In the search for what has changed, all that may be necessary is to walk into a typical K-8 classroom today and see the pandemic artworks in all subjects, the nonstop self-reflective essays, chatty verbal and written responses to just about everything, condemnation of learning of (gasp!) facts, math that has more New Age philosophy than arithmetic, low-content gee-whiz science designed for the MTV generation, "social studies" that has scant real history, geography and civics in the early years, and the omission of academic competitions or recess.

Just what is going on in modern progressivist schools that could account for the plummeting academic performance of boys? Let's consider which of these changes seem to be a factor. Many of these are discussed in more details in the articles listed below.

"The British know all about this. They are a full five years ahead of us in recognizing the achievement gap between boys and girls and in taking active measures to deal with it. ... In Britain, ... more and more parents, teachers, and education experts are coming to the conclusion that progressive/therapeutic education does not work for boys. The British are experimenting by bringing back the old-fashioned pedagogies. ...

Conversely, more boys than girls are suspended from school. More are held back and more drop out. Boys are three times as likely as girls to be enrolled in special education programs and four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. More boys than girls are involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs. Girls attempt suicide more than boys, but it is boys who actually kill themselves more often. In a typical year (1997), there were 4,493 suicides of young people between the ages of five and twenty-four: 701 females, 3,792 males.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, slightly more female than male students enroll in high-level math and science courses. ... Girls, allegedly so timorous and lacking in confidence, now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and even in debating clubs. Only in sports are the boys still ahead, and women's groups are targeting the sports gap with a vengeance. ...

" The brunt of all this fell most disastrously on boys -- who, it turned out, tempermentally depended much more than girls on the principles of traditional education: discipline, structure, and competition. ... One key reason why girls are doing strikingly better than boys is that teachers, in accordance with progressivist ideology, now judge schoolwork in a way that rewards enthusiasm and personal involvement more than objective knowledge and accuracy. ... School is now designed to be most helpful to the self-disciplined and self-motivating --which, during childhood and adolescence, largely means girls. "

" Progressive schools -- and the feminist and feminized 'education' they inflict -- are ultimately very bad for boys and girls alike. But while they favor girls, casting them as a besieged class of helots, they are hostile to boys, who are perceived as members of a ruling elite that refuses to let go of patriarchal privilege and power. "

"If epic literature worms its way into the school's shopping-mall assortment of flimsy courses and frivolous subject matter, then it is duly deconstructed and shred: Boys are taught to see great works of art through feminism's grim and distorting prism. Shakespeare, Tolstoy and T.S. Eliot were members of the ruling class of oppressors -- their artistry no more than a manifestation of the alleged power relationships in society.

"In addition to a core-curriculum, banished too from America's feminized and foolish schools is the 'archaic' idea of a literary canon. Not only do boys have to internalize feminism's lumpen jargon; they must also synchronize their male brains to Oprah's challenged synapses. English teachers expect them to study Memoirs of a Geisha and The Secret Life of Bees.

" And girls are favored over boys. When boys bubble over with unbridled testosterone, instead of challenging, disciplining and harnessing their energies, as teachers once did, they are emasculated or medicated. The former means being made over in the image of woman; the latter entails being diagnosed as 'learning disabled' and drugged with Ritalin. It is a consequence of the demonization of male biopsychology. ...

" The problems plaguing boys are not pecuniary, but paradigmatic: the progressive, child-centered worldview and feminism. For decades now, America's educators have insisted that learning be made as natural and as easy as possible, when it is neither. To this end, content-based, top-down teaching was replaced with pop-culture friendly, non-hierarchically delivered flimflam. ...

As schools adopt teaching methods, curricula, literature and classroom practices that favor girls, the normal behavior of boys is marginalized and deemed inappropriate. There is a tremendous concern by many experts that classrooms have turned into places where girls are praised, but boys are seen as candidates for medical treatment. There seems to be little question that in many cases, attention and hyperactivity problems are indeed severe, debilitating, and need correction or treatment of some kind. But it is also extremely clear that too often children -- particularly boys -- wind up with prescriptions for powerful psychoactive medications, when no real medical or psychological problem is present. The following articles offer a basic introduction to this very big concern.

"Just when you thought nothing new could be added to progressive education's long catalog of failures, yet one more has come to light -- and it is a particularly grave and far-reaching failure. For progressive ed, I would argue, is responsible for the epidemic of underachievement among boys in British state schools, now so deep and widespread that it is taking on the proportions of a national crisis. ... The real culprit is the radical shift in teaching methods and in the content of the school curriculum that progressive education has wrought. ... Lost utterly, too, was any kind of rigor in instruction. ... The school dropped formal training in literacy and numeracy in favor of 'project learning' -- play-like, unstructured, open-ended work, done in groups. ... Progressive ideology rejected the very idea that getting answers right was important. ... The brunt of all this fell most disastrously on boys -- who, it turned out, tempermentally depended much more than girls on the principles of traditional education: discipline, structure, and competition. ... One key reason why girls are doing strikingly better than boys is that teachers, in accordance with progressivist ideology, now judge schoolwork in a way that rewards enthusiasm and personal involvement more than objective knowledge and accuracy. ... School is now designed to be most helpful to the self-disciplined and self-motivating -- which, during childhood and adolescence, largely means girls."

-- Janet Daley, "Progressive Ed's War On Boys", City Journal (Manhattan Institute), Winter 1999

"Many boys think that their grade schools are boy-unfriendly. I well remember my son bursting into the kitchen one day after school, yelling 'They want us to be girls, Mom, they want us to be girls!'"

-- Patricia Dalton, "When Did We Lose Sight of Boys?", Washington Post, Sunday, May 9, 1999

"The poor performance of English boys in relation to girls, particularly in reading skills, is a relatively new phenomenon. Various surveys show that, formerly, where sex differences did occur at the age of 7 or 8, they usually disappeared by the age of 11. Today, significant differences between girls and boys are still dramatically apparent in English tests at the ages of 14, 16 and 18. ... However, there is one English-speaking country that is very similar to England but where no sex differences in reading exist. That country is Scotland. ... There is one major difference in educational policy between the two countries. While 1960's child-centred methods of instruction have radically reshaped the teaching of reading in England, in Scotland methods have remained more traditional and phonics-based. It may be that code-based methods of reading instruction are more advantageous for boys than other methods."

-- Dr. Bonnie Macmillan, "When schools drop phonics, do boys fail to read?", The London Times, June 13, 1997

"Educators today are intolerant of boys acting like boys. ... When boys aren't being punished for being boys, they are being medicated to accomplish the same result. It is revealing that 95 percent of the kids on Ritalin today ... are boys. ... This view has found its most receptive audience in education, which is dominated, to a greater extent than other professions, by women. The result is a commitment to ... monitoring and policing characteristically male behavior, and getting boys to participate in 'characteristically feminine activities.' As a result, our sons think there's something wrong with being a boy. As Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist, puts it, our sons feel like a 'thorn among roses' and a 'frowned-upon presence' in our schools. This war that's being waged on sons isn't only cruel; it's culturally disastrous."

-- Charles W. Colson, "The War Against Boys in Our Schools"

"We spent most of the 1990s fretting about bogus research claiming that the schools were shortchanging and damaging girls, when the truth is that boys are the ones in trouble. Boys are much more likely than girls to have problems with schoolwork, repeat a grade, get suspended, and develop learning difficulties. ... They are five times more likely than girls to commit suicide and four to nine times more likely to be drugged with Ritalin. Student polls show that both girls and boys say their teachers like the girls more and punish the boys more often. Girls get better grades than boys, take more rigorous courses, and now attend college in much greater numbers. While the traditional advantage of boys over girls in math and science has narrowed (girls take as least as many upper-level math courses as boys, and more biology and chemistry), the advantage of girls over boys in reading and writing is large and stable."

-- John Leo, "Will boys be boys?", U.S.News, July 17, 2000

From the Simpsons:

Principal Skinner [phonily]: Am I wearing women's clothes? I didn't notice. When I look in my closet, I don't see male clothes or female clothes, they're all the same.

Edna Krabappel [arms crossed]: Are you saying that men and women are identical?

Skinner: Oh, no, of course not! Women are unique in every way.

Lindsay Nagel [arms crossed]: Now he's saying women and men aren't equal!

Skinner [getting nervous]: No, no, no! It's the differences ... of which there are none, that make the sameness ... exceptional! [desperately] Just tell me what to say!

[Skinner hyperventilates and faints]