Any parent knows that if you give a 4-year-old boy a doll, he'll likely try to make a gun out of it. Or that if you give a little girl a flatbed truck, she'll typically make a bed for her baby in the back. Scientific evidence continues to pour in to back up what most everybody already knows: Boys and girls are inherently different.
Apparently a lot of America's educators recognize the differences, too. Only some of them think that, to the extent boys are different from girls, it's a bad thing.That's what professor Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the forthcoming book "The War Against Boys," found when she attended the recent National Coalition for Sex Equity in Education conference. She wrote about her unique experience for The Women's Quarterly.
What a tale Sommers tells. NCSEE is a professional organization of some 600 "sex-equity experts" who work in federal and state departments of education, in local schools and with activist organizations. Their job is to formulate "gender-fair" education policies and programs and offer guidance to administrators and teachers on how to deal with sexism and sexual harassment -- yes, sexism and sexual harassment -- in elementary and secondary classrooms.
NCSEE's agenda is based on the idea that girls do worse in school than boys. Never mind that girls on average get better grades than boys, take more rigorous academic programs, are more committed to school than their male peers -- and today make up a majority of college freshmen. Or that boys are more likely than girls to get in trouble, drop out and be diagnosed as learning disabled. Or that while the so-called math gap favoring boys is closing, the much larger reading gap favoring girls isn't.
NCSEE maintains that any advantage boys enjoy constitutes sex bias, while, it would seem, any advantage girls enjoy is a (rare) triumph of equity. NCSEE wants to dismantle this system of "injustice" by re-socializing boys.
You see, today what was once referred to as "boys will be boys" behavior -- including competitiveness and aggressiveness -- is viewed by some as bad. But sharing and cooperation, generally thought of by the same group as female traits, are considered good.
Even apart from NCSEE elitists, that sort of thinking is widely reflected in today's schools. Millions of boys who would once be thought of only as having "ants in their pants" are now, for instance, medicated with Ritalin. And boys sports programs have been dismantled at some schools to make room for added girls sports programs -- whether or not girls expressed interest.
Sommers argues that to the extent traditional boyish behavior and activities aren't allowed in school, boys lessen their attachment to school. And she says that, combined with fewer traditional male role models to properly train and civilize boys (whether because of our more feminized culture or because more boys than ever are growing up without dads in the home), may be reasons why boys, not girls, are doing poorly in school.
In other words, boys are the ones falling behind and it's not because they aren't more like girls. It's largely because more and more of our schools and our culture are trying to feminize them instead of civilize them.
Betsy Hart, a former White House spokeswoman, is a weekly commentator on MSNBC television news.