The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  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 No athletic privileges were rescinded.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:

  • Students with learning and behavior disorders would be identified and put in special classes, and, where necessary, would be given professional treatment. (Kevin Scherzer, for example, had been classified as “neurologically impaired” in second grade. But his parents always insisted he be mainstreamed and treated as normal.)

  • The school would hire a crisis-intervention counselor and institute an alcohol awareness program.

  • The school would draw up a new code of discipline, which it would strictly enforce.

  Many Glen Ridge parents were incensed by these plans. They argued that hiring crisis-intervention counselors and having alcohol programs would give Glen Ridge a bad reputation. The very idea of having their children “classified” under some category of disorder made these parents angry. When Maltman presented the seemingly mild code of discipline at a parents meeting, “all hell broke loose.” According to the principal, “The parents thought these were Gestapo methods.”22

  Lefkowitz, Friedan, and Mann draw the wrong lesson. This is not a story about an American “patriarchal culture gone awry”; it is about what happens to children in a moral wasteland. These boys were raised so permissively, with so little moral guidance, and with adult passivity even in the face of the most loathsome conduct, that they ended up sociopaths. It is a tale of young barbarians who were never civilized—a suburban Lord of the Flies. The difference is that the feral English boys in William Golding’s novel committed their atrocities when they were isolated from adults and civil society, stranded on an island after a shipwreck. What is so chilling about Glen Ridge is all the timid, doting adults who presided for years over their children’s moral disintegration. The lesson of the Lakewood Spur Posse is the same.

  “What’s Not to Like About Me?”

  The Spur Posse, a high school clique that took its name from the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, consisted of twenty to thirty middle-class boys who competed with one another in “scoring” with girls, especially underage girls. In March 1993, nine members were arrested and charged with a variety of crimes ranging from sexual assault to rape. One of the alleged victims was a ten-year-old girl.

  Eventually, most of the charges were dropped, but these swaggering, ignorant, predatory boys from “Rapewood” enjoyed a temporary celebrity. “We didn’t do nothing wrong ’cause it’s not illegal to hookup,” an indignant nineteen-year-old, Billy Shehan, told the New York Times.23 The boys appeared on the Dateline, Maury Povich, Jane Whitney, and Jenny Jones television shows, telling fascinated audiences about their sexual adventures.

  Orthodox feminist writers like Betty Friedan, Judy Mann, and Susan Faludi saw in the Spur Posse an embodiment of macho-patriarchal ideals. Less encumbered by a feminist framework, novelist and social critic Joan Didion saw them more conventionally as a group of proto-sociopathic boys. When Didion visited Lakewood in 1993 to do her story for The New Yorker, she noted that contempt for women was not the only thing the members of the Spur Posse had in common. Like the Glen Ridge jocks, these boys had been permitted to terrorize a town with impunity for years. A member of the school board told Didion stories of Spurs approaching nine- and ten-year-old children in playgrounds, stealing their baseball bats, and saying, “If you tell anyone, I’ll beat your head in.” The group had a long history of antisocial behavior, including burglary, credit card fraud, assault, arson, and even an attempted bombing.

  Like the jocks, the Spur Posse had little sense of the harm and suffering they were causing and no feelings of remorse or shame. One thing they did have was high self-esteem. Didion writes in her New Yorker piece: “The boys seemed to have heard about self-esteem, most recently at the ‘ethics’ assemblies . . . the school had hastily organized after the arrests, but hey, no problem. ‘I’m definitely comfortable with myself and my self-esteem,’ one said on Dateline.”24 When another interviewer asked a member of the group if he liked himself, the surprised boy replied, “Yeah, why wouldn’t I? I mean, what is not to like about me?”25

  The mayor of Lakewood, Marc Titel, rightly saw in this group of boys a deplorable failure of moral education: “We need to look at what kind of values we are communicating to our kids.”26 Because boys are by nature more physically aggressive, less risk-averse, and more prone to rule breaking, the communication has to be clear and explicit. Boys, as a rule, require a form of character education that places strong behavioral constraints on them—const
raints that many progressive educators feel we have no right to impose on any child.

  It is absurd to talk of the Glen Ridge and Lakewood outrages in terms of “patriarchal culture gone haywire” or “ground zero of a masculinity crisis.” They are instead evidence of what can happen when adults withhold elementary moral instruction from the young males in their charge, and punishment from acts of youthful terrorism. The more one faults masculinity for such acts, the further one strays from acknowledging the failures of moral education in the last decades of the twentieth century.

  A Socratic Dialogue

  Unfortunately, even some moral philosophers are reluctant to talk plainly about right and wrong and to pronounce judgment on clear cases of moral callowness and immaturity. In the fall of 1996, I took part in a televised “Socratic dialogue” on moral dilemmas with another ethics professor, a history teacher, and seven high school students. The program, Ethical Choices: Individual Voices, was shown on public television and is still circulated to high schools for use in classroom discussions of right and wrong.27 Its message still troubles me.

  In one typical exchange, the moderator, Stanford law professor Kim Taylor-Thompson, posed this dilemma to the students: Your teacher has unexpectedly assigned you a five-page paper. You have only a few days to do it, and you are already overwhelmed with work. Would it be wrong to hand in someone else’s paper?

  Two of the girls found the suggestion unthinkable and spoke about responsibility, honor, and principle. “I wouldn’t do it. It is a matter of integrity,” said Elizabeth. “It’s dishonest,” said Erin. But two of the boys saw nothing wrong with cheating. Eleventh grader Joseph flatly said, “If you have the opportunity, you should use it.” Eric concurred. “I would use the paper and offer it to my friends.”

  I had taught moral philosophy to college freshmen for more than fifteen years, so I was not surprised to find students on the PBS program defending cheating. There are some in every class who play devil’s advocate with an open admiration for the devil’s position. But at least that evening, in our PBS “Socratic dialogue,” I expected to have a professional ally in fellow panelist William Puka, a philosophy professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Surely he would join me in making the case for honesty.

  Instead, the professor told the students that it was the teacher who was immoral for having given the students such a burdensome assignment. He was disappointed in us for not seeing it his way. “What disturbs me,” he said, “is how accepting you all seem to be of this assignment. To me it’s outrageous from the point of view of learning to force you to write a paper in this short a time.”28

  For most of the session, the professor focused on the hypocrisy of parents, teachers, and corporations but had little to say about the moral obligations of students. When we discussed the immorality of shoplifting, he implied that stores were in the wrong for their pricing policies and talked about “corporations deciding on a twelve percent profit margin . . . and perhaps sweatshops.”29

  The professor was friendly and to all appearances well-meaning. Perhaps his goal was to embolden students to question authority and rules. That, however, is something contemporary adolescents are already good at. Too often, we teach students to question principles before they understand them. And in this case the professor was advising school students to question moral teachings and behavioral guidelines that are crucial to their well-being.

  Professor Puka’s “hands-off” style was fashionable in public schools for more than thirty years. It has gone under various names: values clarification, situation ethics, self-esteem education. These value-free approaches to ethics have flourished at a time when many parents fail to give children basic guidance in right and wrong. The decline of directive moral education has been bad for all children, but is has been especially bad for boys.

  Value-Free Kids

  In 1970, Theodore Sizer, then dean of the Harvard School of Education, coedited with his wife, Nancy, a collection of ethics lectures entitled Moral Education.30 The preface set the tone by condemning the morality of the “Christian gentleman,” “the American prairie,” the McGuffey Readers, and the hypocrisy of teachers who tolerate a grading system that is the “terror of the young.”31 The Sizers were critical of the “crude and philosophically simpleminded sermonizing tradition” of the nineteenth century. They referred to directive ethics education in all its guises as “the old morality.” According to the Sizers, leading contemporary moralists agree that that kind of morality “can and should be scrapped.”32

  Some twenty-four hundred years ago, Aristotle articulated what children need: clear guidance on how to be moral human beings. Aristotle compared moral education to physical training. Just as we become strong and skillful by doing things that require strength and skill, so too do we become good by practicing goodness. Ethical education, as he understood it, was training in emotional control and disciplined behavior. First, children must be socialized by inculcating into them habits of decency and using suitable punishments and rewards to discipline them to behave well. Eventually they will understand the reasons for and advantages of being moral human beings. Aristotle’s principles for raising moral children were unquestioned through most of Western history; even today his teachings represent commonsense opinion about child rearing. What Aristotle advocated became the default model for moral education over the centuries. He showed parents and teachers how to civilize the invading hordes of child barbarians. Only in the last decades of the twentieth century did large numbers of parents and educators begin to denigrate his teachings.

  The Sizers, for example, favored a “new morality” that gives primacy to students’ autonomy and independence. Teachers should never preach or attempt to inculcate virtue; rather, through their actions, they should demonstrate a “fierce commitment” to social justice. In part, that means democratizing the classroom: “Teacher and children can learn about morality from each other.”33

  The Sizers preached a doctrine that was already being practiced in many American schools. Schools were scrapping the “old morality” in favor of alternatives that gave primacy to the children’s moral autonomy. “Values clarification” was popular in the 1970s. Proponents of values clarification consider it inappropriate for a teacher to encourage students, however subtly or indirectly, to adopt the values of the teacher or the community. The cardinal sin is to impose values on the student. Instead, the teacher’s job is to help the students discover “their own values.” In Readings in Values Clarification (1973), two of the leaders of the movement, Sidney Simon and Howard Kirschenbaum, explain what is wrong with traditional ethics education: “We call this approach ‘moralizing,’ although it has also been known as inculcation, imposition, indoctrination, and in its most extreme form, ‘brainwashing.’ ”34

  However, the purpose of moral education is not to preserve our children’s autonomy but to develop a character they will rely on as adults. Children who receive guidance and develop good moral habits find it easier to become autonomous adults. Conversely, children who are left to their own devices will flounder.

  Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard moral psychologist, developed “cognitive moral development,” another favored approach during the laissez-faire years. Kohlberg shared the Sizers’ low opinion of traditional morality, referring disdainfully to the “old bags of virtues” that earlier educators had sought to inculcate.35 Kohlbergian teachers were more traditional than the proponents of values clarification. They sought to promote a Kantian awareness of duty and responsibility in students. They were also traditional in their opposition to the moral relativism that many progressive educators found congenial. But they shared with other progressives a scorn for any form of top-down inculcation of moral principles. They, too, believed in “student-centered teaching,” where the teacher acts less as a guide than as a “facilitator” of the student’s development.

  Kohlberg himself would later change his mind and concede that his rejection of “indoctrinative” moral educati
on had been a mistake.36 But his admirable recantation had little effect. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the traditional directive approach to moral education had fallen into desuetude in most public schools.

  Ironically, the next fashion in progressive pedagogy, “student-centered learning,” was soon to leave the Kohlbergians and the values clarifiers far behind. The new buzzword was self-esteem, and by the late 1980s it had become all the rage. Ethics was superseded by attention to the child’s personal sense of well-being; the school’s primary aim was to teach children to prize their rights and self-worth. In the old days, teachers would assign seventh graders to write about “The Person I Admire Most”; now students were assigned to write essays celebrating themselves. In one popular middle school English text, an assignment called “The Nobel Prize for Being You” informs students that they are “wonderful” and “amazing” and instructs them to “create two documents in connection with your Nobel Prize. Let the first document be a nomination letter written by the person who knows you best. Let the second be the script for your acceptance speech, which you will give at the annual award ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.” For extra credit, students can award themselves a trophy “that is especially designed for you and no one else.”37

  Throughout most of human history, children learned about virtue and honor by hearing or reading the inspiring stories of great men and women. During the 1970s and 1980s, the practice was replaced by practices that suggested to students that they were their own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.

  It’s hard to see how the Harvard theorists who urged teachers to jettison the “crude and philosophically simpleminded sermonizing tradition” can today defend the crude egoism that has replaced it. Apart from the philosophical niceties, there are concrete behavioral consequences. The moral deregulation that the progressive educators called for took hold in the very decades that saw a rise in conduct disorders among boys in the nation’s schools.38 No doubt much, perhaps most, of this trend can be ascribed to the large social changes that weakened families, such as the disappearance of fathers. But some of the blame can be laid at the doors of the well-intentioned professors who helped to undermine the schools’ traditional mission of morally edifying their pupils.