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The War against Boys: Has It Ended?

2009; Berghahn Books; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3149/thy.0301.189

2375-9267

Christina Hoff Sommers,

Gender and Technology in Education

The war against boys has not ended. But it is a lot less ferocious these days. And boys have more allies than ever before. In the early nineties when I began research for the Wir Against Boys, few educators or journalists were talking about boys' academic deficits. There were no books like The Dangerous Book for Boys on the bestseller list. And there certainly were no conferences like this one on behalf of young men I am very impressed with your director, Tom Golden- and to all of you- for making this event happen. Let me briefly describe what it was like to be writing on behalf of boys ten or fifteen years ago The nation was in the grips of a full scale crisis . Scholars at Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Wellesley Center for Research and activists at the American Association of University Women (AAUW) had launched a wildly successful movement to rescue the allegedly shortchanged and demoralized American girl Girls definitely needed some special attention in math and science- and there was a need to get more of them interested in sports. But what emerged from this movement was a false picture of confused, silenced, diminished and forlorn girls, struggling to survive. This picture would be drawn again and again with added details and increasing urgency. Reviving Ophelia was by far the most successful of the girl-crisis books It was on the best-seller list for months. It described the lives of American girls in the language of catastrophe. Here is a passage from Reviving Ophelia: Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn. (1994, p. 19) But contrary to the story conveyed in Reviving Ophelia, and many other books just like it, by the early 1990's American girls were flourishing in unprecedented ways. To be sure, some were crashing and burning in a psychological Bermuda triangle. But the vast majority of girls were occupied in more constructive ways, moving ahead of boys in the primary and secondary grades, applying to college in record numbers, filling the more challenging academic classes, joining sports teams, and generally enjoying more freedoms and opportunities than any young women in human history. Girls were not in crisis. If anything, the early nineties marked the beginning of a kind of Golden Age in girls' education. It was boys, not girls, who were on the fragile side of the education gap. But that was not the conventional wisdom at the time. The allegedly low state of America's girls moved the United States Congress to pass the Gender Equity Act in 1994, categorizing girls as an under-served population on a par with discriminated-against minorities. Millions of dollars in grants were awarded to study the plight of girls and learn how to cope with the alleged insidious bias against them. Girl Power! Movements flourished throughout the country. We took our daughters to work, and at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, members of the American delegation presented the educational and psychological deficits of American girls as a pressing human rights issue. By the way, academics like Caryl Rivers at Boston University and Susan Bailey at the Wellesley Center criticize some of us who advocate for boys for overstating our case. Where were these sticklers for moderation when the girl crisis was spinning out of control? (I will take up the question about overstating our case in a moment.) Well, what finally slowed down the Girl-crisis parade? I would like to think that books like mine and Michael Gurian's and Warren Farrell's helped slow things down. Maybe they did: but the real threat to the girl crisis movement was simple reality. Reality has a way of getting noticed. The underachievement of American boys compared to girls is impossible not to see. Teachers were seeing it before their eyes day after day in the classroom. …