Bibliographic record
Abstract
The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers is an eye opening discussion about boys' underachievement in education and how that will impact our economic future.After major waves of feminism and decades of trying to reform policies, strides in education for women have been massive.Women and girls today outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being.But unfortunately at the same time, male underachievement has only gotten worse.Christina Hoff Sommers contends that it is time to take a hard look at our present-day realities and recognize that boys need our help.Our refusal to confront our reality that boys are suffering academically will harm our economic future.The War Against Boys is an incisive, rigorous, and heartfelt argument in favour of recognizing and confronting this new reality. The Gender GapIt is portrayed in the media that the gap in education is based on race and class but in reality, the main gap in education is gender-based (Sommer, 2013, 23-24).For evidence that boys are doing fine educationally, people have attempted to use the wage gap (Sommer, 2013, 25-26).Studies have revealed that there really isn't a wage gap between men and women (Sommer, 2013, 26).Instead, when comparing all relevant variables and éducation 47:3 (2024) www.cje-rce.cacomparing oranges to oranges, women often make more money than men.Sommers discusses this when she states, "The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time.It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked required per week.When mainstream economists consider the wage gap, they find that pay disparities are almost entirely the result of women's different life preferences-what men and women choose to study in school, where they work, and how they balance their home and career" (Sommer, 2013, 26).This was very surprising because the media still portrays this image that women are still disadvantaged and the gender gap is still prevalent in today's society when in fact it is not true.Sommers does a great job of highlighting this information for her readers with evidence to back up her stance. Classroom StrategiesClassroom strategies have changed to become more geared towards girls rather than boys.Sommers explains how our classrooms have shifted to become more feelings entered, risk averse, sedentary, and competition-free which are all movements away from the characteristic sensibilities of boys.There are many schools that have eliminated different types of games based on competition in order that no one's feelings are hurt.Sommer lists many examples of this such as, tug of war, tag, and dodgeball.Sommers explains that activities in the classroom have become feelings and imagination-oriented rather than physical; "From the earliest age, boys show a distinct preference for active outdoor play, with a strong predilection for games with body contact, conflict, and clearly defined winners and losers.Girls, too, enjoy raucous outdoor play, but they engage in it less" (Sommer, 2013, 41).Actual aggression and rough and tumble play lines have been blurred by teachers and administration.In response boys are getting punished more for things that are not that serious, creating this zero-tolerance policy.All of this has led to more suspensions which is a direct indicator of boys becoming disengaged in school and therefore not going to post secondary education.The long-term effects of these classroom strategies in how boys relate to and perceive learning and school is very eye-opening.Sommers states, "In classrooms across the country little boys got the message that there was something wrong with them-something the teacher was trying to change.It is doubtful that these efforts at resocialization were ever successful.But they surely succeeded in making lots Book Review: Lansi xxviiiCanadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation 47:3 (2024) www.cje-rce.ca of little boys confused and unhappy" (Sommers, 2013, 70).It is sad to think that we as a society have created this reality for boys.Sommers gives an insightful account of how our classroom strategies have impacted boys.While we may not realize that we have inadvertently caused boys to withdraw in education, we must use this information to rectify this situation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.049 | 0.032 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".