Posted on 03/27/2002 8:33:33 AM PST by the_devils_advocate_666
An excerpt from "Culture Wars Invade the Lives of Boys". [full text]
Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor turned popular writer, is the author of the most intense salvo: The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Simon and Schuster, 2000; $25). Now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Sommers throws down the gauntlet from the book's opening pages. She writes that it has fallen to her to tell "how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world."
Three guesses about whom or what Sommers blames for this wholesale rejection of maleness. Surprise: If you guessed feminism, you'd only be partly right. True enough, there is virtually no contemporary feminist theorist who doesn't come in for some of Sommers's arctic scorn. She devotes at least two chapters to trashing the Harvard researcher and psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose books on moral reasoning among women and girls (most notably, In a Different Voice) brought to light the paucity of psychological research done on women.
Sommers regards all of Gilligan's research as fatally flawed, with inadequate sampling and a lack of peer review. (Gilligan, along with several research associates and peers, has responded to Sommers's claims. For more details on this contentious exchange, see the August 2000 Atlantic Monthly.) Sommers also blames Gilligan, among others, for setting the women's movement on the path to unrepentant male bashing. Gilligan, she says, has pushed "the myth of the emotionally repressed boy," a myth that "has great destructive potential. If taken seriously, it could lead to even more distracting and insipid school programs designed to get boys in touch with their feelings."
Sommers's distaste for these school-based programs has roots in a justifiable concern about boys' school performance. Eighth-grade boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to be held back a grade. By high school, 67 percent of all special education students are boys. Boys receive 71 percent of all school suspensions and are up to 10 times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Though statistics such as these may have been a revelation to some of Sommers's readers, they are old news in the African American community, for example, where educators and others are working to improve the lives of boys and girls together.
It takes a careful reading of Sommers's book--and her footnotes--to discover her pervasive ideology, one that takes feminism as only one of many targets. Though a card-carrying conservative and veteran of the culture wars since the mid-1980s, she manages to camouflage her larger critique until late in the book. It is not until she turns her attention to the moral life of boys that she tips her hand, writing that
the story of why so many children are being deprived of elementary moral training spans three or four decades of misguided reforms by educators, by parents and by judges. Reduced to its philosophical essentials, it is the story of the triumph of Jean-Jacques Rousseau over Aristotle.
It's not just the feminists, you see: it's the Enlightenment itself, along with the dreaded 1960s, that bears the responsibility for the state of American boys today. Sommers continues:
Aristotle regarded children as wayward, uncivilized and very much in need of discipline. . . . Rousseau believed the child to be originally good and free from sin. As he saw it, a proper education provides the soil for the flourishing of the child's inherently good nature, to bring it forth unspoiled and fully effective.
Just in case you don't get it, she adds:
What happens when educators celebrate children's creativity and innate goodness and abandon the ancestral responsibility to discipline, train, and civilize them? Unfortunately, we know the answer: we are just emerging from a thirty-year experiment with moral deregulation. The ascendancy of Rousseau as the philosopher of education and the eclipse of Aristotle have been bad for all children, but they have been especially bad for boys.
...
Brilliant summary! Sommers is very good!
If that means reducing & demoralizing a few million white boys to wrest that power away, well, to make an omelette ya gotta break a few eggs.
Gilligan, she says, has pushed "the myth of the emotionally repressed boy," a myth that "has great destructive potential. If taken seriously, it could lead to even more distracting and insipid school programs designed to get boys in touch with their feelings."Has it ever occurred to these people that there's a good reason why emotional control has been a valued male skill for thousands of years? When women have emotional outbursts they tend to be internalized, while guys are more likely to break things. Also, many things that make women sad men will typically react to angrily.
Columbine's a classic case. We didn't have these school shootings before these loons got into the schools with all the "don't hold back your feelings" modell. Not all emotional reactions are harmless when allowed full expression, and this is far more true for boys than girls.
-Eric
Left to themselves, boys or girls will follow their natural instincts. That is why they form gangs and have so many babies before 20. Human civilization has been short in evolutionary time scale. We still have raw animal nature lurking below our mind. Thus we will be raising people fit to living in the wild than civilized society. Breaking up of family influence coupled with coddling nature of school with extreme PC will produce people they tried to get rid of. The full-blown wild men with no shame or guilt, roaming around and destroying things as they see fit. Instead of moving to utopia, we are going back to sqaure one, before the dawn of civilization.
It's not just the feminists, you see: it's the Enlightenment itself, along with the dreaded 1960s, that bears the responsibility for the state of American boys today.
This author is an idiot. Rousseau was not part of the Enlightenment movement. He was the first and most influential of those who opposed the Enlightenment on other than traditional grounds. The most influential proponent of the Elightenment was Voltaire.
The American Revolution was based on Enlightenment principles, the French Revolution only 13 years later was heavily influenced by Rousseau's philosophy. Their different outcomes are at least in part a reflection of this fact.
To use an analogy, Nietzche (sp?) was not a Nazi, but there is no denying that his philosophy when carried to its logical conclusion had considerable influence on the creation of Nazi ideology. Some systems of "thought" really are dangerous.
What you called Buck Roger's utopianism and industrial murder of totalitarian regimes is the result of unglued religious passions. These things are not dispassionate scientific endeavor. Rather emotional yearning for reaching that perfect place as fast as possible. The Enlightment movement marginalized religions. But people's nature did not change. All those feelings anchored in a religion broke free and freely roamed around. It found its place in political ideology of one kind or another which promises coming utopia. Much of these free floating passion have been spent to wage that final battle of good and evil to usher in permanent golden age, be it a 1,000 year Reich, or proletarian paradise or Pol Pot's Anka(?), the utopian agrarian commune. Many people believe that we became fundamentally different human beings after the Enlightenment. That is not true. We are almost the same human being. Our passion broke free from a religion and migrated to utopian ideology, who filled the inner void of many people. The tradegy was that these ideologies do not offer spiritual comfort. They were all designed to incite adherent's passion to win the struggle. Such struggles also tend to be perpetuated.
Fair warning, it's about 12 large volumes. The particular volume I'm thinking of is called "Voltaire and Rousseau."
William Flax
True. And much of that hostility was justified. The problem, of course, is that it is the definitive case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.