Boys watch, girls race by

Images that flicker to mind upon the utterance of the word boy have changed but a little from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of a “sturdy little urchin” in “The House of the Seven Gables:” with “cheeks as red as an apple ... he was clad rather shabbily ... [wearing] a chip hat with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices.” Boys themselves since have slipped through crevices. Today, they are education’s urchins. Blame Carol Gilligan.

Her name is likely unknown in the rolling farmlands of Stuarts Draft and in the vicinity of Fort Defiance High School, but the former Harvard University star’s reach likely has extended there. The Ivy League icon’s first professor of gender studies, Gilligan acquired fame among academics in 1982 with the publication of “In a Different Voice,” which purported as science her conclusions about the driving ethical forces in men and women.

She later made a more relevant and melodramatic assertion, that society was casting girls adrift: “As the river of a girl’s life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing.” Other academics, so-called, proceeded with unsubstantiated regurgitation, leading to a study by the American Association of University Women called “How Schools Shortchange Girls.” “The implications are clear,” the AAUW declared. “The system must change.”

So it has. Today, boys trail girls in almost every significant academic measure, in standardized test scores, college enrollment, grades and graduation rates. A story on the front page of today’s newspaper highlights one of the problems. Almost two in 10 boys at Stuarts Draft and Fort Defiance high schools and more than 1 in 10 boys at all of Augusta County’s high schools who were freshmen in 2004 dropped out by last summer. Just 8.6 percent of girls in Augusta schools’ class of 2008 dropped out during that time.

Fingers point everywhere aiming for blame. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “The War Against Boys,” is better than most at identifying answers. She explains that during the 1990s, when Gilligan was winging her way to scholarly glory, girls were chiseling away at achievement gaps just as schools were racing to accommodate the young ladies, compelled by feminists in academia and tales of discriminatory woe. Boys were ignored.

The result: “A boy today, through no fault of his own, finds himself implicated in the social crime of shortchanging girls,” Sommers wrote in “The War Against Boys.” “Yet the allegedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be the superior student.”

Since Sommers penned those words at the turn of the decade, waves of data have vindicated her assertions. Boys are lost in a system inimical to them.

Peg Tyre, author of “The Trouble With Boys,” explained in Newsweek last fall some of the trends. Teachers driven by the whip of standardized tests and No Child Left Behind dictates increasingly have cast aside the hands-on activities boys crave. Recess time – vital for boys whose physical energy revs on high and attention span runs low – has been whittled away or eliminated. Another point of Tyre’s: “In the wake of ... Virginia Tech, kids who stretch out a pointer finger, bend their thumb and shout ‘pow!’ are regarded with suspicion and not a little fear.” Boys, in other words, are quietly disdained.

A single conclusion appears universal. Men play an essential role in improving boys’ chances, serving as mentors and role models. An equally important task is to act as advocates for boys and an approach that removes the politics that manufactured the current disparity and focuses instead on producing an environment that allows students of both sexes to fulfill their potential. Victimization spawns problems rather than repairs them.