The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  When the Department of Education carried out a research review on single-sex education in 2005, it found a tangle of contradictory results. Like much education research—large schools versus small, charter versus traditional public schools—advocates on either side can find vindication if they look hard enough. The Department of Education rightly deemed the research “equivocal” and called for more studies. But it drew no strong conclusions and advised that the question of single-sex schooling might never be resolved by quantitative investigation because it involves issues “of philosophy and worldview.”82 If that is so, then the matter would seem to be ideally suited to practical experience, individual circumstance, and voluntary choice.

  But the Science article goes further, claiming that such schools actually harm students by promoting sexism. And this is where the eight professors discard any pretense to objectivity. As proof of harm, they cite a 2007 British study that showed an increase in divorce rates for men (but not women) who had attended single-sex schools, and another study finding that “boys who spend more time with other boys become increasingly aggressive.”83 The latter study, coauthored by two ACCES board members, consisted of observations of preschoolers and kindergarteners in coed classes; its relevance to single-sex classes for older children is never explained.84

  That 2007 British study compared life outcomes for thousands of middle-age graduates of single-sex and coed schools. On most measures, the two groups looked about the same: Both had similar levels of marital satisfaction and similar views on gender roles. It did conclude that the males who attended single-sex schools were “somewhat” more likely to have divorced, but the report carried a lot of good news about single-sex education as well. To wit: “For girls . . . single-sex schooling was linked to higher wages.” It was also linked to boys focusing their studies on languages and literature and girls on math and science. Did the British study address the central argument of the Science authors, that single-sex schooling promotes “sexism and gender stereotyping”? Yes, it did—finding that “gender stereotypes are exacerbated” in coed schools and “moderated” in single-sex schools!85 All of these glaring contradictions go unmentioned by the eight authors.86

  In a subsequent issue of Science, several academic critics faulted the authors for failing to cite any serious research showing that single-sex schools foster sexism. The authors’ reply conceded the point: “We agree with [critics] that systematic reviews have yet to address the potential harm of single-sex schools in increasing stereotyping and sexism.”87 But, to bolster their original claim, they cited a 2001 study of a single-sex experiment in California in which “increased gender stereotypes was a prominent finding.”88

  They better hope no one looks up the study. Its three feminist authors do not use a conventional methodology. As they explain, “Drawing upon feminist theory, we provide a critique that illuminates how power which is ‘both the medium and the expression of wider structural relations and social forms, positions subjects within ideological matrixes of constraint and possibility.’ ”89 True to this murky goal, they devote most of the study to critiquing parents, teachers, and students for their “gendered perceptions” and evaluating how effectively they challenge “oppressive power relations inherent in traditional education.”90 One unwitting instructor explained why the all-male class voted to read All Quiet on the Western Front and why the all-female class chose Pride and Prejudice: “The girls tend to choose the romantic spiel . . . and guys tend to go for the action.” This sensible and innocent remark is grist for the authors’ mill. “Significantly,” they say, “teachers did little to change student choices by suggesting alternative book choices or topics that might potentially challenge gendered dispositions.”91 These authors warn how “gender ideologies” can shape an instructor’s classroom practices. But they have their own ideology—and it shaped every word of their bizarre study.

  What explains the determination of the Science authors? For them—as for Gloria Allred in the case of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts—organizing children by girls and boys is analogous to racial segregation. As the lead author, Claremont McKenna’s Diane Halpern, explains, “Advocates for single-sex education don’t like the parallel with racial segregation, but the parallels are there.”92 No, they are not. Mandatory racial separatism demeans human beings and forecloses on their life prospects. Single-sex education is freely chosen, and millions of pupils have thrived intellectually and socially within it. Boys and girls, taken as groups, have different interests, propensities, and needs. And they, and their parents and teachers, know it: The teacher who begins the day with “Good morning, boys and girls,” is being friendly and conventional, not invidious and oppressive.

  But the ACLU is not circulating the letters from critics of the Science article, nor highlighting the outré worldview of the authors or their misuse of the research of others. The article is presented as settled science. So far, the ACLU campaign is working. As it boasts on its website:

  Many school districts in the nation have responded to our letters pointing out Title IX violations by shutting down their single-sex education programs in states such as Maine, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. To spread the message further, we’ve launched a nationwide campaign called Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes, to combat the harmful gender stereotypes at the root of the new wave of single-sex programs.93

  Schools with successful single-sex programs are responding to the ACLU threats because they cannot afford costly court battles. School board members in West Virginia, for example, estimate that it could cost as much as $10,000 to defend the Van Devender program in court.94 But on July 3, 2012, they voted to continue the single-sex classes. The ACLU immediately filed a suit, and a judge has issued a temporary injunction against the program. The Van Devender principal was dismayed that the ACLU refused to meet with teachers and parents. “If [the ACLU] would sit down with us . . . we could all be on the same page.” He is certain they would see the merits of the program.95

  Unfortunately, the ACLU’s success in other school districts, its sense of momentum, and its determination to expand its campaign suggest otherwise. In September 2012, the ACLU successfully pressured the school officials in Cranston, Rhode Island, to ban the traditional father-daughter dance and mother-son baseball game. According to the ACLU, “Public schools have no business fostering the notion that girls prefer to go to formal dances while boys prefer baseball games. This type of gender stereotyping only perpetuates outdated notions of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ activities and is contrary to federal law.”96

  Girls will be hurt where the ACLU and ACCES succeed in their campaign to shut down single-sex classrooms. But boys will lose the most. The activist professors and lawyers may believe that “male” and “female” are superficial distinctions best ignored. But here is one glaring gender distinction we ignore at our peril: boys are seriously behind girls in school. We do a far better job educating girls than boys, and we must find out why. All-male schools and classrooms may not be panaceas and are certainly not for everyone, but they have produced many promising results. They seem to be especially effective in poor districts, where boys are the most vulnerable. These boys’ schools and programs are experimenting with male-friendly pedagogy, and they may offer the best hope for discovering classroom practices that work for boys everywhere. Turning a blind eye to real differences and dogmatically insisting that masculinity and femininity are irrelevant distinctions poses serious dangers of its own.

  Respect for Difference

  In 1984, Vivian Gussin Paley, a beloved kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, published a highly acclaimed book about a children’s play entitled Boys & Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner. The book would not be 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 children before the gender police appeared. Paley felt free to express her fondness for boys as they are, warts and all. She also accepted and enjoyed
the clear differences between the sexes and had 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.”97

  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.”98

  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.”99

  At the time Paley wrote her book, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader were all the rage with the boys in her kindergarten class and all across America. 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.”100

  Boys’ imaginative play involves a lot of conflict and violence; that of girls seems to be much gentler and more peaceful. But as Paley looked more carefully, she noticed that the girls’ fantasies were just as exciting and intense as the boys’. The doll corner was in fact a center of conflict, pesky characters, and imaginary power struggles.101

  Refreshingly, Paley does not have the urge to reform the kindergarten to some accepted specification of social justice or gender equality. In particular, she doesn’t need to step in to guide boys to more caring ways of playing. “Let the boys be robbers, then, or tough guys in space. It is the natural, universal, and essential play of little boys. Everything is make-believe except the obvious feelings of well-being that emerge from fantasy play.”102

  Many teachers, perhaps most, share the tolerant and generous views of Paley. But they are proving to be no match for the army of change agents at the ACLU, ACCES, US Department of Education, Wellesley, Harvard, Hunter College, and numerous other schools and activist organizations across the country. Today, these determined reformers are rarely challenged; their influence is growing and can be expected to grow. Few teachers will risk opposing the cause of gender justice backed up by science and lawsuits. Few parents have much of an idea of what their children are facing. As for the children themselves, they are usually in no position to complain—and, when they are asked and do complain, their answers are taken as further proof of their need for resocialization.

  4

  Carol Gilligan and the Incredible Shrinking Girl

  Confident at 11, Confused at 16” read the title of a 1990 New York Times Magazine story reporting an alarming discovery about the psychological development of girls.1 Research by Professor Carol Gilligan, Harvard University’s first professor of gender studies, had demonstrated that as girls move into adolescence they are “silenced” and their native confident spirit is forced “underground.” The piece, by novelist Francine Prose, was laudatory and urgent; it mentioned in passing that Gilligan’s research faced intense opposition from academics but provided few details.

  Prose’s nearly 4,000-word panegyric gave Times readers the heady feeling of being at the center of world-changing science. Gilligan and two colleagues had just published Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School.2 Prose described the book as “a major phase” in Gilligan’s Harvard research project on adolescent girls, extending the findings of her famous 1982 work, In a Different Voice. In the preface to Making Connections, Gilligan states her latest discovery dramatically: “As the river of a girl’s life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing.”3 The stakes are enormous, she says: helping girls negotiate this adolescent maelstrom may be the “key to girls’ development and to Western Civilization.”4

  Had Prose interviewed experts in adolescent development, she might have alerted her readers to anomalies in Gilligan’s methods, and contrasted Gilligan’s findings with those of a substantial academic literature that describes adolescent girls far more optimistically. But no such skeptics were consulted.

  The Times Magazine article generated a panicky concern for girls that would profoundly affect education policy throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Just when—as we now know—an educational gender gap was opening up with girls well in the lead, boys became objects of neglect while the education establishment focused on rescuing the afflicted girls. A brief review of Gilligan’s research methods, and of the findings of empirically minded developmental psychologists, will show why the Times should have engaged a science writer rather than a novelist to present Gilligan’s discovery to the world.

  Unfairness and Not Listening

  For Making Connections, sixteen authors, including Gilligan, interviewed Emma Willard students about how they felt growing into adolescence. The school, located in Troy, New York, takes both boarding and day students and is one of the oldest private girls’ academies in the country. These interviews at Emma Willard seemed to confirm their darkest suspicions about the precarious mental state of teenage girls.

  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. In her Times article, Prose cited what became oft-quoted words of Gilligan’s: “By 15 or 16 . . . [girls] start saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ They start not knowing what they had known.”5

  To protect themselves, girls begin to hide the vast well of knowledge they possess about human relations and injustice. Many bury it so deep inside themselves that they lose touch with it. Says Gilligan: “Interviewing girls in adolescence . . . I felt at times that I was entering an underground world that I was led in by girls to caverns of knowledge, which then suddenly were covered over, as if nothing was known and nothing was happening.”6 According to Gilligan, girls possess an uncanny understanding of the “human social world . . . compelling in its explanatory power and intricate in its psychological logic.”7 The sophisticated understanding of human relations that girls have but do not show, she says, rivals that of trained professional adults: “Much of what psychologists know about relationships is also known by adolescent girls.”

  What sort of experiments did Gilligan and her colleagues carry out at the Emma Willard School that led to the discovery of girls’ acute insights into human relations? A chapter called “Unfairness and Not Listening: Converging Themes in Emma Willard Girls’ Development” gives a fair idea of Gilligan’s methods and style of research. Gilligan and her coinvestigator, Elizabeth Bernstein, asked thirty-four girls to describe an occasion of someone “not being fair” and an occasion when someone “didn’t listen.”8 Here are some sample replies of the Emma Willard girls:

&n
bsp; Barbara, twelfth grader

  Unfairness: “We had three final assignments . . . knowing the students were feeling very burdened, it was unfair of her [the teacher] to contribute to that.”

  Not listening: “She did not seem terribly moved by how the class was feeling.”

  Susan, eleventh grader

  Unfairness: “A friend of mine was kicked out because . . . she had a friend of hers who got 600s on the SATs go in and take them [for her] . . . I understand punishing her, but I don’t think her life should be ruined. It makes me angry. I think they should have had her come back here. . . . I don’t think they cared.”

  Not listening: “We were going to spend a weekend at a boys’ school and [the dean] said I understand you are going to do some drinking. I was just so mad. . . . I said, ‘I will follow the rules.’ But she didn’t listen. I didn’t like her getting involved in my plans, because I didn’t think that was fair.”9

  To the untrained observer, these teenage girls don’t sound exceptionally insightful. Susan seems to be immature and ethically clueless. She seems not to understand the seriousness of the SAT deception; she is indignant that the dean of her boarding school, concerned about underage girls drinking, is so “involved” in her plans. But Gilligan and her colleague Bernstein seem never to notice the moral shortcomings of their subjects. Instead they tell us that girls such as Susan and Barbara are “unsettling” conventional modes of thinking about morality. They credit their callow subjects with exceptional moral insight: “The convergence of concerns with fairness and listening in older girls, for the most part, gives rise to a moral stance of depth and power.”10 Normally, say Gilligan and Bernstein, we disassociate the concepts of fairness and listening, but “remarkably, for these girls fairness and listening appear to be intimately related concepts.”11