Littleton schools seen it as their routine duty to civilize the students in their care, they would never have overlooked the bizarre, antisocial behavior of Klebold and Harris. When the boys appeared in school with T-shirts with the words "Serial Killer" emblazoned on them, their teachers would have sent them home. Nor would the boys have been allowed to wear swastikas or produce grotesquely violent videos. By tolerating these modes of "self-expression," the adults at Columbine High implicitly sent the message to the students that there's not much wrong with the serial or mass murder of innocent people. 

One English teacher at Columbine, Cheryl Lucas, told Education Week that both boys had written short stories about death and killing "that were horribly, graphically, violent" and that she had notified school officials. According to Lucas, the officials had taken no action because nothing the boys wrote had violated school policy. Speaking with painful irony, the frustrated teacher explained, "In a free society, you can't take action until they've committed some horrific crime because they are guaranteed freedom of speech." In many high schools, students are confident that their right to free expression will be protected. Counselors and administrators, fearful of challenges by litigious parents who would be backed by the ACLU and other zealous guardians of students' rights, rarely take action. 

Previous Efforts to 'Rebuild Mankind' Have Failed; Marxism-Leninism, fascism, Maoism
We are, however, familiar with more consequential, less amusing twentieth century experiments with rebuilding humankind from zero: Marxism-Leninism, fascism, Maoism. Each had its share of zealots and social engineers who believed in the plasticity of human nature and their own recipes for improving it. Among the unforeseen consequences of these experiments were mass suffering and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Today, eastern Europeans are in the midst of their own Great Relearning. They have been painfully finding out the extent of the damage wrought by the zealots and of the rebuilding that needs to be done.

America too has had its share of revolutionary developments - not so much political as moral. We have jettisoned a lot of the mores and morals of past generations in the hope that, starting from zero, we would arrive at a society that is more just and free. The new amorality is most dramatically seen in our children. By recklessly denying the importance of giving the young directive moral guidance, parents and educators have cast great numbers of them morally adrift. In defecting from the crucial duties of moral education, we have placed ourselves and our children in jeopardy. In some ways, we are as down and out as those poor hippies who finally found themselves knocking at the door of the free clinic. Now we too face the need for a Great Relearning.

As part of this social and moral deregulation and in the name of an egalitarian ideal, we have denied the plain facts about males and females, laying down the principle that boys and girls are the same and that such differences as we find are the result of social conditioning imposed by a patriarchal male culture intent on subjugating women. We must now relearn what previous generations never doubted: that boys and girls are different in ways that go far beyond the obvious biological differences.

In our schools, therapeutic practices have effectively supplanted the moral education of yesteryear. Ironically, those who pressed for discarding the old directive moral education did so in the name of freedom, for they sincerely believed that moral education "indoctrinated" children and "imposed" a teacher's values on them, something they thought the schools had no right to do. In fact, the "therapism" that took the place of the old morality is far more invasive of the child's privacy and far more insidious in its effects on the child's autonomy than the directive moral education that was once the norm in every school.