Why Johnny Can't Learn

THE WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men , by Christina Hoff Sommers. (Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $25.) Certainties in the world of education have short lives. Just a few years ago, wildly popular books with titles like Reviving Ophelia and Failing at Fairness pronounced that girls were drowning, emotionally and intellectually, in the nation's public schools. They were tormented by boys and not called on in class, and by early adolescence, many of them, one prominent feminist scholar wrote, were losing their "voices." So obviously favored were boys by the patriarchal society and the teachers who served it that some educators called for the creation of single-sex schools, where girls, free of boys at last, could build their self-esteem and finally learn some math and science.

Now, amazingly enough, revisionists like Sommers are telling us that boys are the ones in trouble, that they need schools of their own. Girls, Sommers claims, are hardly drowning. They're riding a wave, taking AP courses and entering colleges in record numbers, while more and more boys flounder both socially and academically.

Sommers, a W.H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the controversial author of Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Betrayed Women , is not the only person lamenting the downfall of boys. Since the Columbine massacre, many pundits and psychologists have rediscovered the male propensity for misogyny, violence, and restlessness. But Sommers differs from others in that she believes the problem has little to do with boys and a lot to do with the way masculinity has been transformed into a kind of disease. Feminists, she argues, have put boys on the defensive by insisting that they change their male ways and...