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The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men ペーパーバック – 2001/6/12
In this provocative book, Christina Hoff Sommers argues that our society has continued to overemphasize the troubles of girls while our boys suffer from the same self-esteem and academic problems. Boys need help, but not the sort of help they've been getting.
- 本の長さ256ページ
- 言語英語
- 出版社Simon & Schuster
- 発売日2001/6/12
- 寸法13.97 x 1.91 x 20.96 cm
- ISBN-100684849577
- ISBN-13978-0684849577
商品の説明
出版社からのコメント
"Provocative and controversial . . . Sommers's voice is impassioned and articulate."--Marilyn Gardner, The Christian Science Monitor
"The burden of [this] thoughtful, provocative book is that it is American boys who are in trouble, not girls. Ms. Sommers . . . makes these arguments persuasively and unflinchingly, with plenty of data to support them."--Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
"This book promises to launch and influence an enduring national debate . . . . The author trains her empirical and polemical skills on an issue of demonstrable and often poignant urgency."--Mary Eberstadt, The Washington Times
"In Christina Hoff Sommers's splendid new book . . . she shows the damage that is being done to our sons by adults determined to stop them from being, well, boys."--Danielle Crittenden, New York Post
レビュー
Richard Bernstein The New York Times The burden of [this] thoughtful, provocative book is that it is American boys who are in trouble, not girls. Ms. Sommers... makes these arguments persuasively and unflinchingly, with plenty of data to support them.
Mary Eberstadt The Washington Times This book promises to launch and influence an enduring national debate....The author trains her empirical and polemical skills on an issue of demonstrable and often poignant urgency.
Danielle Crittenden New York Post In Christina Hoff Sommers's splendid new book...she shows the damage that is being done to our sons by adults determined to stop them from being, well, boys.
抜粋
Chapter One: Where the Boys Are
The Myth of the Fragile Girl
In 1990, Carol Gilligan announced to the world that America's adolescent girls were in crisis. In her words, "As the river of a girl's life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing." Gilligan offered little in the way of conventional evidence to support this alarming finding. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what sort of empirical research could establish so large a claim. But Gilligan quickly attracted powerful allies. Within a very short time the allegedly fragile and demoralized state of American adolescent girls achieved the status of a national emergency.
I will be subjecting Gilligan's research on girls and boys to extensive analysis in later chapters. She is the matron saint of the girl crisis movement. Gilligan, more than anyone else, is cited as the academic and scientific authority conferring respectability on the claims that American girls are being psychologically depleted, socially "silenced," and academically "shortchanged."
Popular writers, electrified by Gilligan's discovery, began to see evidence of a girl crisis everywhere. Former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen recounted how Gilligan's research cast an ominous shadow on the celebration of her daughter's second birthday: "My daughter is ready to leap into the world, as though life were chicken soup and she a delighted noodle. The work of Professor Carol Gilligan of Harvard suggests that some time after the age of 11 this will change, that even this lively little girl will pull back [and] shrink."
Soon there materialized a spate of popular books with titles such as Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls; Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls; Schoolgirls: Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. Time writer Elizabeth Gleick remarked on the new trend in literary victimology: "Dozens of troubled teenage girls troop across [the] pages: composite sketches of Charlottes, Whitneys and Danielles who were raped, who have bulimia, who have pierced bodies or shaved heads, who are coping with strict religious families or are felled by their parents' bitter divorce."
The country's adolescent girls were both exalted and pitied. Novelist Carolyn See wrote in The Washington Post, "The most heroic, fearless, graceful, tortured human beings in this land must be girls from the ages of 12 to 15." In the same vein, Myra and David Sadker, in Failing at Fairness, predicted the fate of a lively six-year-old girl on top of a playground slide: "There she stood on her sturdy legs, with her head thrown back, and her arms flung wide. As ruler of the playground she was at the very zenith of her world." But all would soon change: "If the camera had photographed the girl...at twelve instead of six...she would have been looking at the ground instead of the sky; her sense of self-worth would have been an accelerating downward spiral."
The picture of confused and forlorn girls struggling to survive would be drawn again and again with added details and increasing urgency. In Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, by far the most successful of the girl-crisis books, girls undergo a fiery demise: "Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn."
The description of America's teenage girls as silenced, tortured, voiceless, and otherwise personally diminished is indeed dismaying. But there is surprisingly little evidence to support it. If the nation's girls are in the kind of crisis that Gilligan and her acolytes are describing, it has escaped the notice of conventional psychiatry. There is, for example, no mention of this epidemic in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the official desk reference of the American Psychiatric Association. The malaise that comes closest to matching the symptoms mentioned by the crisis writers is a mood disorder called dysthymia. Dysthymia is characterized by low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, depression, difficulty in making decisions, and social withdrawal. According to DSM-IV, it occurs equally in both sexes among children, and while it is more common in adult women than men, it is still relatively rare. No more than 3 or 4 percent of the population suffers from it.
Scholars who abide by the conventional protocols of social science research describe adolescent girls in far more optimistic terms. Dr. Anne Petersen, a former professor of adolescent development and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota and now senior vice president for programs at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, reports the consensus of researchers working in adolescent psychology: "It is now known that the majority of adolescents of both genders successfully negotiate this developmental period without any major psychological or emotional disorder, develop a positive sense of personal identity, and manage to forge adaptive peer relationships at the same time they maintain close relationships with their families." Daniel Offer, professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University, concurs with Petersen. He refers to a "new generation of studies" that find a majority of adolescents (80 percent) normal and well adjusted.
At the same time Gilligan was declaring a girl crisis, a University of Michigan/U.S Department of Health and Human Services study asked a scientifically selected sample of three thousand high school seniors the question "Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days -- would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?" Nearly 86 percent of girls and 88 percent of boys responded that they were "pretty happy" or "very happy." If the girls who were polled were "caught in an accelerated downward spiral," they were unaware of it.
Clinical psychologist Mary Pipher calls American society a "girl-poisoning" and "girl-destroying culture." What is her evidence? In Reviving Ophelia, she informs readers that her clinic is filled with girls "who have tried to kill themselves." And she cites statistics suggesting that the condition of America's girls is worsening: "The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta reports that the suicide rate among children age ten to fourteen rose 75 percent between 1979 and 1988. Something dramatic is happening to adolescent girls in America."
But Pipher's numbers are misleading. Insofar as anything "dramatic" is happening to America's children with respect to suicide, it is happening to boys. A look at the sex breakdown of the CDC's suicide statistics reveals that for males aged ten to fourteen, the suicide rate increased 71 percent between 1979 and 1988; for girls the increase was 27 percent. Furthermore, the actual number of children aged ten to fourteen who kill themselves is small. A grand total of 48 girls in that age group committed suicide in 1979, and 61 in 1988. Among boys, the number rose from 103 to 176. All of these deaths are tragic, but in a population of 9 million ten- to fourteen-year-old girls, an increase in female child suicide by 13 is hardly evidence of a girl-destroying culture.
Contrary to the story told by Gilligan and her followers, by the early 1990s American girls were flourishing in unprecedented ways. To be sure, some -- among them those who found themselves in the offices of clinical psychologists -- felt they were drowning in the sea of Western culture. But the vast majority of girls were occupied in more constructive ways, moving ahead of boys academically in the primary and secondary grades, applying to colleges in record numbers, filling the more challenging academic classes, joining sports teams, and generally enjoying more freedoms and opportunities than any young women in human history.
An American Tragedy
Gilligan's ideas had special resonance in women's groups already committed to the proposition that our society is unsympathetic to women. Such organizations were naturally receptive to bad news about girls. The interest of the venerable and politically influential American Association of University Women (AAUW), in particular, was piqued. Officers at the AAUW were reported to be "intrigued and alarmed" by Gilligan's findings. "Wanting to know more," they commissioned a polling firm to study whether American schoolgirls were being drained of their self-confidence.
In 1991, the AAUW announced the disturbing results: "Most [girls] emerge from adolescence with a poor self-image." Anne Bryant, then executive director of the AAUW and an expert in public relations, organized a media campaign to spread the word that "an unacknowledged American tragedy" had been uncovered. Newspapers and magazines around the country carried the bleak tidings that girls were being adversely affected by gender bias that eroded their self-esteem. Susan Schuster, at the time president of the AAUW, candidly explained to The New York Times why the AAUW had undertaken the research in the first place: "We wanted to put som...
著者について
登録情報
- 出版社 : Simon & Schuster (2001/6/12)
- 発売日 : 2001/6/12
- 言語 : 英語
- ペーパーバック : 256ページ
- ISBN-10 : 0684849577
- ISBN-13 : 978-0684849577
- 寸法 : 13.97 x 1.91 x 20.96 cm
- カスタマーレビュー:
著者について
著者の本をもっと発見したり、よく似た著者を見つけたり、著者のブログを読んだりしましょう
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トップレビュー
上位レビュー、対象国: 日本
レビューのフィルタリング中に問題が発生しました。後でもう一度試してください。
前著ではジェンダー・フェミニズムのアカデミアへの浸透が大きな問題として扱われていたが、こちらはそこから事態が進展して、初等教育に影響がおよび、それが実際に弊害をもたらしていると論じている。これは実はこのところ日本でホットなトピックとなっている「ゆとり教育批判」と重なり合う部分がある(『論争・学力崩壊』など)。日本では文部省が「ゆとり教育」の首謀者であるとして批判されるが、著者がアメリカでの1990年代の「ゆとり教育」の首謀者として名指しするのはジェンダー・フェミニズムである。そして、この「ゆとり教育」(著者は"progressive"などの言葉を使っている)の被害が、やはりジェンダー・フェミニズムのバイアスのおかげで男子生徒に集中する。これがタイトルの"The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men"の意味。
1990年代の初めに、フェミニストが"shortchange"という言葉を使って、「アメリカの初等教育が女子生徒を不利な立場に追い込んでいる」という主張を始めた時点ですでに、そのような事実はなく、むしろ男子生徒の方が問題を抱えていた。それなのに、この主張に基づいて女子生徒を優遇する策を次々と打ち出したせいで、事態はいっそう悪化した。一方、英国やオーストラリアなどの国では、フェミニストの影響力が強くないので、教育機関は男子生徒の抱えている問題にフォーカスを当てて成果をあげている。とまあ、そういう話である。
以下、前著も合わせての一般的な感想。この読書メモで何度か述べているように、90年代においては、全体的に見れば、性差を含む人間の各種の性質の生物学的基盤を肯定する立場が勢いを強めたように見える。その原因には、計測手法が進歩したということもあるけれども(『女の能力、男の能力』の項も参照)、遺伝子工学の進展によって、各種の性質に生物学的基盤があるという概念が社会に素直に受け入れられやすくなったということもあるだろう(『話を聞かない男、地図が読めない女』がベストセラーになったという事実はそうとう重い意味を持っている)。
なお、上記の『女の能力、男の能力』の著者ドリーン・キムラは、大学におけるジェンダー・フェミニストの活動に反対する意思を公にしているカナダ人女性であり、ソマーズが言うところのequity feministである。生態学/動物行動学をベースにしている長谷川真理子(『進化と人間行動』)は、『科学の目 科学のこころ』において、日本のフェミニストとの共同作業をやろうとしてしんどかったという感想を遠まわしに述べていた。equity feministでないはずがない長谷川真理子が(まあそれを言ったら、equity feministで「ない」人はそうそうはいないと思うが)、ジェンダー・フェミニストとの共同作業をやろうと思えたこと自体が、日本におけるフェミニズムの状況のいくつかの側面を示唆しているように思う。これを「違い」ととるべきなのか、「遅れ」ととるべきなのかは、私にはよくわからない。その手のものをまったく読まなくなってしまったので。ただ「遅れ」だとしたら、後発組の利益を享受できるかもしれない、と言っておこう。
2001/11/18
他の国からのトップレビュー
L'auteur, professeur de philosophie pendant 15 ans, écrivit ce livre à la fin des années 1990, puis l'a repris dans une nouvelle édition, afin de mettre à jour notamment les études scientifiques sur lesquelles elle s'était appuyée en premier lieu. Elle évolue dorénavant au sein de l'American Enterprise Institute, plutôt proche de l'aile réaliste du parti républicain.
Ce livre aborde la manière dont le système éducatif américain, après une longue évolution débutée dans les années 1980, a progressivement rendu la vie de plus en plus difficile aux garçons à l'école. Bien que centré sur les Etats-Unis, le livre évoque également la Grande-Bretagne et l'Australie, et ses leçons sont tout à fait valides pour la France (bien que les chiffres soient différents bien entendu).
L'auteur évoque tout d'abord les nombreux programmes fédéraux américains développés en matière d'éducation au cours des 30 dernières années qui ont, et souvent à juste titre, largement favorisé et soutenu la progression des jeunes femmes au sein du système scolaire et universitaire afin de compenser le désavantage historique dont elles avaient souffert. Bien que reconnaissant un certain mérite à ces programmes, l'auteur tient à mettre en exergue très vite les conséquences néfastes, voire parfois désastreuses, que ces réformes du système scolaire américain ont eu sur les garçons. C'est à ce titre, en documentant très sérieusement ses assertions, qu'elle dénonce les manigances d'une partie du lobby féministe, totalement sourd à ce drame.
L'auteur démontre scrupuleusement comment les jeunes garçons sont vite stigmatisés dans un environnement éducatif devenu extrêmement féminisé, tant au regard du personnel qu'au regard des valeurs qui y sont désormais véhiculées. Elle s'indigne du fait que les garçons risquent de devenir très rapidement le 2ème sexe, alors même que le lobby féminin et les hommes politiques à sa botte continuent de faire la sourde oreille, et continuent de ne se préoccuper que de l'avancement des jeunes femmes.
L'auteur dénonce, dans la logique des débats sur la théorie du genre qui animent les cercles universitaires américains, mais également français, la volonté de certaines féministes de changer la nature masculine.
S'appuyant sur du bon sens, et armée d'arguments incisifs, Christina Hoff Summers jette un véritable pavé dans la mare pour prendre la défense de la vaste entreprise d'émasculation entreprise à l'encontre de nos jeunes garçons, et pour défendre une société où hommes et femmes évolueraient à égalité, dans le respect des différences de chacun.
A rapprocher, bien que très différent dans l'approche, du livre "Nos garçons en danger" du psychologue français Stéphane Clerget.
Enfin, la version Kindle est impeccable.
The book also shows how feminists are interfering with boys normal harmless play. The author shows the type of behaviour that does cause harm in boys. As is happens when Tony Blair was the UK prim minister he pointed out research that shows that boys who play with boys stereotyped toys, including to toy guns, in pre school and primary school do better academically. You would think that better educated boys would be less violent rather than more.
Sommers points out the general types of educational settings that give better behaviour and academic results in boys including more guided learning and stricter discipline.
As it happens I was studying maths in the mid 1990's in Australia and our lecturers had to have a special meeting of all the maths students because the ability of maths and engineering students had fallen so badly in the previous 15 years. This happens to be the time when girls school and university marks went from behind to ahead of boys. That there should be a large overall reduction in ability when half the population has improved so much is hard to understand and is more like the legitimate advantages of boys are not being taught or assessed properly. Also during this time, and earlier, work kept being removed from high school science, such as parts of the REDOX and carbon chemistry electives for final year chemistry in 1984, and in every case girls marks improved.
Also while I was studying maths the state education minister Virginia Chadwick said the words "Boys read maps better, so we changed them." Boys tend to get the specific thing from the whole better due to their spatial advantage, say, which is a legitimate part of real world activity. This has lead to question types to be created that are designed to get answers right, say by being more discrete, rather than including legitimate cognitive areas thus improving girls marks
I think the deliberate hindering of boys in school has lead to the above mentioned poor ability in the areas historically done well by boys in universities causing universities to have to dumb down the work where girls have had their problems as universities don't want high a failure rates. In 1994 all students where I studied were told that there would be a failure restriction of .15% in all classes with 30 or more in the class due to federal government funding changes. The maths degree did not have a single compliant subject although 15 years earlier before the girls improved at school and university as much the maths people would not have had a problem with this failure restriction. When I did data structures only 30% of the class passed, all the girls failed, then the next time they had to pass 85%.