ENGLISH	GERMAN	SPANISH
I know Sarah.	Ich kenne* Sarah.*	Conozco a Sara.
I know chemistry.	Ich weiss* um Chimie.*	Sé química.

There is a fundamental belief running through all European pedagogy that both Wissenschaft and Kenntnis are valuable, and that the two ways of knowing must be balanced.

Seven years ago, I accompanied a class of Swiss third-graders on a field trip through the Dolder forest, high above Zürich. The teacher divided the children into pairs. One child in each pair blindfolded the other. Then the blindfolded child was led to a tree, at least ten paces away, and was instructed to feel the tree with her hands, from the ground up; and also to smell it. (Some children even licked it.) Next the child was spun around and led away from the tree, at least ten paces in a different direction. Then the blindfold was removed and the child was asked: Which tree were you just feeling? “Ohne Augen zu sehen,” the teacher told me: to see without your eyes.

Such an experience would be rare for American schoolchildren today. American students may occasionally go on field trips, but the trips are almost invariably didactic in tone. Pupils learn the difference, say, between an oak leaf and a maple leaf. It’s all Wissenschaft. American education, today more than ever before, is characterized by a serious lack of understanding of, and respect for, Kenntnis. It’s hard to overemphasize how much most Europeans value Kenntnis. When I smiled (perhaps somewhat patronizingly) at the children feeling and sniffing their trees, the teacher frowned at me. She insisted on blindfolding me herself and leading me to a tree, and having me touch it and smell it without being able to see it. Then she led me ten paces away from the tree, turned me around, removed the blindfold, and asked me: “Where is your tree?” I looked, and immediately recognized “my” tree from the dozens of others. It was an unfamiliar, exhilarating experience.

There is more than fifty years of research on the importance, for child development, of multisensory interaction with the real world. This work began with the investigations of the psychiatrist René Spitz into “hospitalism,” the syndrome of stunted emotional and cognitive development that was seen in abandoned children raised in sterile and impersonal hospitals after World War II. This research demonstrated that children must have a rich, interactive sensory environment—touching, smelling, seeing, hearing the real world—in order for the child’s brain and mind to develop properly.³² Without such real-world experiences, the child’s development will be impaired.

Kids need to experience the real world. Only in the past decade have developmental psychologists come to recognize that a curriculum that emphasizes Wissenschaft at the expense of Kenntnis may produce a syndrome analogous to the neglected child. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, has coined the term “nature-deficit disorder” to refer to the constellation of symptoms seen in a child whose life has been spent indoors.³³ You can easily find high school students in America today who can tell you about the importance of the environment, the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle, and so on, but they’ve never spent a night outdoors. They have plenty of Wissenschaft but not a trace of Kenntnis.

For boys in particular, emphasizing Wissenschaft while ignoring Kenntnis may seriously impair development—not cognitive development but the development of a lively and passionate curiosity. “Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting,” Louv reminds us.³⁴ The end result of a childhood with more time spent in front of computer screens than outdoors is what Louv calls “cultural autism. The symptoms? Tunneled senses, and feelings of isolation and containment . . . [and] a wired, know-it-all state of mind. That which cannot be Googled does not count.”³⁵

Boys who have been deprived of time outdoors, interacting with the real world rather than with computers, sometimes have trouble grasping concepts that seem simple to us. Louv quotes Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at Stanford, who says that parents have been deceived about the value of computer-based experience for their children. Dr. Wilson says that medical school instructors are having more difficulty teaching medical students how the heart works as a pump,

because these students have so little real-world experience. They’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through [computers]. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior—but now we know that something’s missing.³⁶

Kenntnis and Wissenschaft are fundamentally different kinds of knowledge. Each is important. Imagine that my baby daughter, Sarah, is crying. Let’s suppose further that a world-renowned expert on infant and child development, perhaps Dr. T. Berry Brazelton himself, has just walked into the room. If I hand Sarah to Dr. Brazelton, how effective will he be in calming her down? Probably not very effective. He doesn’t know how Sarah likes to be rocked or bounced. All his knowledge about child development counts for nothing if he doesn’t have some Kenntnis to go with his Wissenschaft. That principle generally holds true in the real world, I have found, at least as far as the practice of medicine and of psychology is concerned. Book learning is essential. But without Kenntnis you’ll go far astray.

Louv provides a compendium of research demonstrating that when there is a profound imbalance in a child’s early experiences—when nature has been replaced by computer screens and fancy indoor toys—the result is an increased risk for attention deficit disorder. For example, Louv cites a Swedish study in which researchers compared children in two different day-care facilities. One facility was surrounded by tall buildings, with a brick pathway. The other was set in an orchard surrounded by woods and was adjacent to an overgrown garden; at this facility, children were encouraged to play outdoors in all kinds of weather. The researchers found that “children in the ‘green’ day care had better motor coordination and more ability to concentrate.”³⁷ Similarly, researchers at the University of Illinois have found that putting children in an outdoor environment, where they can actually put their hands in the dirt and feel and smell real stuff, as opposed to interacting with sophisticated computer simulations, is helpful in treating ADHD.³⁸ Ironically, the outdoor alternative is cheaper than the program with the fancy computers. Boys are at least three times as likely to be treated for ADHD compared with girls, and the rates of diagnosis of ADHD for both girls and boys have soared over the past two decades.³⁹ One wonders to what extent the shift from Wissenschaft to Kenntnis may have contributed to the explosion in the numbers of children being treated for ADHD.

The mental-health benefit of getting your hands dirty is not a particularly new insight. As Louv observes, Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, declared more than two hundred years ago that “digging in the soil has a curative effect on the mentally ill.”⁴⁰

We have forgotten what our grandparents knew: All children need a balance of Wissenschaft and Kenntnis, a balance between sitting and standing, a balance between classroom work and field trips. That’s true for girls as well as for boys. But if girls are deprived of that balance, if girls are saddled with a curriculum like ours today, all Wissenschaft and no Kenntnis, they will still do the homework—because for girls, as we discussed a moment ago, pleasing the teacher is a significant reward for its own sake. Not so for most boys. If boys are deprived of that balance between Wissenschaft and Kenntnis, they may simply disengage from school. If you ask a boy to read about the life cycle of a tadpole metamorphosing into a frog, but that boy has never touched a frog, never had the experience of jumping around in a stream in his bare feet chasing after a tadpole, he may not see the point. The shift in the curriculum away from Kenntnis toward Wissenschaft has had the unintended consequence of diminishing the motivation of boys to study what they’re asked to learn.

How could such a change happen? How could the intelligent, well-educated people who write school curricula push the school format into such an unhealthy imbalance?

The answer is simple: computers.

How Is a Child Different from a Programmable Computer?

Imagine a really good robot, the best robot money could buy, with the best possible “brain” and “eyes” and “ears.” How would a human being differ from that robot?

Or to put the question another way: Will we someday—someday soon, perhaps—have robots that are able to simulate humans—simulate human behavior, maybe even feel emotions?

The entertainment industry offers us a continual diet of movies like I, Robot and Bicentennial Man, and TV shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation that portray robots (always played by human actors) that are indistinguishable from humans.

It’s just a matter of time before reality catches up with science fiction, right?

Maybe not. Like the search for peace in the Middle East, or for a self-sustaining fusion reactor, the goal that we were once assured was nearly within grasp keeps receding further into the distance. Today, the idea of a fully mechanical device that can actually experience human emotions—and not merely simulate such an experience—seems more distant than it did thirty years ago.

I enrolled in the PhD program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1980. The period from the late 1970s through the late 1990s was the era when cognitive psychology ruled supreme. Cognitive psychology is that branch of psychology that focuses on how we process information.⁴¹ And the University of Pennsylvania was a haven for true believers in cognitive psychology. For those two decades, roughly 1977 through 1997, cognitive psychologists were optimistic that their approach was the best way to understand human learning, development, and behavior.

Throughout that period, cognitive psychologists insisted that everything we do, everything we are, can be represented formally as a computational process and therefore could theoretically be transposed to any computational device, i.e., to a computer. Humans are just complex computers—or so the story went. The mind itself is a sort of computer program running on a very sophisticated computer made of neurons instead of microchips.

This way of thinking about the human mind, and human learning, continues to be influential among educators. If humans are sophisticated computers, and learning is in some way equivalent to programming that computer, then teachers are in some sense merely computer programmers. If we give teachers the correct set of instructions, or programs, then all we should need to do is flip the “on” switch and children should learn, infallibly and efficiently. The 1980s and 1990s saw the widespread adoption of programs such as Direct Instruction, in which teachers were expected essentially to read from a script for an entire class, with students answering questions in unison and by rote. If the script is written correctly, and the teachers do as they are told, then good results are inevitable.

Foolproof.

Failsafe.

. . . provided only that children are pretty much the same as programmable computers.

Which they aren’t.

It turns out that a great deal was missing from the cognitivist perspective. This is not the place for a thorough critique of the arid cognitivism of the 1980s and 1990s. But for our purposes the most obvious and key deficiency of the cognitivist point of view was its failure to grasp the primacy of motivation and emotion.

Type an address in your Web browser and hit “Enter.” If your computer is functioning properly, it won’t talk back. It will do what you tell it to do. Your computer won’t say, “I don’t feel like it,” or “Why go there?” or “How about if we go outside and play instead?”

Computers don’t have to be motivated to do what you tell them to do.

But children do.

The colossal error of 1980’s cognitivism, and of the educational strategies it inspired—many of which are still with us today—is that both cognitivism and cognitive-based educational strategies ignore the crucial question: What motivates kids to learn?

The first thing that happens when you ask kids to do stuff they have no interest in doing is they stop paying attention. Twenty-five years ago, attention deficit disorder was a relatively rare condition, with an incidence estimated at less than one child in one hundred. Today it’s common. A study published in 2006, conducted jointly under the auspices of the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin, found that the likelihood of a child being diagnosed with ADHD is a function of three main factors:⁴²

• Sex: Boys are several times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls;

• Race: White children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than black or Hispanic children;⁴³

• Socioeconomic status: Affluent children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children from low-income families.

For white boys in affluent suburbs, the odds of being diagnosed with ADHD at some point in childhood may be as high as one in three. In one suburb, more than half of the boys were being treated with medications for ADHD.⁴⁴

As we’ll see in chapter 4, many cases of ADD/ADHD being diagnosed today may be overdiagnosed. Many of those boys who are being prescribed drugs may not need drugs. What they need first, is a curriculum that is developmentally appropriate; and second, teachers who know how to teach boys. Again, we’ll return to these points in chapter 4.

The second thing that happens when you ask kids to do stuff they have no interest in doing is they get annoyed. They get irritable. They withdraw. “I hate school. It’s stupid.” Anything associated with school becomes uncool. Reading is uncool. Caring about school becomes uncool. Being interested in learning becomes uncool.

Computers don’t have to care about frogs or be interested in frogs to learn about frogs. But children do. If children are not motivated to learn, they may stop paying attention. That’s especially true for boys, for reasons we discussed earlier in this chapter. Computers are all about Wissenschaft. They don’t need Kenntnis. But real children do—especially boys. The lack of respect for Kenntnis over the past three decades is an important part of the answer to the question, “What’s behind the massive disengagement of so many boys from school?”

Good News: The Boys’ Crisis Is a Myth!

On Sunday, June 25, 2006, I received a call on my cell phone from Jay Mathews, the lead education reporter for the Washington Post. Mr. Mathews wanted my opinion of a study that had just been released by an obscure nonprofit group calling itself Education Sector. He explained that his story on the study would appear the next morning on the front page of the Washington Post.⁴⁵ He wanted my opinion for a follow-up column that he planned to post online.

Mr. Mathews’ front-page article announced “that widespread reports of U.S. boys being in crisis are greatly overstated and that young males in school are in many ways doing better than ever. . . . the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that although the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him.”

The article was picked up by many of the nation’s largest-circulation newspapers. The Miami News, Baltimore Sun, Buffalo News, Detroit News, Seattle Times, San Diego Union Tribune, and dozens of other papers ran the story verbatim. New York Times columnist Judith Warner, in a column entitled “What Boy Crisis?” wrote that the study confirmed that the “boys’ crisis” is a myth, after all. The facts, wrote Warner—echoing the Washington Post—are that boys are “doing better than ever on most measures of academic performance,” with the possible exception of black and Hispanic boys from low-income households. Within twenty-four hours of Mathews’ article in the Post, the story was featured on the CBS Evening News, with the headline “It’s a Myth That Boys Are Falling Behind in School.”

But is it true? Is the boys’ crisis really a myth?

The answer is not so simple. Something strange has been happening with American boys over the past two decades: The reading and writing scores of fourth-grade American boys have improved somewhat, which has actually narrowed the gender gap separating them from girls. Jay Mathews’ article focused on that fact. But during the same period of time, the reading and writing scores of twelfth-grade American boys have dropped. The gender gap separating twelfth-grade girls from twelfth-grade boys has widened, not because girls are doing better—they’re not—but because boys are doing worse.⁴⁶

You’ll sometimes hear people claim that the gender gap is confined primarily to black and Hispanic students, or to low-income girls and boys, or to students whose parents didn’t go to college. We’ll talk about those issues more in a moment. But even among twelfth-grade white students with college-educated parents, the gender gap has become dramatic: One in four white boys with college-educated parents today cannot read at a basic level of proficiency, compared with only one in sixteen white girls.⁴⁷

To repeat:

• Fourth-grade boys are doing slightly better in reading and writing than they were twenty years ago.

• Twelfth-grade boys are doing worse in reading and writing than they were twenty years ago.

How could it be the case that fourth-grade boys are doing better, while twelfth-grade boys are doing worse? How does better become worse?

This riddle is not hard to solve when you think about what we expect from fourth-graders compared with what we expect from twelfth-graders. When we test fourth-graders on their basic reading skills, we’re trying to determine whether they have mastered the fundamentals of reading. Can they read what’s on the page? Do they have some basic vocabulary? In the past twenty years, there has been increased emphasis on mastering the basics of reading. Elementary school students have also been drilled in specific test-taking skills in ways that would not have been imaginable twenty or thirty years ago. The drilling begins at an earlier age and lasts longer. As a result, elementary school students—both girls and boys—are doing somewhat better than they were twenty or thirty years ago, and the gender gap has narrowed somewhat.

Twelfth grade is a different story. Twelfth-graders are expected to be able to read for content. It’s not enough just to be able to sound out all the words. If you’re reading a passage about global warming, you need to be familiar with that topic; it also helps to know what the Kyoto Treaty is; and you’ll write an even better essay if you can make some allusions to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. If you read widely and extensively in your spare time, that’s likely to be a tremendous help. In other words, you’ll do best if you can read that passage in the context of a whole world of knowledge about science and politics.

You can drill third-graders on phonics and see improvements in their reading test scores, but rote drills and repetition don’t work as a means of teaching high school students about how the world works. There’s growing evidence that the intensive reading drills that now characterize early elementary education may actually disengage many students, particularly boys. What’s important, as neurologist Judy Willis recently observed, is “for students not only to learn the mechanics of reading, but also to develop a love of reading.” She cautions against any “approach that puts phonics first at the expense of intrinsic appeal and significance to the young reader.”⁴⁸

In order for high school kids to understand many of the topics we expect them to grasp, they have to be reading a wide range of material. Kids need to be reading in their spare time. Kids need to read for fun.

Boys used to read for fun. Mark Bauerlein, former director of research for the National Endowment for the Arts, and his colleague Sandra Stotsky recently published an important article on what teenagers do with their spare time. The National Endowment for the Arts surveyed a demographically representative sample of teenagers around the United States for twenty-five years, from 1980 through 2004: rich and poor kids; urban, suburban, and rural kids; white, black, Asian, and Hispanic kids. Bauerlein and Stotsky found that girls have always been more likely to read for fun than boys are. But that gender gap widened dramatically between 1980 and 2004. It has grown so wide that it has now become “a marker of gender identity,” these authors found. “Girls read; boys don’t.”⁴⁹

The gender gap did not widen because girls are reading more; they’re not. In fact, girls are slightly less likely to read in their spare time today than they were in 1980. But roughly nine out of ten boys have stopped reading altogether. Why?

When I present this research to parents and ask them that question, a few raise their hands, confident that they know the answer. “Video games,” they usually say. “Boys who might have read books twenty or thirty years ago are playing video games today.” But the evidence suggests otherwise. Boys who play lots of video games are no less likely to read for fun than boys who don’t play lots of video games.⁵⁰

Video games have displaced a major activity in the lives of teenage boys, but that activity isn’t reading; it’s playing outdoors. In 1980, many boys spent lots of time playing outdoors. Today, those boys are more likely to spend that time indoors with the GameCube or the PlayStation or the Xbox. That may be one reason why boys today are four times more likely to be obese compared with boys a generation ago.⁵¹

So video games aren’t the explanation. But there’s a more plausible explanation: namely, that changes in education over the past thirty years have created a negative attitude toward education among many boys. Boys are less likely to read today simply because they don’t want to. And that change in motivation is, at least in part, a consequence of the gender-blind changes in education over the past thirty years.

Let’s return now to that cell phone call from Jay Mathews, the Washington Post reporter who wanted to talk about the study that purported to disprove the idea that boys are having problems in school. That study, like the reporter’s article, rested very heavily on test scores of nine-year-olds nationwide, in fact, on scores on just one particular test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The authors of the study showed that on this test, nine-year-old boys are doing better today than they were doing thirty years ago; on this test, the gender gap in the scores (girls doing better than boys) has been narrowing. White boys—particularly white boys with college-educated parents—are doing fine, according to the report. The real problems in American education are problems of race and social class, not gender, according to the report—a position echoed by the Washington Post.

Mr. Mathews had called to ask for my opinion of the study. “You don’t need my opinion, Mr. Mathews,” I told him. “You know how biased that study is. They focused on improvements in the scores of nine-year-olds, but they neglected what’s happening to seventeen-year-olds! You know very well that the gender gap in reading is getting larger among seventeen-year-olds,” I pointed out. “This study emphasizes the improvements among fourth-graders but completely ignores the decline in reading scores among twelfth-grade boys over the past twenty years. You know that one in four white boys with college-educated parents can’t read proficiently. That means one in four white boys in high school won’t be able to read your article saying how well white boys are doing.”

Mr. Mathews thanked me and promised to include my remarks in his online column on Tuesday, June 27, the day after his front-page article would appear. And he was true to his word: that Tuesday, he did indeed post an online column that continued his coverage of the Education Sector report.⁵² He apologized for the one-sided coverage in the previous day’s paper. To give a more “balanced and comprehensive” coverage, he included not only my comments but also those of other researchers who pointed to the glaring shortcomings in the Education Sector report.

Unfortunately, though, the readership for Mr. Mathews’ personal online column is trivial compared to the coverage afforded to a front-page above-the-fold news article in the Washington Post. Mathews’ front-page article was widely picked up by the media. His online column wasn’t picked up by anybody, wasn’t featured anywhere, and hasn’t been read by anybody, as far as I can tell.

So far, I’ve identified two ways in which education has changed in the past thirty years to make it likely that boys will disengage from school more so than girls:

1. the acceleration of the early elementary curriculum, and

2. the shift from Kenntnis to Wissenschaft.

We turn now to one other important change.

“How Would You Feel If You Were Piggy?”—And Other Questions Unfriendly to Boys

Your son is now twelve years old. His latest report card was a mess: an A in math, C’s in social studies and Spanish, and D’s in reading and English. “You can do better than this,” you say to your son. “Your English teacher told me you didn’t turn in even half the homework. Am I going to have to supervise you to make sure you do your homework every night?”

“I’m not gonna do that homework. It’s stupid,” your son Brett says.

“What’s stupid about it?” you ask.

“It’s TOTALLY stupid,” Brett says.

“What do you mean by that? Can you give an example?”

He shrugs. “Do you want to see it?” he asks.

“Sure,” you say.

Brett rummages in his knapsack, then produces a crumpled piece of paper. After smoothing it out, this is what you read:

In Lord of the Flies, a group of boys finds themselves stranded on a tropical island. One of the boys, nicknamed Piggy because he is overweight, is the victim of vicious bullying by the other boys. Write a short essay in the first person, in Piggy’s voice, describing how you feel about the other boys picking on you. Remember to

• include lots of detail,

• describe scenes from the book, and

• mention specific boys.

“See what I mean?” Brett says, a note of triumph in his voice. “It’s totally stupid!”

“What’s stupid about it?” you ask.

“‘Write an essay in Piggy’s voice,’” Brett paraphrases. “That is total stupidness!”

“Why is it stupid?” you ask again.

“I’m not Piggy. I’m not some fat loser who probably couldn’t even pick his own nose right. If I’d been on that island, I’d have smashed his face myself!”

This homework assignment boils down to: How would you feel if you were Piggy? When I spoke with the teacher who assigned this homework, she explained that she wanted to teach the children about empathy. With all due respect to the teacher, I submit that this assignment didn’t teach this particular boy anything about empathy. Instead, the message the assignment reinforced for him is that doing homework is for girls, not for real boys. No self-respecting boy, in this boy’s frame of reference, would do such a homework assignment.

In Why Gender Matters I reviewed research by Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and her associates at Harvard Medical School demonstrating that the regions of the brain associated with negative emotion in teenage girls are closely associated with the language areas of the brain. In boys of the same age, by contrast, brain activity associated with negative emotion is localized primarily in the amygdala, a nucleus with comparatively scant connections to the language areas of the brain.⁵³ It’s easy for most middle school and high school girls to answer a question like “How would you feel if you were X?” because the area of the brain where the feeling is happening is closely linked to the area of the brain where talking happens. For boys, that’s not the case. For boys like Brett in the example above, it’s not easy to answer, in a genuine and articulate way, the question “How would you feel if . . . ?” He may attempt to produce the answer he thinks the teacher wants to hear, but it’s a chore. A better question for most boys would be “What would you do if . . .” That question may sound similar, but it’s actually a different question, and much more boy-friendly—for most boys.

The Right Kind of Competition

I’ve already pointed out that using the computer metaphor to describe how brains work fails to capture the importance of motivation. It also falls short in another important respect: it doesn’t accommodate the enormous individual differences between one student and another. The differences between a PC and a Mac are trivial in comparison with the differences between Brett, who plays every kind of competitive sport, and his younger sister, Emily, who occasionally watches football games with her older brother but feels bad for the losing team, no matter who they are, because “it must hurt to lose.”

Some kids—both boys and girls—thrive in a competitive atmosphere, even if they often lose. Others wilt and collapse, or withdraw, under the stress of competition. Is competition good or bad? It depends on your child. That’s why there may be no such thing as “a good school.” The best choice for Emily may be a disaster for Brett. The school that is best for Brett may be the worst possible choice for Emily.

Think for a moment about boys who thrive on competition (not all boys do). Consider how changes in our schools and in our society over the past thirty years may have disengaged these boys.

• Traditional physical education: Gym class used to offer many opportunities for boys to experience “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”—even if the game was just kickball or dodgeball. But over the past thirty years, many school districts have eliminated sports such as dodgeball, in the belief that dodgeball and similar sports reward violence. Likewise, competition has been systematically eliminated from many districts’ physical education programs, in the belief that competition alienates some kids from sports. And perhaps it does. But your son may need the zest of competition as a motivator. Without competition, he’s likely to say “Why bother?”

• “Zero tolerance for violence” has changed the way that creative writing and language arts are taught. I remember when I was a seventh-grader, thirty-some years ago, and we were assigned to write a short story. I wrote about an American prisoner of war breaking out of a German prison camp during World War II (I was a huge fan of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape). I’ve seen boys who write similar stories today referred for psychiatric evaluation, just as if they had been caught passing notes about killing the teacher. “I’m sorry,” the teacher says to the parents, “but your son Richie wrote a story about a man garroting the prison guard. We can’t allow that here. We have a zero-tolerance policy for violence.”

When a teacher or principal tells you that the school has a zero-tolerance policy for students writing violent stories, ask them whether the same policy applies to what students read. If students are not allowed to read violent fiction, then the librarian will have to remove novels by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and many others from the library shelves. If the school is really going to ban Hemingway and Dostoyevsky, then that school has some pretty serious problems. But if they’re not going to ban Hemingway and Dostoyevsky, then on what grounds can they reasonably prohibit boys from trying to write in the same genre that they’re allowed to read?

• Competitive sports: Schools have ballooned in size over the past thirty years. I commonly visit middle schools with two thousand-plus students and high schools with four thousand-plus students. One problem with a high school of four thousand-plus students is that only the most elite athletes get to play on the school team. In most metropolitan areas, at least one boy in five would like to play football. In a coed school with four thousand students, i.e., about two thousand boys, there might easily be four hundred boys who would like to play on the football team. But even big schools often have only one bus for the varsity and one bus for the JV team. That means only thirty-six boys can make the varsity team, and another thirty-six on the JV. The other three hundred-plus boys are out of luck. Most of those boys probably won’t even try out: they know that only the best athletes can make the team, and they don’t want to be embarrassed. So they stay home.

If your son is one of those boys who thrive on competition, and he can’t make the team, what should you do? In the short run, you might transfer your son to a smaller school, or you might help him transition to a different sport. More fundamentally, though, I think we need to change the mindset of American sports. I believe every kid who wants to play on a school team should have the opportunity to play.

I know what you’re thinking. “My kid’s high school enrolls 3,000 kids. If two hundred boys try out for the team, how can the coach play every boy? Most of the boys will just be sitting on the bench.” That would be true if there’s only one varsity team, one junior varsity, and maybe one practice squad. But my visits to Australian schools have taught me that there’s a different way. At large Australian schools, there isn’t just one team, or three: it’s common to find five teams, or seven, or ten. How do they do it? Simple: they practice during the school day. One team practices during first period, one team practices during fourth period, and another team practices after school. Even more radical—from the American perspective—is the fact that no team practices every day. No team practices more than three days a week. In Australia, the consensus is that school-based sports should provide decent training to a broad range of athletes, rather than focusing on the most talented few. In the United States, we provide intensive daily training and coaching for those elite few, while leaving the great majority of boys no opportunity to play organized sports at all. Instead, those boys go home and play video games.

I know a boy, let’s call him Tony, who is competitive in absolutely every aspect of his life. He’s only eleven years old, but he finds a way to make everything a race or some sort of competition. At summer camp, he organized a contest among all the boys to see who could pee the farthest. Boys like Tony usually will respond well to any challenge so long as:

• there are winners and losers, and

• the outcome is in doubt. Anybody might conceivably win and anybody might conceivably lose. Everything depends on how hard you play.

Satisfy both criteria, and Tony will be on board. If either one of the criteria is missing, Tony won’t see the point. He’ll disengage. He’ll lose interest. He’ll stare out the window.

Mater Dei School is an all-boys elementary school not far from my home in Montgomery County, Maryland, where this principle is understood very well. On enrollment, every boy is assigned either to the Blue Team or the White Team. The assignment is arbitrary—in other words, it’s random—and it is permanent.^c Once you’re a member of the Blue Team, you are forever a member of the Blue Team. The two teams compete in every aspect of school life. When the boys play soccer, it’s Blue against White. On school examinations, it’s Blue against White. The team that scores higher on the exams gets points. The team whose members donate more food to give away at Thanksgiving gets points. At the end of the year, the winning team is officially recognized and gets its name—“Blue” or “White”—the year of its victory, and the names of the team captains, emblazoned on a plaque in the hallway. This may seem silly to some people. But for many of these boys, it’s highly motivating.

Team competition has another benefit for boys who are motivated by the will to win. Team competition socializes boys. It teaches boys to value something above themselves. It subordinates some of the ego and the egocentricity that these boys often manifest.

I’ve seen the principle of team competition engage many boys who otherwise don’t care much about school. Individual competition is seldom as successful and is almost guaranteed to disengage many boys. Why is that? Remember the second principle we discussed a moment ago: the outcome must be in doubt. If you have individual competition in academics, for example, Daniel may decide that he’s unlikely to win. Once he’s decided that he’s not likely to win, he’s not interested in playing. “You think I care about this subject? Ha. I couldn’t care less. Go ahead and flunk me. You think I care about your stupid contest?”

But if Daniel is a member of a large team, anything can happen. Either team might win. If the class examination is public, Daniel’s performance might determine whether his team wins or loses. For example, if the class assignment were to read The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and now there’s an oral quiz, Blue Team vs. White Team, Daniel needs to be able to answer the questions. All the students in the class will have been warned, incidentally, that answers must be taken only from J. R. R. Tolkien’s books, not from a movie version of the books.

The teacher, Mrs. Hofstadter, says: “It’s the Blue Team’s turn. Carlos, you’re answering for the Blue Team this round. Here’s your question: After Frodo is wounded by the Nazgûl and needs to be taken to Rivendell, what is the name of the Elf who takes him there?”

“Arwen?” Carlos guesses.

“Wrong!” Mrs. Hofstadter says. “Arwen plays that role in the movie, but not in the book. Daniel, you’re answering for the White Team. After Frodo is wounded, what is the name of the Elf who takes Frodo to Rivendell?”

Daniel shouts “Glorfindel!”

“Right!” Mrs. Hofstadter says. Daniel’s teammates on the White Team give him high fives all around, because this is a high-stakes test for sixth-grade boys. Each member of the winning team in this classroom will get a coupon for free pizza and ice cream at the popular corner store.

Daniel may not care that much about his grade in the class or about The Lord of the Rings. He may not even care that much about pizza and ice cream. But he doesn’t want to let his teammates down. He doesn’t want to risk being the one who got the wrong answer, whose one wrong answer cost the whole team the prize.

Why doesn’t this approach work as well for many girls? Here’s why: most girls value friendship above team affiliation. If Emily and Melissa are best friends, and you put Emily and Melissa on opposing teams, both girls may be uncomfortable. Emily doesn’t want to make Melissa sad, so she may be reluctant to beat Melissa. She’d rather play alongside Melissa rather than try to make her lose. But if Justin and Jared are best friends, and you put them on opposing teams, Justin will happily run down the field and knock Jared down. In that situation I’ve seen Jared get up, dust himself off, and say to Justin, “You think that was a good hit? That wasn’t anything. I’ll get you better next time.” That kind of good-natured competition actually builds their friendship. Boys are more likely to understand that friends don’t have to be teammates, and teammates don’t have to be friends. And boys are more likely to be invested in the success of their team regardless of whether any of their friends are on the team.

It’s easy to see how the competitive team format might engage and motivate boys who otherwise wouldn’t be inspired to do their homework or read the assigned text. But I’ve also seen team competition work in other, unexpected ways: for example, to motivate scholarly boys to become better athletes. When I visited Calgary, Alberta, in 2004, I heard a story involving team competition that took place at a boys’ school near Edmonton. At this school, all the boys were assigned to one of three teams. It happened that this particular year, the best athletes were on one team while most of the best students were on another team.

A twenty-kilometer snowshoe relay race was announced. Each team would nominate four boys to race. Everybody expected the team with the best athletes to win easily. But the scholars—the “geeks”—really studied up on snowshoeing. They learned that the key to success in snowshoeing is to run lightly over the surface of the snow. So they nominated their four lightest, fastest boys to represent their team. And those boys trained. The athletes didn’t train for this event; they figured they didn’t have to, they were already in excellent shape.

When the day of the race arrived, the scholarly boys were ready. They blew the other two teams away: the fourth boy on the scholarly team crossed the finish line about ten minutes ahead of either of the other teams. The strong football players representing the athletic team bogged down in the snow—their muscular build was a liability rather than an advantage. That event, I was told, raised the status of the scholarly team enormously in the eyes of the whole school. They had beaten the jocks at an athletic event. And the jocks saluted them.

The competitive format of this school in Alberta, or of the Mater Dei school in Maryland, might make those schools a poor choice for many girls (even if the schools enrolled girls, which they don’t). And those schools might not be the best choice for some boys. But if your son loves competition—if you can imagine him competing to see who can pee the farthest—then you need to find your son a school like this one. If there is no such school nearby, then I hope you will lend your copy of this book to your school’s principal and to some of your son’s teachers. Ask whether they might make some effort to accommodate different types of boys. In the twenty-first century, most school formats allow little place for team competition. Indeed, any school competition with clearly defined winners and losers is disparaged in many schools nowadays, on the grounds that the loser’s self-esteem might be in jeopardy in a competitive environment. We need to change that, and we can.

What About Self-Esteem?

“What if my son loses?” you may be wondering. “What if my son gives the wrong answer and the team loses as a result? Wouldn’t that damage his self-esteem?”

To understand the answer to this question, you have to understand something about gender differences with regard to self-esteem. Let me tell you first about a study that was done recently at Harvard University. The researchers recruited Asian and Asian-American women from among Harvard undergraduates. The women were then randomly assigned to three groups. One group was simply asked to take a short written math examination and that was it. The second group was given a questionnaire that emphasized their Asian heritage. The questionnaire asked what language they spoke at home, whether they preferred traditional Asian foods over Western foods, and so on. The women in this second group scored significantly higher on the math exam than the women in the first group.

The third group was given a questionnaire that emphasized the fact that they were women. The questionnaire asked whether they preferred to live in a single-sex dorm or a coed dorm, whether they felt that there were adequate protections for women on campus. The women in this third group scored significantly lower on the math exam than the women in the first group.⁵⁴

Just reminding women of their membership in a category that is negatively stereotyped—i.e., women supposedly aren’t as good in math as men are—resulted in a significant impairment of the ability of these women to test well. Reminding women of a different stereotype—the supposed superior ability of Asians in math—significantly enhanced the women’s ability to do well. These women weren’t stupid. They were Harvard undergraduates. Similar studies of young girls and teenagers, with even larger effects, have been published.⁵⁵ For girls and for many women, if you believe you’re smart, you’ll actually be smarter—you’ll learn better and do better on tests—than if you think you’re dumb. A girl who thinks she’s good in math will test better than a girl of the same ability who thinks she’s bad in math.

But that effect simply doesn’t hold true for boys. A boy who thinks he’s smart in math won’t necessarily test better than his equally bright peer who thinks he’s not so smart. The boy who thinks he’s smart may actually test worse than his peer, because boys who think they’re smart in a subject tend not to work as hard studying the subject—just as the athletes at the school in Edmonton didn’t bother to train for the snowshoe relay. The correlation between a boy’s self-esteem in a subject and his performance in that subject is zero at best—and may possibly be negative, after controlling for ability.⁵⁶

I know many parents who are uneasy with the idea that their son needs a school with a more competitive format to get motivated. That idea clashes with the politically correct notions of the past twenty years, according to which competition is bad because it is harmful to self-esteem. But those notions were not empirically based. We now know that self-esteem has a value for girls that it simply doesn’t have for many boys, while competition—particularly team competition—has a value for many boys that it doesn’t have for most girls. Some boys need the challenge and the risk of competition to care about the results. Parents and teachers and school administrators who don’t understand that fact may actually disengage these boys from school.

I met with a woman who has coached both girls’ and boys’ sports for many years. She has found that most girls, even athletically talented girls, need encouragement. Otherwise, girls are likely to decide they’re not good enough, they’re not fast enough, they’re not strong enough. They give up. “You have to build the girls up,” Angie told me. But boys are different. Many boys—especially athletically talented boys—have a tendency to overestimate their skills and their ability. “You have to tell that hotshot that he may have some talent, but he’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is. He still has a lot to learn. He’s going to need to put in a lot of work if he wants to make it to the next level,” Angie told me. “You have to break the boys down.”

I’m a little uneasy with this woman’s motto—“build the girls up, break the boys down”—but I have to admit that it captures the essence of the research on self-esteem. For many boys, failure is a spur to work harder. The competitive format gives these boys a structured environment in which they can easily determine whether or not they’re making real progress. A noncompetitive format in which “everybody’s a winner” is a sure way to disengage this boy from the whole process.

What About Columbine—and Virginia Tech?

The zero-tolerance policies many school districts have regarding anything that looks or sounds violent didn’t spring out of nowhere. They were motivated by concerns about school violence. Some parents ask: “If you let boys write violent stories, and you encourage competition with winners and losers, aren’t you creating conditions in which violent activity is more likely to occur?”

Those parents—and the district administrators who wrote the zero-tolerance policies—usually believe that prohibiting violent play or imaginary violence (e.g., boys’ writing violent stories) will decrease actual violence. There is no shred of evidence to support this belief.⁵⁷ We actually know a good deal about the kind of boy who is the most likely to bring a gun to school. That boy is more likely than other boys to be an honor student; he’s more likely to be shy, a loner; he is less likely than other boys to participate in aggressive sports such as football.⁵⁸ We now understand that aggressive play, such as dodgeball, does not increase the risk of truly violent activities such as a school shooting. Writing a story about a World War II prison break is not a violent act. Prohibitions on dodgeball and on writing violent stories do not in any way decrease the likelihood of school violence. They only accomplish one thing: they send a clear message that certain types of boys are simply not welcome at school. To do well at school, that boy must deny his true self and pretend to be someone else. More compliant. More willing to do what the teacher asks. More concerned about pleasing the teacher.

Consider these recent examples:

• In Arkansas, an eight-year-old boy was punished for pointing a cooked strip of chicken at another student and saying “pow, pow, pow.”⁵⁹

• In New Jersey, eight-year-old Hamadi Alston found an L-shaped piece of paper in a schoolbook. When he used it in a game of “cops and robbers” at the next recess, he was taken to the school office and then turned over to police for “threatening to kill other students”—because he had said “pow pow” while playing during recess. He spent five hours in police custody and had to make two court appearances before charges were dropped.

• In Alabama, nine-year-old Austin Crittenden was suspended for “possession of a weapon—replica” when he brought a tiny plastic G.I. Joe handgun to his elementary school. The third-grader’s principal “had to tape the gun to a piece of paper to keep from losing it,” Austin’s grandmother reported.⁶⁰

These stories are so outrageous that they made the newspapers. But I can tell you many stories from my own experience that don’t make the newspapers: a boy whose story about a white family escaping from Zimbabwe was given a C because it included the suggestion of a violent act, while a girl’s story of comparable quality in response to the same assignment—but with no hint of violence—received an A+. The end result of these episodes is the widespread belief among the children themselves that school isn’t welcoming to real boys.

In Why Gender Matters, I quoted a famous saying attributed to the Roman poet Horace: “You can try to drive out Nature with a pitchfork; yet she will always return.”⁶¹ If your son is motivated by competition, then eliminating it from his school, throwing out his toy guns, and forbidding him to write stories with violent themes won’t change him. Those policies may disengage him from school, however. The end result may be a boy who feels that the only place he is truly understood as he really is, is the world of video games.

And, as we’ll see in the next chapter, that world has its own problems.

How Is a Child Different from a Programmable Computer?

Good News: The Boys’ Crisis Is a Myth!

“How Would You Feel If You Were Piggy?”—And Other Questions Unfriendly to Boys

The Right Kind of Competition

What About Self-Esteem?

What About Columbine—and Virginia Tech?

Why Is That a Problem?

Hold Him Back So He’ll Get Ahead

What Are Little Girls Made Of?

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil