Will Boys Be Boys?

Why the gender lens may not shed light on the latest educational crisis.
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2006, at 1:07 PM ET

"It's OK, guys, being a haptic learner doesn't necessarily mean you have ADD," a teacher reassured a group of ninth-grade boys who were duly filling out a survey designed to assess their "learning styles." Telling me this story as she flipped through a recent issue of Newsweek announcing the arrival of a "Boy Crisis" in education, my ninth-grade daughter laughed. I gather the boys had found it at least somewhat amusing, too. Though the term made me think of spastic, "haptic," I discovered, actually means "hands-on." Here was a diagnosis with a double entendre that the testosterone-afflicted gender could almost enjoy.

As experts shift their attention from girls and their academic disadvantages to the lagging educational achievement levels of American males, adults should perhaps take a cue from kids' skepticism about the latest vogue in gender-based learning labels. Instead, diagnostic zeal runs high in the current media flurry. Elbowing girls out of the way, the authors of Newsweek's cover story tour the spectrum of tidy explanations for why boys are falling behind girls. And in an essay called "Boy Trouble" in the New Republic, Richard Whitmire joins a chorus invoking highly speculative brain science, among other less than definitive data, as he sounds the alarm about this supposedly unnoticed crisis. But this paradigm of a cognitive chasm between the sexes at school—inherited from the girl-boosting crusade of recent decades—might be getting in the way of what we really need: a, well, more "haptic" approach to educational dilemmas that arguably have less to do with biology and feminist legacies than with basic study habits and the economy.