Free Republic

As one critic told me recently, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy and unfocused workers. But unproductive workers are adults — not 5-year-olds. If boys are restless and unfocused, why not look for ways to help them do better? As a nation, can we afford not to? A few decades ago, when we realized that girls languished behind boys in math and science, we mounted a concerted effort to give them more support, with significant success. Shouldn’t we do the same for boys? When I made this argument in my book “The...

Women earn most of America’s advanced degrees but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the "problem." Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man...

Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the ‘problem.’ Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course...

Item 1: Two nights ago, Rollye James mentioned on her radio show about how Christine Hoff-Sommers had been invited to address some Fed bureau meeting on education. When she began to speak, and as the audience realized she was questioning their beloved dogma, she was shouted down. One federal employee stood up and told her "shut up, bitch." One of the organizers of the forum "ordered her" to "stop speaking." Anyone else hear of this? Item 2: There was this tease on Fox's morning show about some school that had "banned" the Pledge of Allegiance and had had someone arrested ...

Where the Boys Aren't By Christina Hoff Sommers Posted: Monday, July 3, 2006 Education Sector, a new Washington think tank established this year by the Bill & Melinda Gates and other leading foundations, describes itself as an "honest broker of evidence in key education debates." But its first big study, "The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: Truth About Boys and Girls," is deficient in this virtue. Resident Scholar Christina Hoff Sommers The report, written by policy analyst Sara Mead, denies that American boys are in trouble academically. "The real story," says Ms. Mead, "is not bad news about boys doing worse; it's...

<p>It is common knowledge that American schoolboys are faring poorly compared with girls. The average 11th-grade boy has the writing skills of an 8th-grade girl. Boys receive a majority of the failing grades, while girls garner most of the honors. Women earn 57 percent of bachelor's degrees, a gender gap that experts predict will widen. So what are the Department of Education and National Science Foundation doing about the problem of male underachievement? Nothing. But they are conducting a review of math, physics and engineering programs at selected universities to root out supposed bias against women and girls.</p>

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 24, 2006, 8:28 a.m. Biology’s Revenge Christina Hoff Sommers was right. The surest way to get attention in American society is to become a crisis. Boys are now on their way to achieving this dubious but indispensable distinction with the new cover of Newsweek, "The Boy Crisis." It is to be hoped that the crisis establishes a simple truth that is astonishing anyone ever forgot — boys and girls are different. Or as Newsweek puts it, "Boys are biologically, developmentally and psychologically different from girls — and teachers need...

The following lecture by Christina Hoff Sommers was delivered on August 3, 2004 at the Young America's Foundation 26th Annual National Conservative Student Conference in Washington, DC. (The text that follows contains adult language and themes and is intended for mature audiences only. Reader discretion is advised). Several years ago, a radical feminist philosopher visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she gave a lecture attacking what she called “male science.” This theorist confidently explained that science was part of a discredited oppressive, patriarchal, white-male, bourgeois legacy. It was tainted to the core by sexism, classicism, and racism. Women, she...