The War Against Boys (38 page)

21.
 Tom Duffy, “Behind the Silence,”
People
, September 21, 1998, p. 175.

22.
 
Saturday Today
, March 28, 1998.

23.
 Nadya Labi, “Mother of the Accused,”
Time
, June 24, 2001,
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,138917,00.html
(accessed January 29, 2013). See also David Koons, “A Boy Killer Speaks,”
Arkansas Times
, December 4, 2008,
www.arktimes.com/arkansas/a-boy-killer-speaks/Content?oid=934386&storyPage=1
(accessed January 29, 2013).

24.
 PBS, “Who Is Kip Kinkel?” Last modified 2013,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kinkel/kip/cron.html
(accessed January 30, 2013).

25.
 FBI Uniform Crime Report:
www.fbi.gov/ucr/Cius_97/97crime
. See also US Department of Justice,
Juvenile Offenders and Victims: A National Report
(Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1995).

26.
 Some passages in
Real Boys
show that Pollack has genuine understanding for the needs of boys. There is, for example, an excellent discussion of the ways our schools neglect boys and favor girls. He notes that our “coeducational schools . . . have evolved into institutions that are better at satisfying the needs of girls than those of boys . . . not providing the kind of classroom activities that will help most boys to thrive.” Unfortunately, such passages are rare. Most of his book is about a male culture that is harming boys, as it harms girls. The demoralization of girls is the paradigm. Even as he is pointing out that our schools are unfairly neglecting boys, Pollack treats girls as the default victims of our culture, adding only that “adolescent boys,
just like adolescent girls
, are suffering from a crisis in self-esteem” (emphasis in original) (p. 239).

27.
 Pollack,
Real Boys
, p. 6.

28.
 See, for example, Anne C. Petersen et al., “Depression in Adolescence,”
American Psychologist
48, no. 2 (February 1993), p. 155; and Daniel Offer and Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl, “Debunking the Myths of Adolescence: Findings from Recent Research,”
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
31, no. 6 (November 1992), pp. 1003–1014. See also entry on “Separation Anxiety Disorder” in
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, 4th ed., p. 112.

29.
 Susan Faludi,
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
(New York: Morrow, 1999).

30.
 Ibid., p. 358.

31.
 Ibid., p. 9.

32.
 Ibid., p. 39.

33.
 David Myers and Ed Diener, “Who Is Happy?,”
Psychological Science
6, no. 1 (January 1995), p. 14. For data from the National Opinion Research Center, see
www.icpsr.umich.edu/gss99
.

34.
 Faludi,
Stiffed
, p. 27.

35.
 Ibid., p. 6. Regier is one of the researchers cited in Faludi's supporting footnote (p. 612, footnote 5).

36.
 
DSM-IV
, the official desk reference of the American Psychiatric Association, reports that the point prevalence for clinical depression among men is 2 percent to 3 percent.

37.
 Jim Windolf, “A Nation of Nuts,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 22, 1997.

38.
 Pat Sebranek and Dave Kemper,
Write Source 2000 Teacher's Guide
(Burlington, WI: The Write Source/D.C. Heath, 1995), p. 70. In a 1999 interview, one of the writers, Dave Kemper, told me that in future editions, most of the “feeling” questions and self-esteem exercises will be eliminated.

39.
 Jack Levin and Arnold Arluke, “An Exploratory Analysis of Sex Differences in Gossip,”
Sex Roles
12 (1985), pp. 281–285.

40.
 Diane McGuinness and John Symonds, “Sex Differences in Choice Behavior: The Object-Person Dimension,”
Perception
6, no. 6 (1977), pp. 691–694.

41.
 See, for example, Leslie Brody and Judith Hall, “Gender and Emotion,” in
Handbook of Emotions
, eds. Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), p. 452.

42.
 Jane Bybee, “Repress Yourself,”
Psychology Today
, September/October 1997, p. 12. See also, Jane Bybee, “Is Repression Adaptive? Relationships to Socioemotional Adjustment, Academic Performance, and Self-Image,”
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry
6, no. 1 (January 1997), pp. 59–69.

43.
 Amanda Rose et al., “How Girls and Boys Expect Disclosure About Problems Will Make Them Feel: Implications for Friendships,”
Child Development
, February 2012.

44.
 “Males Believe Discussing Problems Is a Waste of Time, MU Study Shows,”
MU News Bureau
, August 22, 2011,
http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2011/0822-males-believe-discussing-problems-is-a-waste-of-time-mu-study-shows/
(accessed September 21, 2012).

45.
 Pollack,
Real Boys
, p. 50.

46.
 Fay Weldon, “Where Women Are Women and So Are Men,”
Harper's Magazine
, May 1998, p. 66.

47.
 At the very end of one of his last books,
Civilization and Its Discontents
, Sigmund Freud sternly cautioned his followers to resist the temptation to talk of whole groups as suffering neurosis brought about by “the culture.” Whatever its drawbacks as a diagnostic
and therapeutic technique, Freudian psychology should not be faulted for the way Pipher, Gilligan, and the Pollack group seek to pathologize our children. Freud acknowledged that in important respects the development of civilization shows similarities to the development of individuals. And he noted the temptation to say “that under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become ‘neurotic.' ” But he warned “that it is dangerous, not only with men but with concepts [such as neurosis], to tear them from the sphere in which they originate and have been evolved.” Freud even predicted that “one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities” using psychoanalytic concepts. Though he had invented psychoanalysis, he deplored the day it would be used in that way.

48.
 Nussbaum, “Good Grief,” p. 49.

49.
 Quoted in Sharon Begley, “You're O.K., I'm Terrific: ‘Self-Esteem' Backfires,”
Newsweek
, July 13, 1998, p. 69. See also Roy F. Baumeister, Laura Smart, and Joseph Boden, “Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark Side of High Self-Esteem,”
Psychological Review
103, no. 1 (1996), pp. 5–33; and Kirk Johnson, “Self-Image Is Suffering from Lack of Esteem,”
New York Times
, May 5, 1998.

50.
 John P. Hewitt,
The Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Happiness and Solving Problems in America
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), p. 51.

51.
 Ibid., p. 85.

7.
Why Johnny Can't, Like, Read and Write

1.
 Story told by Dr. Carl Boyd, president and CEO of the Art of Positive Teaching, an educational foundation in Kansas City (keynote address, National Coalition for Sex Equity Experts, July 1998).

2.
 Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde,
Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools
(Portsmouth, NH: Heineman, 1998), p. 51.

3.
 Alfie Kohn,
What to Look for in a Classroom
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), p. 51.

4.
 E. D. Hirsch Jr.,
The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them
(New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 9.

5.
 National Center for Education Statistics,
Highlights from TIMMS 2007: Mathematics and Science Achievement of US Fourth- and Eighth-Grade Students in an International Context
, US Department of Education, 2009,
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf
(accessed July 18, 2012). See also, Harold Stevenson,
A TIMSS Primer
(Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 1998). (For full data report, see
http://www.csteep.bc.edu/timss
).

6.
 Boys' Reading Commission,
The Report of the All-Party Literacy Commission,
National Literacy Trust, July 2, 2012, p. 5.

7.
 Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell, “Sex Differences in Mental Test Scores, Variability, and Numbers of High-Scoring Individuals,”
Science
269 (July 7, 1995), p. 45.

8.
 Center on Education Policy, “Are There Differences in Achievement Between Boys and Girls?,” March 2010.

9.
 Lester Thurow, “Players and Spectators,”
Washington Post Book World
, April 18, 1999, p. 5.

10.
 Charles Hymas and Julie Cohen, “The Trouble with Boys,”
Sunday Times
(London), June 19, 1994, p. 14.

11.
 Barclay McBain, “The Gender Gap That Threatens to Become a Chasm,”
The Herald
(Glasgow), September 17, 1996, p. 16.

12.
 “Tomorrow's Second Sex,”
The Economist
, September 28, 1996, p. 23.

13.
 Robert Bray et al.,
Can Boys Do Better?
(Bristol: Secondary Heads Association, 1997).

14.
 Ibid., p. 17.

15.
 McBain, “The Gender Gap That Threatens to Become a Chasm.”

16.
 E. Redwood, “Top Marks to the Lads,”
Daily Telegraph
, January 17, 1998, p. 19.

17.
 Ibid.

18.
 Ibid.

19.
 Bray et al.,
Can Boys Do Better?
, p. 1.

20.
 Annett MacDonald, Lesley Saunders, and Pauline Benefield,
Boys' Achievement, Progress, Motivation and Participation
(Slough, Berkshire, England: National Foundation for Educational Research, 1999), p. 18.

21.
 Ibid., p. 13.

22.
 Boys' Reading Commission,
The Report of the All Party Parliamentary Literacy Group
, National Literary Trust, July 2, 2012,
www.literacytrust.org.uk/policy/nlt_policy/boys_reading_commission
(accessed July 18, 2012).

23.
 Ibid., p. 10.

24.
 Ibid., p. 20.

25.
 Ibid., p. 15.

26.
 Ibid.

27.
 Ibid., p. 22.

28.
 Ibid., p. 13.

29.
 Ibid., p. 25.

30.
 Ibid., p. 76.

31.
 Ibid.

32.
 “Success for Boys Outline,”
www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/BoysEducation/Pages/success_for_boys.aspx
(accessed July 18, 2012).

33.
 Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky, “Why Johnny Won't Read,”
Washington Post,
January 25, 2005, p. A15,
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33956-2005Jan24.html
(accessed July 18, 2012).

34.
 Louisa Moats,
Whole-Language High Jinks: How to Tell When “Scientifically-Based Instruction” Isn't
(New York: Thomas Fordham Institute, 2007).

35.
 Higher Education Research Institute,
The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2010
, pp. 58, 82,
http://heri.ucla.edu/PDFs/pubs/TFS/Norms/Monographs/TheAmericanFreshman2010
(accessed July 18, 2012).

36.
 Friedrich Froebel,
The Student's Froebel
, ed. W. H. Herford (Boston: Heath, 1904), pp. 5–6. (The quotation is cited in Hirsch,
The Schools We Need.
See especially Hirsch's chapter 4, “Critique of Thought World,” for a thorough and astute analysis of the influence of romanticism on American education, pp. 69–126.)

37.
 Zemelman et al.,
Best Practice
, p. 9.

38.
 Ibid., book summary on back cover. See Hirsch's chapter 5, “Reality's Revenge,”
The Schools We Need
, for his critique of
Best Practice
(pp. 127–76).

39.
 Zemelman et al.,
Best Practice
, p. 4.

40.
 Ibid., p. 8.

41.
 Ibid., p. 6.

42.
 David Brooks, “Honor Code,”
New York Times
, July 5, 2012,
www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/opinion/honor-code.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120706
(accessed July 18, 2012).

43.
 Sumitra Rajagopalan, “We Need Tool-Savvy Teachers,”
Globe and Mail
, October 20, 2010,
www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/we-need-tool-savvy-teachers/article1215226/
(accessed July 18, 2012).

44.
 Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Pathways to Prosperity Report: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century
, February 2011.

45.
 Ibid., p. 27.

46.
 
U.S. News & World Report
says it is 44 percent female:
www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/massachusetts/districts
;
shblackstone-valley-regional-vocational-technical/blackstone-valley-regional-vocational-technical-high-school-9282
(accessed January 23, 2013).

47.
 Alison L. Fraser,
Vocational-Technical Education in Massachussetts
, Pioneer Institute White Paper no. 42, October 2008, p. 6.

48.
 Ibid., p. 14.

49.
 “Valley Tech Freshmen Get Warm Welcome,”
Northbridge Daily Voice
, August 20, 2011,
http://northbridge.dailyvoice.com/schools/valley-tech-freshmen-get-warm-welcome
(accessed July 18, 2012).