It's not hard to believe that the kindler, gentler public school of 2008 is ill-suited to the behaviour of young males. A tragic altercation on a rugby pitch can lead to manslaughter charges. Skinned knees are the stuff of lawsuits. And school-wide bans on tag and snowball fights are much more than a cranky old man's nightmare—they are very, very real.

According to some researchers, that boy-hostile environment extends into the classroom as well. Leonard Sax, author of the new book Boys Adrift, says it starts in the very first days of a boy's education—in kindergarten. In an interview in the January 21 issue of Maclean's, he argues that whereas in years past there were "lots of different activities: singing, playing, dancing, fingerpainting," nowadays "the primary activity is formal didactic education, with the kids sitting still and the teacher instructing." Boys being more restless, Sax posits that they soon find themselves constantly in conflict with their teachers' expectations. He says many conclude that "doing what the teacher wants and being good is un-masculine." That negative attitude sets like concrete, he says, pointing to the "stunning reversal" in gender trends at the undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Sax is by no means alone in identifying some kind of academic or existential crisis among boys. But there are many who disagree. In July of last year, David Von Drehle set out in Time magazine to destroy what he called the "myth" of boyhood under siege. He pointed to researchers like Sara Mead, who studied the data and concluded that "[t]he real story is not bad news about boys doing worse; it’s good news about girls doing better." Von Drehle himself looked at the latest childhood welfare indicators from the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics and suggested that his own generation had been the one with the real boyhood crisis. He called his cohort "the leading edge of an epidemic of thugs, dolts and cads." Since then, he argued, those downward trends had been halted or reversed.

Sax was unimpressed. Of course reading test scores will improve "[w]hen you turn elementary school into year-round test-prep," he wrote on his blog, but how many boys will lose interest in reading as a result? (He noted that 12th-grade reading scores have "plummeted.") The dropout rates Von Drehle used were severely underestimated, Sax contended. And as for Von Drehle's "favourite statistic," showing that more boys than ever go straight from high school to college or university, Sax quipped that the "only requirement for a boy to go to college … is a parent whose checks don't bounce." He was more interested, he said, in the troubles young men faced when they got there.

"[A] clever researcher," as Von Drehle wrote, "given a little time, can unearth evidence to support almost any point of view." A more fundamental question for concerned parents might be, is kindergarten really changing that much? But again, it depends on who you ask. Research on childhood literacy has certainly led to more focus on "phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge," says Janette Pelletier, a professor of human development and applied psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. But she says there's no reason those objectives couldn't be met through "oral language activities that are based in stories, rhymes, songs and games." Some teachers "are more didactic and skills-oriented," she says, "whereas others believe strongly in a child-centred, play-based program." But she rejects the idea that Canadian kindergartens have undergone wholesale pedagogical changes in the last 20 years, let alone ones uniquely detrimental to male students.

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