The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  Few thinkers have written about liberty and individual autonomy with greater passion and good sense than the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. But Mill makes it clear he is talking about adults. “We are not speaking of children,” he says in On Liberty. “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience.”39

  Mill could not foresee the advent of thinkers like the Sizers and the values clarificationists who would glibly recommend “scrapping” the old morality. From the loftiest of progressive motives, many schools were robbed of the ability to enforce society’s codes and rules.

  The Courts Enter the Fray

  The courts also played a role in eroding teachers’ and school officials’ power to enforce traditional moral standards and discipline. In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the US Supreme Court ruled that Iowa school authorities violated students’ rights by denying them permission to wear protest armbands to school. Justice Abe Fortas, in the majority opinion, found the action of the school authorities unconstitutional: “It can hardly be argued that students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”40 Justice Hugo Black dissented. Though a great champion of the First Amendment, he noted that schoolchildren “need to learn, not teach.” He wrote, presciently: “It is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the Judiciary. . . . Turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against their teachers . . . it is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools.”41

  Abigail Thernstrom, a political scientist at the Manhattan Institute, cites Tinker as the beginning of the end of effective school discipline. She also sees it as an unfortunate example of Rousseauian romanticism in the courts. According to Thernstrom, “[Fortas’s majority] opinion was a romantic celebration of conflict and permissiveness, even within the schoolhouse walls—as if the future of democratic government and American culture could be placed in jeopardy had the students been told to stage their demonstration elsewhere.”42

  In 1975, a second case that would further diminish the authority of school officials to correct student behavior reached the high court. In Goss v. Lopez, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for schools to suspend students without due process. Justice Byron White, who wrote the majority opinion, strongly favored extending students’ rights. Justice Lewis Powell opposed the ruling, fearing it would ultimately be harmful to students.

  Justice White prevailed, and the judiciary thus joined the progressive educationists and many parents in holding that “student rights” trump the traditional prerogative of teachers to require compliance with school discipline. The Goss ruling helped bring on the era of permissiveness that Justice Black had warned about.

  A Stanford education scholar explains what happened next: “In response to the threat of such lawsuits, schools have felt forced to institute increasingly formal and rigid procedures that cannot be challenged in court because they allow for no discretion or flexibility in the way they are administered.”43 Enter the zero-tolerance policies we discussed in chapter 2. Schools gradually augmented value-free education with judgment-free discipline. But punishment without discretion and judgment angers students and further undermines the moral authority of the school.

  Where the Reformers Go Wrong

  Those who oppose directive moral education often call it a form of brainwashing or indoctrination. That is sheer confusion. To brainwash children undermines their autonomy and rational self-mastery, and diminishes their freedom. To educate them and to teach them to be competent, self-controlled, and morally responsible in their actions increases their freedom and deepens their humanity. The Greeks and Romans understood this well, as did most of the great scholastic and Enlightenment thinkers. It is a first principle of every great religion and high civilization. To know what is right and act on it is the highest expression of freedom and personal autonomy.

  What Victorians had in mind when they extolled the qualities of a “gentleman” are the virtues we need to teach our children: honesty, integrity, courage, decency, politeness. These are as important to the well-being of a young male today as they were in nineteenth-century England. Even today, despite several decades of moral deregulation, most young men (and women) understand the term gentleman and approve of the ideals it connotes.

  Far from being oppressive, the manners, instincts, and virtues we recognize in decent human beings—in the case of males, the manners, instincts, and virtues we associate with being a “gentleman”—are liberating. To civilize a boy is to allow him to make the most of himself. And good manners and good morals benefit the community more than even the best of laws. As Edmund Burke advised, “Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there and now and then. Manners are what vex and soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us by a constant, steady uniform insensible operation.”44

  Common sense, convention, tradition, and modern social science research converge in support of the Aristotelian tradition of directive character education.45 Children need clear standards, firm expectations, and adults in their lives who are loving and understanding but who insist on responsible behavior. But all of this was out of fashion in education circles for more than thirty years. By the mid-1970s, we were on our way to becoming the first society in history to use high principle to weaken the moral authority of teachers. Soon, local officials throughout the country, from Principal Maltman at Glen Ridge High in New Jersey to Mayor Titel of Lakewood, California, would be powerless in the face of delinquent students and litigious parents.

  Value-free education declined slowly, then came to an abrupt end on April 20, 1999, when two boys walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and murdered twelve students and a teacher.

  Evil Boys

  The Columbine massacre shocked the nation. How could it happen? The usual explanations failed. Poverty? The killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were middle class. Easy access to weapons? True, but young men, especially in the West, have always had access to guns. Broken families? Both boys’ families were intact. A nation of emotionally repressed boys? Boys were much the same back in the ’50s and ’60s when nobody brought guns to school. Bullies drove them to it? As journalist Dave Cullen showed in his meticulously researched Columbine, the killers were not bullied; nor were they members of an outcast Goth cult called the Trench Coat Mafia—that was all a media fiction.46

  One week after the Colorado shootings, Secretary of Education Richard Riley talked to a group of students at a high school in Annapolis, Maryland. After the secretary rounded up the usual causes and reasons for the atrocity, a student asked him about one he had not mentioned: “Why haven’t students been offered ethics classes?” Secretary Riley seemed taken aback by the question.

  Sad to say, it is not likely that an ethics curriculum would have stopped boys like Harris and Klebold from their murderous rampage. Harris was a cold-blooded sociopath; Klebold, an enraged, suicidal follower. They planned their assault for more than a year, and the goal was not to shoot a few students. Their plan (which fortunately failed when their bombs did not detonate) was to rival Timothy McVeigh and to blow up the entire school. They were domestic terrorists.

  As noted in chapter 2, many social critics cited the Columbine debacle as a metaphor for all boys. William Pollack, director of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital and author of the bestselling Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, told audiences around the country, “The boys in Littleton are the tip of the iceberg. And the iceberg is all boys”47 (his emphasis). More recently, feminist sociologist Jessie Klein opined:

  Eric and Dylan were affirming, rather than rejecting, some of the prevailing social moral standards at their school
. These expectations push boys to achieve a certain kind of status at all costs—and in particular link the achievement of this status to a narrow definition of masculinity that values power and dominance above all else.48

  There were hundreds of boys at Littleton’s Columbine High. Some behaved heroically. Senior Seth Houy threw his body over a terrified girl to shield her from the bullets. Scores of grief-ridden boys attended the memorial services. At one service, two brothers performed a song they had written for their lost friends. Other young men read poems. To take two morbid killers as representative of “the nature of boyhood” is profoundly misguided and unjust.

  Certainly, the school could have done a better job protecting itself. When Harris and Klebold appeared in school with T-shirts with the words “Serial Killer” emblazoned on them, the principal should have taken notice. An English teacher at Columbine, Cheryl Lucas, told Education Week that both boys had written short stories about death and killing “that were horribly, graphically, violent” and that she had notified school officials. According to Lucas, the officials had taken no action because nothing the boys wrote had violated school rules. Speaking with painful irony, the frustrated teacher explained, “In a free society, you can’t take action until they’ve committed some horrific crime because they are guaranteed freedom of speech.”49 Harris and Klebold exposed the madness of deploying that sort of logic with adolescents.

  But one of the lessons of the Columbine story is to be careful drawing lessons. In the first edition of this book, I cited the case as an example of a breakdown in character education. But the more we learn about the events at Columbine or Sandy Hook Elementary, why those killers did what they did is as mysterious and complex as the problem of evil itself. We need to do all we can to identify deviants such as Klebold, Harris, and Adam Lanza; and we need to protect ourselves from their malice. But they should not be confused with normal boys. Most boys don’t need therapeutic interventions, gender resocialization, or draconian punishments; what they need are basic ethics.

  In sum: Columbine brought an abrupt end to the “value-free” progressive pedagogy of 1970–1999, but it also led to serious errors in the opposite direction: the zero-tolerance movement. Both were errant extremes that proved particularly harmful to boys. At the same time, Columbine produced positive and productive responses. It invigorated a burgeoning character education movement. Such a movement may never protect us from sociopaths like Harris, Klebold, and Lanza, but its prospects for normal, healthy children are bright.

  The Quiet Revival of Character Education

  In the early 1990s, even before the Columbine shootings, a hitherto silent majority of parents, teachers, and community activists were beginning to agitate in favor of old-fashioned moral education. In July 1992, a group called the Character Counts Coalition (organized by the Josephson Institute of Ethics and made up of teachers, youth leaders, politicians, and ethicists) gathered in Aspen, Colorado, for a three-and-a-half-day conference on character education. The program was initiated by Michael Josephson, a former law professor and entrepreneur. His texts were Aristotle, St. Augustine, and the Boy Scout Handbook—the “old morality.”

  At the end of the conference, the group put forward “The Aspen Declaration on Character Education.” Among its principles:

  • The present and future well-being of our society requires an involved, caring citizenry with good moral character.

  • Effective character education is based on core ethical values that form the foundation of democratic society, in particular, respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, caring, justice, fairness, civic virtue, and citizenship.

  • Character education is, first and foremost, an obligation of families: it is also an important obligation of faith communities, schools, youth, and other human service organizations.50

  Over the years, the Character Counts Coalition has attracted a wide and politically diverse following. Its council of advisors has included liberals such as Marian Wright Edelman and conservatives such as William Bennett. Several United States senators from both political parties have joined, along with a number of governors, mayors, and state representatives. The new character-education movement has been embraced by dozens of youth-serving organizations, including the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the YMCA of the USA, Boys & Girls Club of America, and the National PTA. Members also include schools, municipalities, and businesses. “Together we reach more than seven million young people every day,” says the Josephson Institute.51 Today most states mandate some form of moral education.

  Individual schools have testified to its effectiveness. Fallon Park Elementary School in Roanoke, Virginia, for example, saw a dramatic change in its students after the principal adopted the Character Counts program in 1998.52 Every morning the students recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This is followed by a pledge written by the students and teachers: “Each day in our words and actions we will persevere to exhibit respect, caring, fairness, trustworthiness, responsibility, and citizenship.” These core values were integrated into the daily life of the school. According to the principal, suspensions declined, attendance and grades improved, and—mirabile dictu—misbehavior on school buses all but disappeared.53 That was in 1998; in 2012 the program was still going strong.

  Character Counts is the most widely used character education program. So far there is little research proving its efficacy, but dozens of evidence-based programs have flourished over the years, and many received strong federal support for a time. Among the most successful are PATHS (South Deerfield, Massachusetts), Roots of Empathy (Toronto, Canada), Caring School Community (Oakland, California), and Positive Action (Twin Falls, Idaho). Stanford’s William Damon reports, “Federal support for such programs was authorized under the Clinton administration and tripled in size during the Bush administration.”54 According to Damon, the Obama administration has “reduced or eliminated support . . . with the lone exception of a new bullying initiative.”55

  Members of the Obama administration may have recoiled from the conservative connotations of “character.” But it is also possible they were reacting to the muddled state of research surrounding such programs. There are hundreds of different programs, and the research on their effectiveness is mixed. In What Works in Character Education, a 2005 survey, University of Missouri–St. Louis education scholar Marvin Berkowitz and his colleague Mindy Bier identified “sixty-nine scientifically rigorous studies showing the effectiveness of a wide range of character education initiatives.”56 Thirty-three programs were cited for having “scientifically demonstrated positive student outcome.” However, these results were contradicted by a major 2010 Department of Education study, which examined seven typical character education programs and found them ineffective.57 Researchers randomly assigned programs to eighty-four schools in six states and then measured their impact on student behavior and achievement. When compared to the results of a control group, they could find no evidence of improvement.

  The latter study has proved controversial. According to Berkowitz, the research design was so rigorous that it likely made it difficult to implement the programs effectively. Such comprehensive school initiatives usually require strong commitment from school leaders and staff, and randomly assigning programs to schools and classrooms is therefore an obstacle to effectiveness. William Damon judged it to be “a poor test of how real character education influences students.”58 Allen Ruby, the coauthor of the Department of Education study, conceded that “this is one study, so people shouldn’t just say, ‘We’re done, let’s move on.’ ”59 All the same, the findings were sobering and remind us that the task of finding our way back to moral education is not going to be easy. Needless to say, we have to keep trying. Too many children, boys most of all, are morally adrift. And there are some programs that have been judged effective by other researchers. Consider Positive Action.

  Aristotle in Idaho

  Positive Action is a character education program founded in 1982
by education scholar Carol Gerber Allred. Today more than eleven thousand schools, twenty-five hundred districts, and two thousand community groups have adopted it. The K–12 curriculum consists of teachers’ guides and scripted lessons, along with a variety of age-appropriate games, music, posters, stories, and activities. Lessons are taught fifteen minutes a day throughout the school year. When the Department of Education carried out an evaluation of forty-one leading character education programs in 2007, Positive Action was the only one to receive its seal of approval. Positive Action is the one ethics program included in the department’s influential What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). “The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Positive Action to be moderate to large for behavior and for academic achievement.”60

  In the late 1970s, Allred was teaching high school in Idaho and became discouraged by her students’ lack of engagement and ambition. Many were confused about basic ethics and had little understanding of work ethic. “I just knew they could do better,” she told me. In response, Allred developed a character education system based on her readings in psychology, philosophy, and her appreciation of “Idaho farm values.” She asked herself, “What do these hardworking, self-reliant, and honorable farmers know, and how can I teach it to my students?” She came up with a simple formula, which she named Positive Action. According to several carefully designed studies, her formula works.61 These studies found that Positive Action improved behavior, increased academic achievement, reduced suspension rates, and, according to the WWC, reduced “serious violence among boys.”62 A third, more recent study found that Positive Action had “favorable program effects on reading for African American males.”63