Boy, talking about “making welcome of indifference.”

This article in Time entitled The Boys Are All Right seems to be saying that while boys are failing at just about everything as girls excel, ’twas ever so, so don’t worry, be happy.

More boys than girls are in special-education classes. More boys than girls are prescribed mood-managing drugs. This suggests to her (and others) that today’s schools are built for girls, and boys are becoming misfits. As a result, more boys than girls drop out of high school. Boys don’t read as well as girls. And America’s prisons are packed with boys and former boys.

Meanwhile, fewer boys than girls take the SAT. Fewer boys than girls apply to college. Fewer boys than girls, in annual surveys of college freshmen, express a passion for learning. And fewer boys than girls are earning college degrees. Even sperm counts are falling. “It’s true at every level of society” that boys are stumbling behind, Sommers continued.

Observers of the boy crisis contend that families, schools and popular culture are failing our boys, leaving them restless bundles of anxiety–misfits in the classroom and video-game junkies at home. They suffer from an epidemic of “anomie,” as Harvard psychologist William Pollack told me, adrift in a world of change without the help they need to find their way. Even in the youngest grades, test-oriented teachers focus energy on conventional exercises in reading, writing and other seatwork, areas in which girls tend to excel. At the same time, schools are cutting science labs, physical education and recess, where the experiential learning styles of boys come into play. No wonder, the theory goes, our boys get jittery, grow disruptive and eventually tune out. “A boy will get a reputation as hell on wheels that follows him from one teacher to the next, and soon they’re coming down on him even before he screws up. So he learns to hate school,” says Mike Miller, an elementary school teacher in North Carolina. Miller’s principal has ordered every faculty member to read a book this summer titled Hear Our Cry: Boys in Crisis.

In short, society treats “boyhood as toxic, as a pathology,” says Sommers–who may have been guilty of this herself when she wrote several years ago that the Columbine killers were emblematic of turn-of-the-century boyhood. But she’s right that it’s not girls who are shooting up their classrooms–and boys are at least five times as likely as girls to die by suicide.

The increasing girl-boy divide is developed in this eye-opening piece. But, boy, I’m not at all convinced with its conclusion:

“When no one’s looming over them, they begin making choices of their own,” … “They discover consequences and learn to take responsibility for themselves and their emotions. They start learning self-discipline, self-confidence, team building. If we don’t let kids work through their own problems, we get a generation of whiners.”

That sounds to me like the feel-good crap that created the problem in the first place. No one was talking about a girl-boy divide when there was a wood shed.