The War Against Boys (27 page)

The developing gender gap in the gifted programs of New York City does not indicate that girls are smarter than boys. Rather, it shows how well-intentioned government officials and educators—adults with the standard adult preferences for order and quiet—can disregard boys' needs and abilities and unwittingly adopt policies stacked against them. It is a small part of the long story of how boys have become the have-nots in American education.

American educators and government officials should follow the example of the British and Australians. We are kindred spirits—inclusive, fractious democracies. We all embrace and insist upon the social and political equality of the sexes, and we all contend with the sometimes excessive pressures for political correctness and multiculturalism. Yet, somehow, the British and Australians openly acknowledge the plight of boys and are unapologetically taking steps to help them. The mood in Great Britain and Australia is constructive and informed by good research and common sense. The mood in the United States is contentious, ideological, and cowed by gender politics. The British have their parliamentary “toolkit of effective practices” for educating boys,
⁷⁷
while Americans have the National Women's Law Center's
Tools of the Trade: Using the Law to Address Sex Segregation in High School Career and Technical Education.

We should pay close attention to the advice dispensed by the British Boys' Reading Commission and the Australians' Success for Boys. That means more experiments with single-sex classes and academies. That means more schools of education offering special courses on boy-friendly pedagogy. Old-fashioned, structured, competitive, teacher-directed classrooms work best for many boys. Too many get lost in jazz improvisations. We must make room for more boy-enthralling, job-directed schools like Aviation High School and Blackstone Valley Tech, and more boy-effective teachers like Chicago's Mrs. Daugherty and Montreal's Professor Rajagopalan.

Most of all, we need a change of attitude. The women's lobby, the Department of Education, the gender theorists in our schools of education, the ACLU, the authors of the Perkins Act Reauthorization, and the president of the United States are so carried away with girl power they have forgotten about our male children. They have distracted themselves and the nation from acknowledging a plain and simple fact: American boys across the ability spectrum and in all age groups have become second-class citizens in the nation's schools. The Australians and British are coping with this reality. If they can do it, so can we.

B
oys who are morally neglected have unpleasant ways of getting themselves noticed. All children need clear, unequivocal rules. They need structure. They thrive on firm guidance and fair discipline from the adults in their lives. But boys need these things even more than girls do.

The Josephson Institute of Ethics conducts surveys on the moral attitudes of young people. Girls routinely far outperform boys in every measure of honesty and self-control. As part of the 2010
Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth
, Josephson researchers polled a sample of more than forty thousand high school students. They found that significantly more boys “agree” or “strongly agree” with the following statements:

• “A person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed” (47.4 percent of males versus 29.8 percent of females).
¹

• “It's not cheating if everyone's doing it” (19.1 percent of males, 9.8 percent of females).
²

• “It's sometimes okay to hit or threaten a person who makes me angry” (36.7 percent of males, 19.1 percent of females).
³

The American Psychiatric Association defines a “conduct disorder” as “a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others, or other major age-appropriate societal norms or rules, are violated.”
⁴
According to the APA, the prevalence of conduct disorder has increased since the 1960s. Far more males than females fit the pattern. “Rates vary depending on the nature of populations sampled and the methods of ascertainment: for males under age 18 years, rates range from 6 percent to 16 percent; for females, rates range from 2 percent to 9 percent.”
⁵
For conduct disorders severe enough to gain the attention of the police, boys also predominate. According to the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Center, 62 percent of children younger than age eighteen arrested for property crimes in 2009 were boys; of those arrested for violent crimes, 82 percent were boys.
⁶

The male's greater propensity for antisocial behavior is cross-cultural. A 1997 University of Vermont study compared parents' reports of children's behavior in twelve countries. The populations studied (which included the United States, Thailand, Greece, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Sweden) differed greatly in how they raised children and defined gender roles. Yet in every case boys were more likely than girls to fight, swear, steal, throw tantrums, and threaten others.
⁷

Every new generation enters society unformed. Princeton University demographer Norman B. Ryder speaks of “a perennial invasion of barbarians who must somehow be civilized . . . for societal survival.”
⁸
Ryder views the problem from the vantage point of society. But when socialization is inadequate, the children also suffer. A society that fails in its mission to humanize and civilize its children fails its male children in uniquely harmful ways.

Janet Daley, the education writer at the
Daily Telegraph
in London, has written at length about how the lack of directive moral education harms boys more than girls:

There is one indisputable fact with which anyone who is serious about helping young men must come to terms: boys need far more discipline, structure and authority in their lives than do girls. . . . Boys must be actively
constrained by a whole phalanx of adults who come into contact with them—parents, teachers, neighbors, policemen, passers-by in the streets—before they can be expected to control their asocial, egoistic impulses.
⁹

What happens when boys never encounter that “phalanx of adults”? We don't have to look far. In the middle and late decades of the twentieth century, the United States experimented with value-free education. Stanford education scholar William Damon has described the era:

Educators found themselves embedded in a . . . postmodern world. Most responded by concluding that the moral part of their traditional mission had become obsolete. Moral relativism was in,
in loco parentis
was out. . . . This thinking was a misconception that caused so many readily apparent casualties among the young that it was bound to be abandoned sooner or later.
¹⁰

Today, most schools have abandoned once popular laissez-faire attitudes toward behavior. As we saw in earlier chapters, many now err in the opposite direction, with draconian zero-tolerance policies for even harmless behavior. But it is instructive to go back a few decades to a time when large numbers of adults defected altogether from the central task of civilizing the children in their care.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, newspapers carried shocking stories about adolescent boys exploiting, assaulting, and terrorizing girls. In the South Bronx, a group of boys known as the “whirlpoolers” surrounded girls in public swimming pools and sexually assaulted them. In Glen Ridge, New Jersey, popular high school athletes raped a mentally disabled girl. In Lakewood, California, a gang of high school boys known as the Spur Posse turned the sexual exploitation of girls into a team sport.
¹¹

Women's groups seized on these incidents as symptomatic of a violent misogyny pervading American culture. The cause? Stereotypical male socialization. Referring to the Glen Ridge case, feminist pioneer Betty Friedan noted somberly that, “machismo is a fertile ground for the seeds of evil.”
¹²
Columnist Judy Mann wrote that the Spur Posse case “contains all the ingredients of patriarchal culture gone haywire.”
¹³
For Susan Faludi, the Spurs were “ground zero of the American masculinity crisis.”
¹⁴

Author Joan Didion wrote a lengthy piece on the Spur Posse for the
New Yorker
, and Columbia University journalism professor Bernard Lefkowitz spent six years researching the Glen Ridge case for his 1997 book,
Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb.
Didion and Lefkowitz offer detailed portraits of the lives of the young male predators. We can see for ourselves some of the forces that turned seemingly normal boys into criminals. Were they desensitized by being separated from their mothers at too early an age, as William Pollack and Carol Gilligan suggest? Are they products of conventional male socialization? Are they the offspring of what Judy Mann calls the “machocracy”?
¹⁵
The narrative evidence points, albeit unintentionally, to an entirely different cause.

The Glen Ridge rape was reported on May 25, 1989. Several popular high school athletes had lured a mentally disabled girl into a basement, removed her clothes, and penetrated her with a broomstick. Lefkowitz was intrigued by the question of how seemingly normal American boys had come to commit such acts: “This wasn't about just a couple of oddballs with a sadistic streak. . . . Thirteen males were present in the basement where the alleged rape occurred. There also were reports that a number of other boys had tried to entice the young woman into the basement a second time to repeat the experience. . . . I wanted to know more about how this privileged American community raised its children, especially its sons.”
¹⁶

According to Lefkowitz, these boys were “pure gold, every mother's dream, every father's pride. They were not only Glen Ridge's finest, but in
their perfection they belonged to all of us. They were Our Guys.”
¹⁷
To find out what had gone wrong, he undertook “an examination of the character of their community and of the young people who grew up in it.”
¹⁸

Lefkowitz shares with Friedan and Mann the view that machismo created much of the evil:

The Jocks didn't invent the idea of mistreating young women. The ruling clique of teenagers adhered to a code of behavior that mimicked, distorted and exaggerated the values of the adult world around them. . . . But these misguided and ultimately dehumanizing values were not exclusive to this one small town. As the continuing revelations of sexual harassment and abuse in the military, in colleges, in the workplace . . . suggest, these values have deep roots in American life.
¹⁹

Lefkowitz presents the Glen Ridge story as a modern morality tale about misogyny and the oppression of women. But the facts he powerfully reports sustain a very different interpretation. The real story is about how a group of adults—parents, teachers, coaches, and community leaders—failed massively and tragically to carry out their responsibility to civilize the children in their care. The problem with these young male predators was not conventional male socialization, but its absence.

All through elementary school and junior high, Chris Archer and twins Kevin and Kyle Scherzer, the three boys who would later be convicted of first-degree sexual assault, had bullied other students and mistreated teachers. The “jocks,” as their group was called, routinely disrupted class with outbursts and obscenities. They smashed up the science laboratory, trashed the Glen Ridge Country Club (surely a redoubt of the suburban patriarchy), stole from other students, and vandalized homes. All these actions apparently went unpunished. No charges were filed. No arrests were made. No athletic privileges were rescinded. No apologies were demanded or received. According to Lefkowitz, the jocks had such a bad reputation that twenty families withdrew their children from the school system during their reign.
²⁰

The history of abuse of the mentally disabled girl, known as Leslie, went
back to Kevin and Kyle's early childhood. The girl's mother reports that when the twins were in kindergarten, they tricked her daughter into eating dog feces. Later, they fed her mud, pinched her arm until it was covered with welts, and routinely referred to her in public as “Brain-Les,” “Head-Les,” and “retard.”

Again, it seems the boys were never reprimanded or punished. Leslie's parents chose not to tell Kevin and Kyle's parents about the feces, the mud, and the welts. No one seemed to see the behavior in moral terms. Leslie's parents did consult a child psychologist, who blamed the incidents on the girl's immaturity—something she would grow out of. The active malice and cruelty of the boys was never regarded as a serious problem to be disciplined and stopped.

From the time they were small children, the boys who would later take part in the rape were opportunistically abusive and cruel to nearly anyone who crossed their paths. This pattern persisted through adolescence. It affected their peers regardless of sex. Later on, it affected their teachers and schoolmates. The glaring absence of any firm discipline, the failure of the adults in their lives to punish them for their egregious actions, turned them into monsters.

By the time the Glen Ridge boys assaulted Leslie in the basement, they had had years of experience with mayhem and abuse without suffering any consequences. Where were their parents? The school officials? The police? According to David Maltman, principal of the Glen Ridge Middle School, “These kids would act up in class, disrupt the learning situation, set other kids up, get in fights with them, go after them back and forth to school. By the fifth grade, they already had had a bad name for a long time.”
²¹
Officials did attempt to intervene. Just before the unruly cohort entered high school, Maltman and the teachers developed a plan to introduce more discipline and order into the school. It had several features that are standard in many schools: