My 14-year-old son, David, sometimes shows signs of the kind of emotional disengagement that worries feminists who would like to "reform" boys. He came to me one evening Allen he was in he seventh grade, utterly confused by his homework assignment. Like many contemporary English and social studies textbooks, his book, Write Source 2000, was chock-full of exercises designed to improve children's self-esteem and draw them out emotionally. "Mom, what do they want?" David asked.

He had read a short story in which one character always compared himself to another. Here are the questions David 1ad to answer: Do you often compare yourself with someone? Do you compare to make yourself feel better? Does your comparison ever make you feel inferior?

The Write Source 2000 Teacher's Guide suggests grading students on a scale from one to ten: Ten for a student who is ''intensely engaged," down to one for a student who "does not engage at all." David did not engage at all:

Do you often compare yourself with someone else? "Sometimes."
Do you compare to make yourself feel better? "No. I do not."
Do your comparisons make you feel inferior? "No."

I was amused by his terse replies. But feminists see them as unhealthy signs of emotional shutdown.

Toy manufacturers know about boys' reluctance to engage in social interactions. They have never been able to interest boys in the kinds of interactive social games girls love. In the computer game "Talk With Me Barbie," Barbie develops a personal relationship with the player: She learns her name and chats with her about dating, careers, and playing house. These Barbie games are among the all-time best-selling interactive games. But boys don't buy them.

Males, whether young or old, are just less interested than females in talking about personal feelings and relationships. In one experiment researchers at Northeastrn University analyzed college students' Conversations at the cafeteria table. They found young women were far more likely o discuss intimates: close friends, boyfriends, family members. "Specifically," say the authors, "56 percent of the women's targets but only 25 percent of the men's targets were friends and relatives." This is just one study, but it is backed up by massive evidence of distinct male and female interests and preferences. In another study, boys and girls differed in how they perceived objects and people. Researchers simultaneously presented male and female college students with two images on a stereoscope: one of an object, the other of a person. Asked to say what they saw, the male subjects saw the object more often than they saw the person; the female subjects saw the person more often than they saw the object. In addition, dozens of experiments confirm that women are much better than men at judging emotions based on the expression on a stranger's face.

If, as the evidence strongly suggests, the characteristically different interests, preferences, and behaviors of males and females are expressions of innate, "hardwired" biological differences, then their differences in emotional styles will be difficult or impossible to eliminate. But why should anyone make it his business to eliminate them? Why do liberal gender theorists see male stoicism and reserve as vices or psychological weaknesses to be overcome?

In most cultures—including our own until quite recently—reticence and stoicism have been regarded as comendable, while free expression of emotions is often seen as a shortcoming. From a historical perspective, the burden of proof rests on those who believe that being openly expressive makes people better and healthier.

Dr. William Pollack, author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, is a champion of emotional expressiveness. He instructs parents, "Let boys know that they don't need to tee 'sturdy oaks,"' for to encourage boys to be stoical is to ''harm'' them. But Pollack needs to show, not merely assert, that it harms a child to be "called upon to be tough." AII of the world's major religions place stoical control of emotions at the center of their moral teachings. "Be in touch with your feelings" is not one of the Ten Commandments. JudeoChristian teaching enjoins attentiveness to the emotional needs and feelings of others—not one's own.

Reform-minded "experts" should seriously consider the possibility that American children may in fact need more, not less, self-control and less, not more, self-involvement. It may be that American boys don't need to be more emotional and that American girls do need to be less sentimental and self-absorbed. (Maybe all the crashing and disappearing selves of young women described in books like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of Adolescent Girls are selves that have for too long been self preoccupied, to the unhealthy exclusion of outside interests.)

Contrary to what many feminists argue today, American boys are not deformed by society's conditioning. They do not need to be rescued. They are not pathological. They are not seething with repressed sentiments or imprisoned in "straitjackets" of masculinity. Being a boy is not a defect in need of a cure.

Indeed, when it comes to the genuine problems that do threaten our children's prospects—their moral drift, their academic deficits—the androgynizers, healers, and social reformers provide no solutions. On the contrary, they exacerbate the problems and stand squarely in the way of what needs to be done to solve them, as one can see by looking at today's classrooms. Consider the case of Mrs. Daugherty, a retired Chicago public school teacher whose story is famous in education circles. She was a highly respected sixth-grade teacher. One year she found her class impossible to control and began to worry that many of them had serious learning disabilities. When the principal was away, she did something teachers were not supposed to do: She looked in a special file where students' I.Q.s were recorded. To her amazement, she found that a majority of her students were way above average in intelligence, many with I.Q.s in the 120s and 130s. One of the worst classroom culprits was brilliant: He had an I.Q. of 145.

Mrs. Daugherty was angry at herself. She had been feeling sorry for the children, giving them remedial work, and expecting little from them. She immediately brought in challenging work, increased homework, and inflicted draconian punishments on misbehavior. Slowly the students' performance improved. By year's end, the class of ne'er-do-wells was one of the best behaved and highest performing in the sixth grade.

The principal was delighted by the turnaround. At the end of the year, he asked Mrs. Daugherty what she had done; she told him the truth. He forgave her and congratulated her. But then he added, "I think you should know, Mrs. Daugherty, those numbers next to the children's names—those are not their I.Q. scores. Those are their locker numbers.''

The moral is clear: Strict is good. Demanding excellence and good conduct only benefits the student. Sadly, a lot of education specialists are skeptical of this uncontroversial truism. The shift away from structured classrooms, competition, strict discipline, and skill-and-fact-based learning has been harmful to all children—especially boys.

Progressive pedagogues pride themselves on fostering creativity and enhancing children's self-esteem. A recent summary of our educational establishment's view of what schools need most today listed the following items:

— "LESS student passivity: sitting, listening, receiving, and absorbing information"...
—"LESS rote memorization of facts and details"...
—"less emphasis on competition and grades in school"...
—"MORE active learning in the classroom with all the attendant noise and movement of students doing, talking, and collaborating"...
—"MORE cooperative, collaborative activity; developing the classroom as an interdependent community"

Meanwhile, in Britain—where, as in America, boys are markedly behind girls academically, especially in reading and writing—education officials have found that this sort of"progressive" approach especially disadvantages boys. A council of British headmasters spent almost a decade studying successful classroom programs for male students, and found that nearly everything on their list violates some hallowed progressive tenet. A selection of the practices they found most effective with boys:

More teacher-led work
A structured environment
High expectations
Strict homework checks
Consistently applied sanctions if work is not done
Greater emphasis on silent work
Frequent testing
One-sex classes

The headmasters advise schools to avoid fanciful,"creative" assignments, noting, "Boys do not always see the intrinsic worth of 'Imagine you're a sock in a dustbin.' They want relevant work." Norm are the headmasters concerned about the students' serf-esteem. And they do not celebrate collaborative learning.

One approach now being experimented with in co-ed public schools throughout Great Britain is all-male classes. In 1996, Ray Bradbury, the head teacher of King's School in Winchester, was alarmed by the high failure rates of his boys, which far exceeded those of his female students. He identified 30 or so boys he thought at risk for failure and placed them together in a class. He chose an athletic young male teacher he thought the boys would like. The class was not"childcentered." The pedagogy was strict and old-fashioned. "The class is didactic and teacher-fronted," he explained. "It involves sharp questions and answers, and constantly checking understanding. Discipline is clear-cut—if homework isn't presented, it is completed in a detention There is no discussion."

A visiting journalist described the class: "Ranks of boys in blazers face the front, giving full attention to the young teacher's instructions. His style is uncompromising and inspirational.'People think that boys like you won't be able to understand writers such as the Romantic poets. Well, you're going to prove them wrong. Do you understand?"'

"When girls are present," the teacher explains, "boys are loath to express opinions for fear of appearing sissy." He chooses challenging but male-appropriate readings: "Members of my group are football mad and quite laddish. In mixed classes they would be turned off by Jane Eyre, whereas I can pick texts such as Silas Marner and The War Poets." The initial results have been promising. By 1997, after only a year, the boys had nearly closed the gap with the girls.

Another vindication of traditional pedagogy: In fall 1998, the British government introduced into primary schools a compulsory back-to-basics program called the "Literacy Hour," explicitly intended to narrow the achievement gap between boys and girls. It is phonicscentered, whole-class, teacher-led, with old-fashioned emphasis on such things as grammar and punctuation. David Blunkett, Britain's Education Secretary, also insisted that teachers find boy-friendly reading materials such as adventure, sports, or horror stories as well as nonfiction.

The effects were immediate and dramatic. In fall 1999, British newspapers announced the good tidings. In the words of the Daily Mail: While the girls are still ahead, the ability gap has dramatically narrowed. Education Secretary David Blunkett will see the...results as complete vindication of his back-to-basics policies in primary schools.... Last year just 64 percent of 11-yearold boys were proficient in reading. Today's figure is 78 percent. The remarkable improvement has exceeded the wildest expectation of the government.

The British experience suggests boys respond well to the traditional ways of teaching. If so, boys are paying the highest price for the current misguided fashions in education, especially the denigration of competition. Janet Daley, education writer for London's Daily Telegraph, observes that "by rejecting the old-fashioned ladder of tests, measurable achievement, and competition, incentives were lost that had once given school a comprehensible point to many pupils—particularly the male ones." A world "in which no one can be called a winner and nothing counts as losing will have little call on the young male psyche."

Unfortunately, the elimination of competitive rankings in American schools has made great headway. Pat Riordan of George Mason University researched class rankings for the National Association of Secondary Schools. She estimates that 60 percent of schools no longer use them. At Community High in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, academic awards at graduation are kept a secret. As the graduation counselor puts it, "Everybody is seen as an equal contributor to the class of '99." Jim Mitchell, executive director of the Maryland Association of Elementary School Principals, explains the new hostility to the honor roll: "It flies in the face of the philosophy of not making it so competitive for those little kids.... We even frown on spelling bees."

Yet competition that provides incentives to excel is as natural to a successful classroom as it is to a successful sports team. E. D. Hirsch, an educator and reformer at the University of Virginia, advises that "instead of trying fruitlessly to abolish competition as an element of human nature, we should try to guide it into educationally productive channels."

As soon as they identified the education gender gap, British educators began seriously experimenting with same-sex classes as a way of narrowing it, despite the rancorous reaction from "progressives" that such classes produce. Acknowledging that single-sex schooling is unorthodox, Marian Cox, headmistress at the Cotswold School, argues that"We have a national crisis with boys' tinder-achievement in English. Either we tackle it, or we just put our heads in the sand."

Sadly, any time American schools try to develop special programs for boys, groups such as the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union vociferously oppose them. This despite the example of schools like Harford Heights Elementary School, Maryland's largest elementary school, located in a poor Baltimore neighborhood. Since the mid-1990s, the school has experimented with same sex classes for boys and girls. They are optional; parents and teachers jointly decide who will most benefit.

As in Great Britain, the all-boy classes are taught by male teachers, and the boys' natural competitiveness and high-spiritedness are not discouraged but channeled to good ends. As the former principal, who initiated the program, said, "The boys become competitive rather than combative."

Walter Sallee has taught an all-boys class for three years at Harford, using many of the old-fashioned methods favored by the British headmasters. He teaches phonics, grammar, and diction. He carefully monitors progress. He uses boy-friendly materials; for example, he has developed math lessons based on Jackie Robinson's baseball statistics, and they have proved a great success. At recess his focus is character education through sportsmanship. He exploits the boys' natural competitiveness by breaking his class of ten-year-olds into "teams." Classroom activities become contests with an elaborate point system and prizes. School uniforms are optional at Harford, but most of his boys choose to wear them. Teams get extra points when all members don the uniform.

His boys are mostly poor and African American. Sallee is concerned about their self-esteem and confidence, but he floes not rely on therapeutic methods. The boys gain confidence by mastering skills, becoming good sports, being team players and young gentlemen. One of his primary aims is helping them develop social skills. They learn to express themselves with confidence, and they learn manners. Several times a year the all-boy and all-girl classes take part in shared events. One favorite occasion is a Thanksgiving banquet in which the boys escort the girls to the table, help them into their chairs, and engage in polite conversation. The children love it—especially the girls. Though at risk for every kind of academic and behavioral problem, the boys in Sallee's class are the opposite of disengaged and disruptive. They are enthralled. As Sallee told me, "they love the positive attention they get... They look forward to it and hate to miss a single day."

Harford Heights offers same-sex classes in grades three, four, and five. The classes are a great success with parents, who are asking for more. It is easy to see why. Sallee's deliberate efforts to teach ethics through sportsmanship and good manners could be the making of many boys, rich and poor, from all ethnic backgrounds. But the forces arrayed against public, same-sex education for boys are formidable.

In 1998, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) released Separated by Sex: A Critical Look at Single-Sex Education for Girls. The report, a compilation of essays by several scholars, turned out to be inconclusive. Most of the authors agreed more systematic long-term research was needed. But the AAUW press release was categorically negative: "What the report shows is that separating by sex is not the solution to the gender inequity in education." Critics soon pointed out the disparity between the full report and the press summary. One of the contributing scholars, Cornelius Riordan, was stunned. He told the Los Angeles Times that the press releases were "slanted," and "off the deep end."

Co-education is a strong tradition in the United States, and it's doubtful we will ever adopt a single-sex system on a large scale. On the other hand, those who oppose it on ideological grounds should not be indulged. Single-sex classes seem to be working for privileged boys who attend private schools as well as for the disadvantaged boys in Mr. Sallee's class. British officials believe in them. We need a national discussion of the merits of all-male classes without ideological interference.

1n 1970, Theodore Sizer, then dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, co-edited with his wife, Nancy, a collection of ethics lectures entitled Moral Education. The preface sets the tone by condemning the morality of the "Christian gentleman," the American "prairie," the McGuffey Readers, and any grading system that inspires "terror" in the young. The Sizers were especially critical of the "crude and philosophically simpleminded sermonizing" tradition of the nineteenth century. That kind of morality"can and should be scrapped," argued the Sizers.

Instead they favored a "new morality" that gives primacy to students' autonomy and independence. Teachers should never preach or inculcate virtue; rather, through their actions they should demonstrate a "fierce commitment" to social justice. In part, that means democratizing the classroom: "Teacher and children can learn about morality from each other."

On top of new relativistic theories of education like this one, schoolhouse moral standards and discipline were severely damaged in recent decades by court verdicts that eroded the standard-setting power of teachers and school officials. In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Iowa school authorities had violated students' rights by denying them permission to wear protest armbands to school. Justice Awe Fortas, in the majority opinion, found the action of the school authorities unconstitutional:

'lt can hardly be argued that students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

Justice Hugo Black dissented. Though a great champion of First Amendment rights, Black pointed out that school children "need to learn, not teach." He wrote, presciently, "it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the Judiciary...turned loose with lawsuits for damages and injunctions against their teachers.... It is nothing but wishful thinking to imagine that young, immature students will not soon believe it is their right to control the schools."

Indeed, teachers and parents who embraced the "liberate the children" view turned out to have badly underestimated the potential barbarism of children who are not given a directed moral education. That the romantic approach to moral education is harmful is becoming increasingly obvious to the public, but it will take some time for the educational establishment to change. It's unlikely a single ethics class would have, for instance, stopped boys like Harris and Klebold from murdering their classmates at Columbine High School. On the other hand, a K-12 curriculum infused with moral content would have created a climate that might have made a massacre unthinkable. Such a depraved and immoral act Divas indeed unthinkable in the ''simpleminded'' days before the schools cast aside their mission of moral edification. Teachers, too, would have acted differently. Had K-12 teachers in the Littleton schools seen it as their duty to civilize the students in their care, they would never have overlooked the bizarre, antisocial behavior of Klebold and Harris. When the boys appeared in school with T-shirts emblazoned "Serial Killer," their teachers would have sent them home. Nor would the boys have been allowed to wear swastikas or produce grossly violent videos as school projects. By tolerating these modes of "self-expression," the adults at Columbine implicitly sent students the message that there's not much wrong with the murder of innocent People.

One English teacher at Columbine, Cheryl Lucas, told Education Week that both boys had written short stories about death and killing "that were horribly, graphically violent" and that she had notified school officials. According to Lucas, the officials head taken no action because nothing the boys wrote had violated school policy. Speaking with painful irony, the frustrated teacher explained, "In a free society, you can't take action until they've committed some horrific crime because they are guaranteed freedom of speech." In many high schools, students are confident that their right to say and do almost anything will be indulged. Counselors and administrators rarely take action, out of fear they will be challenged by litigious parents backed by the ACLU and other zealous guardians of students' rights.

Incidents such as the Columbine shootings have led Americans to begin to take a hard look at boys and their growing educational lags. This is encouraging, for the public has a lot to learn about how our schools have been routinely failing boys, both academically and morally. But if our schools are to be gotten back on track, something akin to a "Great Relearning" will have to take place regarding the true natures of boys and girls, men and women. I borrow the phrase "Great Releaming'' from the novelist Tom Wolfe, who applied it to lessons reamed in the late 1 960s by a group of hippies living in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The hippies had collectively decided that hygiene was a middle-class hang-up they would live without. Baths and showers, while not actually banned, were frowned upon retrograde. These men and women "sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out at zero," noted Wolfe.

But after a while, their principled aversion to modern hygiene had unpleasant consequences: "At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scruff, the rot." Their manginess eventually began to vex the reformers, leading them to individually seek help. They had gone too far in jettisoning proven social practices and plain common sense. Step by step, they had to rediscover for themselves the rudiments of modern hygiene. A Great Relearning.

Far outside of Haight-Ashbury, other Americans have jettisoned older mores and morals in hopes that, starting from zero, they would arrive at a society more just and free. The new amorality is most dramatically seen Al our children. By recklessly denying the importance of giving the young moral guidance, parents and educators have cast great numbers of them adrift. In some ways, we are as down and out as those poor hippies who finally found themselves knocking at the door of the clinic. We too face a Great Relearning. One area where we have much to relearn concerns the plain facts about males and females. We are going to have to get away from the idea that boys and girls are the same, and that such differences as we find are the result of social conditioning imposed by a patriarchal male culture intent on subjugating women. We must relearn what previous generations lever doubted: Boys and girls are different in ways that go far beyond the obvious biological divergences.

A recent book, Between Mothers and Sons, offers poignant glimpses of several mothers rediscovering the true nature of boys. Most of the contributors to this collection of mother-son reflections are self-described feminists, and it is a compilation of insights from mothers who have had to call into question their cherished prejudices about boys when they turned ut not to square with their own experience as mothers.

Some of the mothers confess to having tried to educate heir sons in conformity with feminist precepts, stopping only Allen it became evident that they were coercing their sons to act against their natures. In these accounts, Mother Nature, through social conditioning, has the last word, and fashionable ideology is swept away by the powerful love that mothers—including committed feminist mothers—bear for their sons. Deborah Galyan, a short-story writer and essayist, describes what happened when she sent her son Dylan to a Montessori preschool "run by a goddess-worshipping, multiracial women's collective on Cape Cod":

Something about it did not honor his boy soul. I think it was the absence of physical competition. Boys who clashed or tussled with each other were separated and counseled by the peacemakers. Sticks were confiscated and turned into tomato stakes in the school garden.... [It] finally came to me...I had sent him there to protect him from the very circuitry and compulsions and desires that make him what he is. I had sent him there to protect him from himself.

Galyan then posed painful questions to which she found a liberating answer: "How could I be a good feminist, a good pacifist, and a good mother to a stick-wielding, weapon generating boy?" Answer: "A five-year-old boy, I learned from reading summaries of various neurological studies...is a beautiful, fierce, testosterone drenched, cerebrally asymmetrical humanoid carefully engineered to move objects through space, or at the very least, to watch others do so."

Janet Burroway, a poet, novelist, and self-described pacifist-liberal, has a son Tim, who grew up to become a career soldier. She is not sure how exactly he came to move in a direction opposite her own. She recalls his abiding fascination with plastic planes, toy soldiers, and military history, noting that "his direction was early set." Tim takes her aback in many ways, but she is clearly proud of him. Throughout his childhood she was struck by his "chivalric character": "He would, literally, lay down his life for a cause or a friend." And she confesses, "I am forced to be aware of my own contradictions in his presence: a feminist often charmed by his machismo."

As part of our great relearning, we must again recognize and respect the reality that boys and girls are different, that each sex has its distinctive strengths and graces. We must put an end to all the crisis mongering that pathologizes children. Nape must be less credulous w hen sensationalist "experts" talk of girls as drowning Ophelias or of boys as anxious, isolated Hamlets. Neither sex needs to be "revived" or "rescued"; neither needs to be "regendered." Instead of doing things that do not need doing and should not be done, we must dedicate ourselves to the hard tasks that are both necessary and possible: improving the moral climate in our schools and providing our children with first-rate education that equips them for a good life in the new century.

I am confident we can do that. American boys, whose very masculinity turns out to be politically incorrect, badly need our support. If you are an optimist, as I am, you believe that good sense and fair play will prevail. If you are a mother of sons, as I am, you know that one of the more agreeable facts of life is that boys will be boys.