by: F.R. Duplantier

Janet Daly of the London Daily Telegraph contends that "the epidemic of underachievement among boys in British state schools" is the predictable consequence of progressive education policies introduced 30 years ago. "Rather than encouraging working-class children to see the inadequacies of their own deprived social backgrounds and to aspire to go beyond them," she explains, schools began to "embrace and idealize 'anti-elitism,' in the name of delivering children from their feelings of class inferiority." Writing in the current issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, Daly marvels that no one foresaw that "this inverted snobbery would lock deprived children into the limitations into which they had been born," and she denounces progressive educators for "giving up on social mobility in favor of the virtue of class solidarity."

This anti-elitist approach entailed "a wholesale rejection of virtually the entire corpus of historical and literary knowledge that had traditionally been passed down from one generation to the next by formal schooling," Miss Daly continues. "By dismantling the traditional study of literature and grammar, the schools lost the unifying thread of cultural initiation: the basic knowledge of linguistic and literary heritage that had once equipped every properly educated person, whatever his background, with the ability to move freely and confidently in British society. Predictably," she concludes, "the effect was to reinforce class differences."

Rejecting this anti-elitism and the substanceless self-esteem it generates, Daly affirms that "nothing increases children's confidence more than the acquisition of knowledge and mastery of usable skills. Children are not fooled by patronizing attempts to hide real differences in ability," she asserts, "and boys especially are frustrated to the point of frenzy by a perverse refusal to give them clear goals and intelligible markers of success. While most children were shortchanged to some extent by this philosophy, boys -- and particularly working-class boys -- were more likely to be devastated. By failing to criticize, teachers deprived them of the criteria for self-criticism," says Daly. "By abdicating their responsibility to exercise firm control on behavior, schools allowed the worst-behaved to dominate the culture of the classroom and to set the tribal standards for adolescent male society."

Daly argues that progressive education has taken a greater toll on boys, because they "temperamentally depended much more than girls on the principles of traditional education: discipline, structure, and com-petition." She warns that boys deprived of academic achievement are "dropping out in alarming numbers into a nihilistic, outlaw street culture. Unemployable and uneducated, these youths make their chief preoccupations hooliganism, petty crime, and sexual predation." Daly charges that "schools have loaded the system very heavily in favor of female achievement and male failure. What has been systematically dismantled," she emphasizes, "is just the kind of externally imposed structure and clear discipline, both behavioral and intellectual, that boys require. This was, of course, part of an explicitly feminist program."