Excerpt from The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

School "Engagement"

A 1999 Congressional Quarterly Researcher article about male and female academic achievement takes note of a common parental experience: "Daughters want to please their teachers by spending extra time on projects, doing extra credit, making homework as neat as possible. Sons rush through homework assignments and run outside to play, unconcerned about how the teacher will regard the sloppy work." In the technical language of education experts, girls are academically more "engaged." School engagement is a critical measure of student success. The U.S.

Department of Education gauges student commitment by the following criteria:

• How much time do students devote to homework each night?
  


• Do students come to class prepared and ready to learn? (Do they bring books and pencils?
  


• Have they completed their homework?)

That boys are less committed to school than girls was already well documented by the Department of Education in the eighties and nineties. Higher percentages of boys than of girls reported they "usually" or "often" come to school without supplies or without having done their homework. Surveys of fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades show girls consistently reporting that they do more homework than boys. By twelfth grade, males are four times as likely as females not to do homework.

Here we have a genuinely worrisome gender gap, with boys well behind girls. It is this gap that should concern educators, parents, school boards, and legislators. Engagement with school is perhaps the single most important predictor of academic success. But boys' weaker commitment is not addressed at the equity seminars and workshops around the country. Instead, the fashionable but spurious self-esteem gap continues to be the prevailing concern -- the gap that the AAUW, in its zeal to "know more" about Carol Gilligan's findings, claims to have exposed.

There are some well-tested ways of reengaging boys, improving their study habits, and interesting them in learning and achievement. (I'll discuss what works with boys in later chapters.) But until boys' problems are acknowledged, they cannot be addressed. And until they are addressed, another educational disparity is likely to persist: far more girls than boys go on to college.


The College Gap

The U.S. Department of Education reports that in 1996 there were 8.4 million women but only 6.7 million men enrolled in college. It also shows women holding on to and improving this advantage well into the next decade. According to one Department prediction, by 2007 there will be 9.2 million women in college and 6.9 million men.

Girl partisans offer ingenious, self-serving arguments for why the higher enrollment of women in college should not count as an advantage for women. According to feminist essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, "One of the reasons why fewer men are going to college may be because they suspect that they can make a living just as well without a college education; in other words they still have such an advantage over women in the non-professional workforce that they don't require an education."

Ehrenreich is suggesting that a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy about to graduate from high school, with no plans for college, may still be better off than the college-bound girl sitting next to him. There may be a handful of enterprising high school students for whom this is true, but for the vast majority of boys a college education allows entrance into the middle class -- to say nothing of the personal benefits of a liberal arts education.

In recent years, the economic value of a college education has increased dramatically. An economist at the American Enterprise Institute, Marvin Kosters, has quantified the trend: "The average wage of a mature adult college graduate was about 25 percent higher in 1978 than the wage of a high school graduate. By 1995, the difference had more than doubled to an average wage of more than 50 percent higher for the college-educated worker."

Copyright © 2000 by Christina Hoff Sommers