Judging from the subtitle of The
War Against Boys alone, it’s clear that Sommers has an axe to grind: she
blames the feminist movement for many of the problems that young men
experience. Her suggestion is that
gender-neutral child rearing ignores that fact that boys have a distinct nature
different from girls, and that boys are not well served if we ignore this fact. She criticizes the recent work of Carol
Gilligan that argues that young women suffer in a male dominated society, and
she equally criticizes the related work of William Pollack that argues that
young men are oppressed by cultural ideals of masculinity. She calls for a return to traditional education that includes the forming of moral character, and believes that the old-fashioned goal of helping boys become gentlemen has great value.

Some of
Sommers’ arguments make good sense. For
example, when feminists deny the obvious average differences between boys and
girls, they look silly. Sommers also
argues convincingly against educators who put more emphasis on increasing
children’s self-esteem than giving them skills they can be proud of. She gives strong evidence that boys are on
average performing worse than girls in school and college. She makes a strong argument that we should
try single-sex education as a solution to some problems, and allow competition
and discipline back into the classroom, if it is actually true that they were
neglected.

Sommers’
arguments against the excesses of feminist claims and the wooly thinking of
academics in schools of education are convincing. However, the fundamental weakness of The War Against Boys
is its failure to demonstrate that there is a crisis or even a serious problem
in our current education policies concerning the treatment of boys. At most, Sommers highlights a few worrying
trends in the work of educational psychologists and some best-selling books,
but she says nothing to show that boys are really being harmed by new methods
of education and government policies. 
While she provides a plethora of statistics showing the poor performance
of boys compared to girls in schools, her criticisms of modern education policy
are impressionistic and vague; she never makes a strong case that education has
actually been taken over by the self-esteem movement or false therapeutic values. She does cite some interesting studies that
suggest that voicing one’s emotions may not be helpful in recovering from
trauma, but it is far from clear that it is part of mainstream education policy
to encourage children to give voice to their personal pain. The few examples Sommers provides to support
her case are no substitute for good data. 

One of
Sommers’ main ideas is that boys and girls are intrinsically different, and
that it is folly to try to change this. 
She ends her book with the idea that we should accept and even rejoice
in the adage, “boys will be boys.” Yet
she is also rather alarmed that girls are in many ways doing better than boys
in schools and college. It is hard to
see why we should share her alarm. 
While it is clear that boys are doing less well than girls, on average,
in schools around the country, she gives no evidence that boys are doing less
well than they used to in previous decades. 
Indeed, one of the charts in the book shows clearly that there is
improvement over the 10 years between 1980 and 1990 in the percentage of high
school sophomores who arrive at school unprepared, for both boys and girls (p.
28). Sommers suggestions that there is
a “war against boys” and that it is “a bad time to be a boy in America” remain
implausible. It seems just as likely
that boys are doing less well than girls in school and college because they are
simply less interested in school work or even less talented than girls, and that
they chose to put their energy into other pursuits and careers that do not need
college degrees.

Furthermore, while she is
unsympathetic to the recent claims of Gilligan and Mary
Pipher about the current plight of girls, she says little to address the
data that suggest that girls have a very hard time in high school, facing
increasing rates of diagnosis of depression, self-injury, and eating disorders,
and increasing problems of sexual harassment and assault and pressures to
engage in sexual activity. While some
of her criticisms of feminist scholarship are legitimate, she chooses soft
targets, such as proposals that boys should be playing with dolls and wearing
dresses, that even few other feminists are ready to defend.

The debates over gender issues and
the state of education in America today have become highly charged. Sommers rightly insists that we should be
careful with the statistics and their interpretation, and we should avoid
leaping to unwarranted conclusions. Her
criticisms of some of methodologies of Carol
Gilligan and William
Pollack are convincing and noteworthy. 
But Sommers’ conclusion that there is systemic discrimination and
prejudice against boys in schools across America remains unproven. She is right
to draw attention to the dangers of such problems, and indeed, I hope that
students in educational psychology and schools and departments of education are encouraged
to read The War Against Boys, at least if they are going to read other
works in these gender debates. Ironically,
in her talk of “war,” Sommers herself engages in as dramatic and overblown
rhetoric as her opponents, and if these debates are going to progress, we need
to move away from ideologically driven stances, looking to see what problems
children are actually experiencing and finding creative and realistic
solutions.

NB: My thanks to my colleagues Mark
Rigstad and Richard Wilkens for helpful discussions of these matters. Thanks also to Christina Hoff Sommers for
engaging in debate on these issues on her visit to our college this month.

© 2002 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Christian Perring,
Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College,
Long Island. He is editor of Metapsychology Online Review.
His main research is on philosophical issues in psychiatry.
He is especially interested in exploring how philosophers can
play a greater role in public life, and he is keen to help foster
communication between philosophers, mental health professionals,
and the general public.

Categories: Ethics, General

Tags: Educational Psychology, Gender Issues and Sexual Disorders