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November 7 - December 18, 2018
As our schools become more feelings centered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys.
Today, women in the United States earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of PhDs.
career. A thorough 2009 study by the US Department of Labor examined more than fifty peer-reviewed papers on the subject and concluded that the wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”60 In addition to differences in education and training, the review found that women are more likely than men to leave the workforce to take care of children
or older parents.
Life for women may be difficult, but the system is no longer rigged against them. The new problem with no name is the economic and social free fall of millions of young men.
According to the authors “the seeds of a gender gap in educational attainment may be sown at an early age.”
Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.
The new therapeutic sensibility rejects almost all forms of competition in favor of a gentle and nurturing climate of cooperation. It is also a surefire way to bore and alienate boys.
Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, sums up the research on male/female play differences: Boys tend to play outside, in large groups that are hierarchically structured. . . . Girls, on the other hand, play in small groups or in pairs: the center of a girl’s social life is a best friend. Within the group intimacy is the key.11
Rough-and-tumble play brings boys together, makes them happy, and is a critical part of their socialization.
Rough-and-tumble play is inevitable, particularly with boys. It seems to satisfy innate physical and cultural drives. As long as all participants are enjoying the play and are safe, I don’t intervene. Play is the basis of learning in all domains.20 Play is, indeed, the basis of learning. And the boy’s superhero play is no exception. Researchers have found that by allowing “bad guy” play, the children’s conversation and imaginative writing skills improved.21 Such play also builds their moral imagination. It is through such play, say the authors, “that children learn about justice . . . and
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The move to eliminate recess has aroused some opposition, but almost no one has noticed its impact on boys. It is surely not a deliberate effort to thwart the desires of schoolboys. Just the same, it betrays a shocking indifference to their natural proclivities,
play preferences, and elemental needs. Girls benefit from recess—but boys require it.29 Ignoring differences between boys and girls can be just as damaging as creating differences where none exist. Were schools to adopt policies harmful to girls, there would be a storm of justified protests from well-organized women advocates. Boys have no such protectors.
As Levine sees it, boys are potential predators in need of remedial socialization. Her view is the norm among gender activists.
She gratefully quotes the words of male feminist Haki Madhubuti: “The liberation of the male psyche from preoccupation with domination, power hunger, control, and absolute rightness requires . . . a willingness for painful, uncomfortable and often shocking change.”94
In her 2012 book, The Bully Society, she says, “Boys learn from an early age that they assert manhood not only by being popular with girls but also by wielding power over them—physically, emotionally, and sexually.”97 And she has a ready explanation for the school shootings: The school shooters picked up guns to conform to the expected ethos dictating that boys dominate girls and take revenge against other boys who threatened their relationships with particular girls: their actions were incubated in a culture of violence that is largely accepted and allowed to fester every day. Transforming
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is forcing schools to treat normal boys as sexist culprits.
Hypermasculine young men do indeed express their maleness through antisocial behavior—mostly against other males, but also through violent aggression toward and exploitation of women. Healthy young men express their manhood in competitive endeavors that are often physical. As they mature, they take on responsibility, strive for excellence, and achieve and “win.” They assert their masculinity in ways that require physical and intellectual skills and self-discipline.
History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and a gift to women.
Boys do need discipline, but in today’s educational environment they also need protection—from self-esteem promoters, roughhouse prohibitionists, zero-tolerance enforcers, and gender equity activists who are at war with their very natures.
According to Marshall, a child’s sexual identity is learned by observing others. As she noted, “When babies are born they do not know about gender.” Since newborn babies know very little about anything, Marshall’s comment was puzzling. They don’t know their blood type either,
after all, but they still have one. Marshall explained that gender, indeterminate at birth, is formed and fixed later by a process of socialization that guides the child in adopting a male or female identity. According to Marshall and her colleagues, a child learns what it means to be a boy or a girl between the ages of two and seven. In those early years the child develops a “gender schema”—a set of ideas about appropriate roles, attitudes, and preferences for males and females. The best prospects for influencing the child’s gender schema are in these early malleable years: these years are
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At no time during this eight-hour conference did any of the two hundred participating teachers and administrators challenge the assumption that gender identity is a learned (“socially constructed”) characteristic. Nor did anyone mention the immense body of scientific literature from biologists and developmental psychologists showing that many male/female differences are natural, healthy, and, by implication, best left alone.3 On the contrary, everyone simply assumed that preschool children were malleable enough to adopt either gender identity to suit the
ends of equity and social justice. The possibility that they were tampering with the children’s individuality or intruding on their privacy was never broached.
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a genetic defect that results when the female fetus is subjected to abnormally large quantities of male hormones—adrenal androgens. Girls with CAH consistently prefer trucks, cars, and construction sets over dolls and
play tea sets. “It appears,” says Kimura, “that perhaps the most important factor in the differential of males and females . . . is the level of exposure to various sex hormones early in life.”
Our society, says Valian, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop “a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to
the job, and an intense desire for achievement.”23 Such gender role socialization, she says, exacts a high toll on women and confers an unfair advantage on men.
To achieve a gender-fair society, Valian advocates a concerted attack on conventional schemas. Changing how parents interact with children is at the top of her list. For example, says Valian, there is a widespread assumption that women are better with babies than men. Where did that come from? The commonsense answer is that women’s special affinity for babies is a powerful, universal, time-immemorial biological instinct. But Valian dismisses such explanations and ...
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Valian concludes, “It appears that [parents] want their children . . . to conform to gender norms.” And, according to Valian, those norms inhibit a child’s potential to flourish later in life.
As things stand, children learn
to enjoy only half of what is potentially open to them, the half adults give them access to. Girls learn to take pleasure in being nurturant, boys learn to take pleasure in physical skills. Girls’ increasing interest in sports shows how quickly some of them acquire a taste for physical acti...
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Preteen girls, Gilligan writes, are confident, forthright, and clear-sighted. But, as they enter adolescence, they become frightened by their own insights into our male-dominated culture. It is a culture, says Gilligan, that tells them, “Keep quiet and notice the absence of women, and say nothing.” Girls no longer see themselves as what the culture is about. This realization is “seditious” and places girls in psychological danger. So girls learn to hide what they know—not only from others, but even from themselves.
Gilligan’s writings on silenced girls, the limits of “androcentric and patriarchal norms,” and the hazards of Western culture are not science or scholarship. They are, at best, eccentric social criticism. Yet by borrowing the prestige of academic science, her theories persuaded parents, educators, political officials, and women’s activists that girls are being diminished and led them to policies that have indeed diminished boys.
The sex/gender system, says Chodorow, is the way society has organized sexuality and reproduction to perpetuate the subordination of women. The system keeps women down by permanently assigning to them the primary care of infants and children, while men dominate the public sphere.
Following Chodorow, Gilligan claims that boys get the message that in order to be “male”—to become “one of the boys”—they must suppress those parts of themselves that are most like their mothers. Gilligan speaks of a “relational crisis” that very young boys undergo as part of their initiation into the patriarchy. In effect, says Gilligan, boys are forced to “hide [their] humanity” and submerge their best qualit[y]—their sensitivity.”14 Though this diminishes boys psychologically and morally, it does offer them the advantage of feeling superior to girls.
Gilligan’s theory about boys’ development includes three claims: (1) Boys are being psychically deformed and made sick by a traumatic, forced separation from their mothers. (2) Seemingly healthy boys are cut off from their own feelings and damaged in their capacity to develop
healthy relationships. (3) The well-being of society may depend on freeing boys from the culture of warriors and capitalism.
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.
It showed up in 2004 when Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara McLanahan of Princeton University studied the incarceration
rates of fatherless boys: “Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families. . . . Those boys whose fathers were absent from the household had double the odds of being incarcerated—even when other factors such as race, income, parent education and urban residence were held constant.”
Children need to be moral more than they need to be in touch with their feelings. They need to be well educated more than they need classroom self-esteem exercises and support groups. Nor are they improved by having their femininity or masculinity “reinvented.” Emotional fixes are not the answer. Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.
American boys do not need to be rescued. They are not pathological. They are not seething with repressed rage or imprisoned in “straitjackets of masculinity.” American girls are not suffering a crisis of confidence; nor are they being silenced by the culture. But when it comes to the genuine problems that do threaten our children’s prospects—their moral drift, their cognitive and scholastic deficits—the healers, social reformers, and confidence builders don’t have the answers. On the contrary, they stand in the way of genuine solutions.
Common sense, convention, tradition, and modern social science research converge in support of the Aristotelian tradition of directive character education.45 Children need clear standards, firm expectations, and adults in their lives who are loving and understanding but who insist on responsible behavior. But all of this was out of fashion in education circles for more than thirty years.
In sum: Columbine brought an abrupt end to the “value-free” progressive pedagogy of 1970–1999, but it also led to serious errors in the opposite direction: the zero-tolerance movement.
Others, who bear no malice to boys, nevertheless do not credit them with sanity and health, for they regard the average boy as alienated, lonely, emotionally repressed, isolated, and prone to violence. These “save-the-male” critics start out by giving boys a failing grade. They join the girl partisans in calling for radical change in the way American males are socialized: only by raising boys to be more like girls can we help them become “real boys.”
It is also unfortunate that so many popular writers and education reformers think ill of
American boys. The worst-case sociopathic males—gang rapists, mass murderers—become instant metaphors for everyone’s sons. The vast numbers of decent and honorable young men, on the other hand, never inspire disquisitions on the inner nature of the boy next door. The false and corrosive doctrine...
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Women are joining men as partners in running the world and even moving ahead of them in many fields, but they are not replacing them. After almost forty years of gender-neutral pronouns, men are still more likely than women to run for political office, start businesses, file for patents, tell jokes, write editorials, conduct orchestras, and blow
things up. Males succeed and fail more spectacularly than females: More males are Nobel laureates and CEOs. But more are also in maximum-security prisons, and males commit most acts of wanton violence. But it usually takes other men to stop them. “Are Men Necessary?” asks New York Times writer Maureen Dowd. Yes, they are.
