[In the following review, Lowry praises Sommers's The War against Boys as an important conservative intervention against liberal trends in education.]

A couple of kindergarten boys were recently suspended from school in New Jersey after being caught red-handed playing cops and robbers at recess. Finger-pointing, shouting “bang,” running, playing dead—the incident involved the whole sorry litany of playground mock aggression. School officials were enforcing a Columbine-inspired “zero tolerance” policy against firearms at school, even the thumb-and-forefinger variety (where are the trigger locks?). But they were also acting on another trend afoot in American education: a disapproval of all the things boys do during recess. The Atlanta schools have eliminated recess altogether.

Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails have fallen on tough times. In fact, as Christina Hoff Sommers demonstrates in The War against Boys, they have powerful enemies. The new book by the author of Who Stole Feminism? is a stinging indictment of an anti-male movement that has had a pervasive influence on the nation's schools and seeks, at bottom, nothing less than to eliminate the need for exasperated women ever again to shake their heads and mutter, “Boys will be boys.” Sommers, an expert at debunking shoddy (and trendy) research, exposes the ballyhooed “crisis of young girls” as the creation of feminists armed with dubious studies and savvy PR skills.

Girls, the story goes, are supposedly ignored by teachers who call only on boys in the classroom and otherwise (vaguely) neglect and abuse them, catastrophically undermining their self-confidence. “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves,” Mary Pipher argued in her hit girl-crisis book Reviving Ophelia. “They crash and burn.” Sommers catches Pipher in a typical bit of statistical dishonesty. Pipher cites the fact that suicide rates among children aged 10 to 14 rose 57 percent between 1979 and 1988 as evidence that “something dramatic is happening to adolescent girls.” Actually, the suicide rate for boys had increased 71 percent, and for girls 27 percent; 61 girls killed themselves in 1988, 176 boys.

When it comes to girls in school, don't think of poor Ophelia, but the Reese Witherspoon character in the movie Election—together, smart, leaving the boys behind. Girls get better grades, do more homework, engage in more extracurricular activities, enroll in more advanced-placement classes (and fewer special-education classes), go to college in greater numbers, and so on. This doesn't mean that girls are academically superior to boys; just that the special needs of boys are being neglected. As competitiveness and individual initiative are discouraged, classroom discipline loosened, and outlets for natural rambunctiousness—e.g., recess—eliminated, schoolboys tend to tune out or turn on (to Ritalin).

Sommers traces the fundamental problem to the progressive, “child-centered” educational theories dominant in American schools. “Education and instruction should from the very first be passive, observant, protective, rather than prescribing, determining, interfering.” Thus did Friedrich Froebel, the 19th-century inventor of kinder-garten, sum up what would become the tenets of progressive education. But boys need their “prescribing” in big, strong doses. If they don't get it they drift into their own little worlds of inattention and underachievement. Sommers points for evidence to Britain, which has addressed lagging boys by re-emphasizing teacher-led work, structured classrooms, frequent tests, and strict homework checks, sometimes in all-male classes led by male instructors. Early results suggest that in Britain, easily distracted Johnny now finds it easier to learn how to read.

If American boys are trailing girls, why all the focus on Ophelia? The career of superstar Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan is central to the answer. Famous as the first women's-studies professor at that institution, she is the chief phrenologist of academic feminism. In the past, she has rejected conventional standards of evidence as masculine tools—and apparently meant it. Her best-selling 1982 book, In a Different Voice, argued that women have a moral psychology distinct from that of men. But other scholars haven't been able to confirm her findings and the three studies on which Gilligan supposedly based her work are suspiciously under wraps, unavailable for peer review. As Sommers writes, all of this has led to “serious complaints of a type that, in disciplines that respect scholarly standards, have been known to lead to censure—or worse.”

Fortunately for Gilligan, her specialty isn't quantum mechanics, but “gender theory.” In two books after Different Voice, Gilligan explored the way adolescent girls are traumatized by a “male-voiced” culture and quickly learn that “people … [do] not want to hear what girls know.” So, according to Gilligan, preteen girls “know” things that they then “forget” in their teens as they are beaten down by the patriarchy. This provocative conclusion is based on small samples and extremely subjective interpretations. To simplify: Bitchy or politically liberal statements from girls are considered “knowing” by Gilligan, while anything polite or accepting of authority is taken as evidence of the dominant male culture at work.

That Gilligan's latest work did more than provide grist for tendentious dissertations is a testament to the power of marketing. The New York Times Magazine trumpeted her findings. The Ms. Foundation latched on to them and launched Take Our Daughters to Work Day. The American Association of University Women commissioned two studies meant to support Gilligan's conclusions and pin the blame for girls' low self-esteem on discrimination in schools. Headlines blared—the AAUW spent ＄100,000 on research for the second study, ＄150,000 on promotion—and Congress passed the “Gender Equity in Education Act.” When the AAUW sponsored yet another study in 1995—this one much more scientifically rigorous—the results contradicted the earlier dire conclusions; according to Sommers, this third study was not mentioned in a single newspaper article.

In the late '90s, Gilligan turned to the subject of boys, whom, she concluded, were also being traumatized by the patriarchy (which at least is an equal-opportunity oppressor). A fellow charlatan named William Pollack won major media attention after Columbine by talking, in a similar vein, of “Ophelia's brothers.” The idea is that there is nothing wrong with boys that can't be fixed if they stop acting like boys. Or, as Gloria Steinem puts it, “We need to raise boys like we raise girls.” This gets to the heart of the matter. Critics often say feminists hate men. That's not quite it—they actually hate masculinity.

One Department of Education-funded consultant warns against Little League, “where parents and friends sit on the sidelines and encourage aggressive, violent behavior” (stealing bases, sliding home, etc.). The women at Ms. briefly suggested a boys' equivalent of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which would have included a visit to abused women's shelters—just so the little guys would know what violent bastards men are. This is the subtext of—now effectively Supreme Court-mandated—sexual-harassment training in schools. So, boys are forbidden to engage in traditional boyish behaviors, and subjected to propaganda about the evils of men. If all this doesn't bleach the masculinity from them, well, that just shows—in the words of one influential feminist—the “need for [new] materials to defuse male resistance.”

The War against Boys bristles with examples of the kind that send parents fleeing from the public schools. Take Judy Logan, a middle-school teacher in San Francisco who is legendary among girl-partisans for her relentlessly feminizing pedagogy. Boys in her class are made to enjoy quilting, girls encouraged to vent their anger at men. In one project, Logan required each boy to give a presentation in the persona of an African-American woman. After one freckled-faced boy completed his rendition of Anita Hill, a delighted Logan exhorted the class, “Give her a hand, everyone!” The title of a chapter about Logan in an AAUW book: “Anita Hill Is a Boy: Tales from a Gender-Fair Classroom.”

The fight against masculinity waged by foot soldiers like Judy Logan is not a bizarre sideshow to American culture. It is fundamental to the liberal project. The incorrigible maleness of men is a standing rebuke to the Rousseau-inspired notions of human moral plasticity that are central to liberalism. Sommers provides a charming, if slight, example: Her 14-year-old received a gooey, self-esteem essay exercise at school, asking whether he compared himself to others, whether he made such comparisons to make himself feel better, and whether such comparisons made him feel inferior. His answers, respectively: “Sometimes,” “No, I do not,” and “No.” Academic feminists and their army of fellow-traveling psychologists and educational consultants must be scandalized by boys like this, who, despite everything, just refuse to play with dolls.

There is also an explicitly political element to the fight over boys. Tocqueville worried that the tender attentions of government would “soften” Americans and make them “timid.” The modern welfare state has that tendency, but feminists are working toward the goal even more directly. It is no coincidence that behaviors frowned upon by liberals—owning guns, smoking, risk-taking generally—are predominantly male activities. Government fosters dependency, while feminist cultural warriors seek to rid the national character of precisely those traits that are naturally resistant to the nanny state: It's a pincer movement.

This is why Christina Hoff Sommers has written such an indispensable book, and why a goal for conservatives just as important as cutting taxes and limiting government should be keeping America safe for recess and Little League.