The War Against Boys (23 page)

In 2012, University of Missouri psychologist Amanda Rose and her coauthors published a study in
Child Development
that tested the Gilligan/Pollack assumption that boys were fearful and ashamed of sharing their feelings with others.
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Rose and her colleagues surveyed and observed nearly two thousand children and adolescents and found that boys and girls have very different expectations about the
value
of
problem talk. Girls were more likely to report that personal disclosure made them feel cared for and understood. Boys, overall, found it to be a waste of time—and “weird.” Contra Pollack and Gilligan, boys did not feel embarrassed about sharing feelings and were not filled with angst about being ridiculed or teased for being weak or unmasculine. Instead, said the lead author Amanda Rose, “boys' responses suggest they just don't see talking about problems to be a particularly useful activity.”
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Rose has sound advice for parents. If you want your son to be more forthcoming, it won't help to make him feel “safe” about sharing confidence. You will have to persuade him that it serves a practical purpose. As for daughters, she warns, excessive problem talk is linked to anxiety and depression. “So girls should know that talking about problems isn't the only way to cope.”

It is worth noting that in most past and present societies, “repression” of private feelings has often been regarded as a social virtue. From a historical perspective, the burden of proof rests on those who believe that being openly expressive makes people better and healthier. That view has become a dogma of contemporary American popular culture, but in most cultures—including, until quite recently, our own—reticence and stoicism are regarded as commendable, while the free expression of emotions is often seen as self-centered and immature.

Pollack, who is a champion of emotional expressiveness, instructs parents, “Let boys know that they don't need to be ‘sturdy oaks.' ” To encourage boys to be stoical, says Pollack, is to harm them: “The boy is often pushed to ‘act like a man,' to be the one who is confident and unflinching. No boy should be called upon to be the tough one. No boy should be harmed in this way.”
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But Pollack needs to show, not merely assert, that it harms a child to be “called upon to be tough.” Why shouldn't boys—or for that matter, girls—try to be sturdy oaks? All of the world's major religions place stoical control of emotions at the center of their moral teachings. For Buddhists, the ideal is emotional detachment; for Confucianism, dispassionate control. Nor is “Be in touch with your feelings” one of the Ten Commandments. Judeo-Christian
teaching enjoins attentiveness to the emotional needs and feelings of others—not one's own.

The insights of the save-the-male psychologists into the inner world of boys are by no means self-evident; nor is it at all obvious that their emotivist proposals would benefit boys. Boys' aggressive tendencies do need to be checked. But the boy reformers have not proved that they have the recipe for civilizing boys and restraining their rough natures. Before the gender experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the practitioners of the new male psychology are given broad license to reprogram our sons to be “sensitizers” rather than repressors, they should first be required to show that the repairs they are so anxious to make are beneficial and not injurious.

These reform-minded experts should seriously consider the possibility that American children may in fact need more, not less, self-control and less, not more, self-involvement. It may be that American boys don't need to be more emotional—and that American girls do need to be less sentimental and self-absorbed.

The British writer and social critic Fay Weldon has coined the useful, if somewhat ungainly, term
therapism
for the popular doctrine that almost all personal troubles can be cured by talk.
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Weldon is more concerned with therapism as a pop phenomenon than an educational practice; but in either sphere, talk therapy, once primarily a private therapeutic technique, has gone public in ways undreamed of in Sigmund Freud's philosophy.
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Strangers, proudly in touch with their feelings, share their innermost thoughts and experiences with one another. Talk-show participants make intensely personal disclosures to wildly applauding audiences. The endless stream of confessional memoirs, the self-esteem movement, the textbooks and questionnaires that probe children's innermost feelings are all manifestations of a profound and rampant therapism.

The contemporary faith in the value of openness and the importance of sharing one's feelings is now so much a part of popular culture that we find even such staid organizations as the Girl Scouts of America giving patches for being open about grief.
Lingua Franca
writer Emily Nussbaum reports that “a Girl Scout troop in New York instituted a ‘grief patch' in 1993—troop members could earn this epaulette by sharing a painful feeling with one another, writing stories and poems about death and loss and meeting with bereavement counselors.”
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One sector in our society has so far been highly resistant to therapism: little boys are no more interested in earning “grief patches” than they are eager to interact personally with dolls. When homework assignments require them to explore their deeper feelings about a text, it is likely that they will not engage. I suspect that efforts to get little boys to be more overtly emotional rarely succeed. But I do not discount the powers of the would-be reformers to wreak a great deal of harm and grief by trying.

All through the 1990s,
self-esteem
was the education buzzword. Everyone needed it; many demanded it for their children or pupils as a basic human right. But the excesses of those who promoted techniques for increasing students' self-esteem provide a cautionary example of what can happen when teachers, counselors, and education theorists, armed with good intentions and specious social science (for one thing, no one agrees on what self-esteem is or how to measure it), turn classrooms into encounter groups.

It has never been shown that “high self-esteem” is a good trait for students to possess. Meanwhile, researchers have uncovered a worrisome correlation between inflated self-esteem and juvenile delinquency. As Brad Bushman, an Iowa State University psychologist, explains, “If kids develop unrealistic opinions of themselves and those views are rejected by others, the kids are potentially dangerous.”
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John Hewitt, a University of Massachusetts sociologist, has examined the morality of the self-esteem movement in a fine scholarly book called
The Myth of Self-Esteem
. Hewitt documents the exponential growth of self-esteem articles and programs from 1982 to 1996.
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He points to the ethical
hazards of using the classroom for therapeutic purposes. In a typical classroom self-esteem exercise, students complete sentences beginning “I love myself because . . .” or “I feel bad about myself because . . .” Hewitt explains that children interpret these assignments as
demands
for self-revelation. They feel pressed to complete the sentences “correctly” in ways the teacher finds satisfactory. As Hewitt acutely observes, “Teachers . . . no doubt regard the exercises as being in the best interest of their students. . . . Yet from a more skeptical perspective these exercises are subtle instruments of social control. The child
must
be taught to like himself or herself. . . . The child
must
confess self-doubt or self-loathing, bringing into light the feelings that he or she might prefer to keep private”
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(emphasis in original).

Far from being harmless, these therapeutic practices are unacceptably prying. Surely school children have a right not to be subjected to the psychological manipulations of both self-esteem educators and the reformers intent on getting boys to disclose their emotions in the way girls often do.

The vast majority of American boys and girls are psychologically healthy. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that they are morally and academically undernourished. Every society confronts the difficult and complex task of civilizing its children, teaching them self-discipline and instilling in them a sense of right and wrong. The problem is old, and the workable solution is known—character education in a sound learning environment. The known, tested solution does not include therapeutic pedagogies.

Children need to be moral more than they need to be in touch with their feelings. They need to be well educated more than they need classroom self-esteem exercises and support groups. Nor are they improved by having their femininity or masculinity “reinvented.” Emotional fixes are not the answer. Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.

American boys do not need to be rescued. They are not pathological. They are not seething with repressed rage or imprisoned in “straitjackets of
masculinity.” American girls are not suffering a crisis of confidence; nor are they being silenced by the culture. But when it comes to the genuine problems that do threaten our children's prospects—their moral drift, their cognitive and scholastic deficits—the healers, social reformers, and confidence builders don't have the answers. On the contrary, they stand in the way of genuine solutions.

T
here is a much-told story in education circles about a now-retired Chicago public school teacher, Mrs. Daugherty. She was a dedicated sixth-grade teacher who could always be counted on to bring out the best in her students. But one year she found her class nearly impossible to control. The students were noisy, unmanageable, and seemingly unteachable. She began to worry that many of them had learning disabilities. When the principal was out of town, she did something teachers were not supposed to: she went to his office and looked in a special file where students' IQ scores were recorded. To her amazement, she discovered that a majority of the students were significantly above average in intelligence. A quarter of the class had IQs in the high 120s (124, 127, 129), several in the 130s, and one of the worst classroom culprits was in fact brilliant: he had an IQ of 145.

Mrs. Daugherty was angry at herself for having felt sorry for them and for expecting so little from them. Things soon changed. She increased the difficulty of the work, doubled the homework, and ran the class with uncompromising discipline. Slowly but perceptibly, the students' performance improved. By the end of the year, this class of former ne'er-do-wells was among the best behaved and highest performing of the sixth-grade classes.

The principal was delighted. He was well aware of this infamous sixth-grade class and its less-than-stellar reputation, so at the end of the year he called Mrs. Daugherty into his office to ask what she had done. She felt compelled to tell him the truth. The principal listened attentively and immediately forgave her. He congratulated her. But then he said, “I think you should know, Mrs. Daugherty, those numbers next to the children's names—those are not their IQ scores. Those are their locker numbers.”
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The moral of the story: Strict standards are good. Demanding and expecting excellence can only benefit the student. These were once truisms of education. Even today, setting and enforcing high standards for students is uncontroversial, at least as a general principle. Who would question the need for challenging work, high expectations, and strict discipline? The sad answer is that a lot of education experts are skeptical about what they see as old-fashioned pedagogy, and their theories have the effect of relaxing standards and expectations. Rousseauian romanticism, in the form of progressive education, remains a powerful force in American schools. The departure from structure, competition, discipline, and skill-and-fact-based learning has been harmful to all children—but it appears to have exacted an especially high toll on boys.

Progressive pedagogues pride themselves on fostering creativity and enhancing children's self-esteem. Strict discipline and the old-fashioned “dry-knowledge” approach are said to accomplish the opposite: to inhibit creativity and leave many students with feelings of inadequacy. Progressives frown on teacher-led classrooms with fact-based learning, memorization, phonics, and drills. Trainees in the schools of education are enjoined to “Teach the student, not the subject!” and are inspired by precepts like “[Good teaching] is not vase-filling; rather it is fire-lighting.”
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In this “child-centered” model, the teacher is supposed to remain in the background so that students have the chance to develop as “independent learners.” Drill and rote have no place in a style of education focused on
freeing “the creative potential of the child.” One prominent champion of progressivism, Alfie Kohn, author of
The Schools Our Children Deserve
and
Punished by Rewards
, suggests the modern cooperative classroom should resemble a musical jam session: “Cooperative learning not only offers instruments to everyone in the room, but invites jazz improvisation.”
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Child-centered, progressive education has been prevalent in American schools of education since the 1920s. According to University of Virginia education scholar E. D. Hirsch Jr., the “knowledge-based approach currently employed in the most advanced nations [has been] eschewed in our own schools for more than half a century.”
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With the exception of a brief period in the late 1950s and early 1960s (when the Soviet Union's success with Sputnik generated fears that an inadequate math and science curriculum was a threat to national security), the fashion in education has been to downplay basic skills, knowledge acquisition, competitive grading, and discipline. This fashion has opened a worrisome education gap that finds American students falling behind their counterparts in other countries.
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