s children across Canada and the United States troop back to school this month, a spate of new books and studies suggest that at least half of them are in deep trouble. After decades of arguing that schools marginalize and demean girls, a growing number of teachers, sociologists and psychologists are now concerned that boys, not girls are being short-changed.
"I think our system is weighted against boys and I think that there are difficulties for them in the schools," says University of Toronto education psychologist Larry Schwartz.
Testing of Ontario's Grade 3 students in 1997 showed that girls outscored boys in reading and writing skills by a wide margin. Statistics Canada studies indicate that two-thirds of elementary school children in special education classes are boys and that they are more prone to behavioral problems.
Schwartz believes that boys' problems stem from a school system that doesn't account for their needs. "If they are pushed into directions that they are not yet cognitively or developmentally able to go, then theyburn out and they become problems," he says. "They're not interested in academics. They're not interested in school. They want to leave.''
The problem is even more marked in the United States where only 45 percent of boys go on to post-secondary education. More boys than girls are suspended from school, more are held back and more drop out. "It's a bad time to be a boy in America," says Christina Hoff Sommers.
In The War Against Boys, Sommers, a former professor of philosopher at Clark University and currently a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, argues that boys are being "pathologized" by the educational system; a system in which reverse sexism is the norm and boys are categorized as "protosexists, potential harassers and perpetuators of gender inequality."
In a climate of disapproval, boys are constantly subjected to the notion that men are brutal, hypersexual and emotionally crippled, leading them to feel hesitant about themselves. Sommers believes that the schools have undertaken a "deeplyauthoritarian" mission to suppress natural masculine traits.
Describing herself as a libertarian and feminist, Sommers thinks that this re-education effort actively harms boys and has contributed to their academic downward spiral. As she sees it, the enemies in this particular war are "misguided feminists" and the American Association of University Women who have convinced governments to spend million of dollars on special programs for girls on the grounds that they are "psychologically depleted, socially silenced and discriminated against academically." These propositions are, Sommers insists, demonstrably false.
Yet, the idea that girls are academically disadvantaged persists and governments, school boards and teachers continue to address a nonexistent problem while ignoring the "real gender inequality: "the plight of boys.''
Somers uses the first half of her book building the case that feminist organizations have used bad science to hoodwink parents into believingthat a "girl crisis'' exists. She dissects flawed studies, unearths better ones and skewers the canonical texts of the girl-crisis movement.
The heart of the book is a long, devastating critique of "the matron saint" of the girl-crisis movement, Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies and author of In a Different Voice, who believes that women are more caring than men and that girls in a patriarchal society are destined to suffer a soul-destroying crisis at adolescence. Lapsing into ad hominem argument, Sommers describes her as the "one person most responsible for promoting the idea that our culture is targeting girls for second-class citizenship.''
In The War Against Boys, Sommers is not making an argument in favor of boys over girls. "I became a feminist because I didn't like bullies," she says. "I didn't like male chauvinists. But now it seems like there are female bullies, female chauvinists. And that is just wrong. The opposite of inequity for women is fairness for women and men"
Sounds fair to me.