Seeking Remedy for Pathologized Boys

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 14, 2000 | by Woody West

Two boys carrying a bat and ball and gloves are heading home: "Yeah, it was fun! ... Not a parent in sight" says one, in a pungent editorial cartoon by Bruce Plante of the Chattanooga Times.

A cartoon should not be made to carry too much baggage, to be sure. But there is a deceptively complex focus implied here involving boys and the quality of masculinity, highly organized youth athletics and parental involvement, or intrusion, more precisely. One immediately thinks of the beating death recently in a Boston suburb in which a youth-hockey coach died after a fight with a parent, the latter having since been charged with manslaughter.

The wider canvas, though, is the developing debate over the status of boys and young men in our cultural matrix.

There is a simple premise to this vexing issue: It is that boys are different from girls. That would seem incontrovertible. But for several decades now it has been challenged by feminists and faddish educationists who contend that such differences are merely "social constructs." Nonsense. Boys are more physical, aggressive, competitive and more difficult to socialize -- all traits widely viewed as anomalous by liberals. The behavior associated traditionally with youngsters of the male persuasion almost routinely is now diagnosed as attention deficit disorder, or some similar psychobabble. A terrible solution has been to pump drugs into them -- Ritalin and Prozac particularly. Better passive lumps than unruly lads.

School systems and disconcerting numbers of parents have bought into this absurd equation. They will not recognize that male-female differences are genuine and natural, and they recite what they consider aberrant male behavior in the same mode as Ophelia describing Hamlet as if he had been "loosed out of Hell to speak of horrors."

These anti-male attitudes have become conventional wisdom. This is a logical and negative extension of another bit of prevalent progressive belief -- that girls are being harmed by the way they are treated in schools, undervalued and denigrated and so on -- as one more of the supposedly nasty ways women are unrelievedly discriminated against. A few years ago, Christine Hoff Sommers demolished these politicized notions, especially the meretricious study by the American Association of University Women that the press loudly and uncritically seconded.

Now Sommers, a former professor of philosophy, has turned her analytical skill on the gender-bending crusade against boys. "It's a bad time to be a boy in America" she writes in The WarAgainst Boys. "Boys need discipline, respect and moral guidance. They do not need to be pathologized."

She is not the first critic in a backlash against feminist propaganda to note that girls in fact do better in school; that boys more often are tossed out of class and suspended, forced to repeat a grade, and suffer learning disabilities. Girls attend college in greater numbers (females now compose 56 percent of college enrollment in this country, with a greater gap, 63 to 37 percent, among blacks) and exhibit dramatic superiority over boys in writing proficiency by 12th grade. These are just a few of the differentia.

As one reviewer of the Sommers' book pointed out, prevalent teaching practices tend to emphasize cooperative learning, the priority of feelings and student direction over competition, facts and structure.

Is it too much to wonder if the occasional violence by parents in regimented youth athletics may not be a reaction to the denaturing of the male -- with parents disproportionately asserting the value of vigorous and, yes, aggressive masculine behavior as some sort of reaction or compensation? Of course, some of the parental excess is simply thuggish, but it also is well to remember that thuggishness is far from the norm.

Well, how to combat the "war against boys"? The British evidently have had success in combating the academic underachievement of young males by instituting basic literacy programs that emphasize phonic reading instruction grammar and punctuation, with texts that appeal to "manly" images.

"So who in the United States is working to improve boys' achievement?" Sommers asks. "No one. No national organizations alert the public to boys' academic shortcomings, no politically powerful groups lobby Congress to help boys.... The mood in the United States is contentious and ideological, and shaped by the girl advocates."

How fortunate are those of us who eons ago simply were permitted to choose up sides in sandlot ball games and take our lumps and learn the rules of equity among peers, and who were not treated in school as if we were mutant beings but youngsters who were to be guided, rigorously if need be, in acquiring the habits of civil society.

May Christine Hoff Sommers have a wide readership.