Eventually, many of the leaders of the movement to empower girls joined their critics in calling for new research into how to remedy educational and social inequities for boys. In fact, Gilligan launched a three-year study called "The Harvard Project on Women's Psychology, Boy's Development and the Culture of Manhood" in 1995.

By the end of the '90s, a passel of boy-centered books were published. But unlike many of the girl-centered books published earlier in the decade, many of these authors actively disagreed with one another. On one side were old-school feminists and their sympathizers, who believed that boys, like girls before them, were victims of patriarchal definitions of masculinity. These thinkers -- including Gilligan (for whom the learning differences between the sexes are the result of patriarchy, not biology) and, to some extent William Pollack, the author of 1998's "Real Boys" -- see the salvation of boys in reconstructing outmoded notions of masculinity, in much the same way that feminists once agitated to reconstruct society's definitions and expectations of femininity.

Others, like Michael Gurian, author of "The Wonder of Boys" and the just-released "The Wonder of Girls," argue that boys and girls learn in fundamentally different ways, and that academic success and personal happiness for children of both genders can be achieved only by returning to traditional notions of sex and gender. Hoff Sommers adds, in "The War Against Boys," that boys have been the victims of feminists like Gilligan (and to some extent, boy advocates like Pollack), whose outmoded disdain for patriarchy and capitalism have "pathologized" what she considers to be normal masculinity.

Scholars like Gurian, Gilligan, Hoff Sommers and Pollack also disagree about who, if anyone, is to blame for boys' poor academic performance: Were boys actually villainized in the process of empowering girls? Are gender differences hard-wired? If so, how does one explain the extraordinary progress of girls in math, science and higher education -- areas where they are supposedly destined to show weakness?

Without agreement on the origins of the crisis, these scholars also cannot agree on how to deal with the crisis. Once again, the debate questions whether gender differences in learning are deeply ingrained or sheer mythology. Some suggest that reading curricula be more "masculine" in order to engage boys; others say that boys must be encouraged to embrace their "feminine" side. There are even advocates who call for a return to single-sex education, a debate that should sound familiar to anyone who followed the girls education debate.

It used to be accepted wisdom that boys and girls learned differently: Boys were thought to be better at spatial reasoning, abstract concepts and deductive reasoning, while girls had an easier time with concrete detail, intuition and evaluation, and inductive reasoning.

Researchers like Hoff Sommers tend to agree with the theory that gender differences that affect learning are hard-wired and should be considered in dealing with the learning delays of boys. She maintains, for instance, that reading preferences are gender specific, and that the current English curriculum favors the reading tastes of girls, an inequity that has led to the lower scores of boys in reading literacy.

"Our English classes are strongly feminized, even in boys schools," says Hoff Sommers. "We want literature to make boys more sensitive. But I'm not sure that we need to invest in literature as a form of therapy."

She points out that a majority of English teachers still assign fiction in the classroom, while she believes that boys prefer nonfiction. (In the PISA study, girls and boys were asked to self-report on the kind of reading materials they preferred. Boys reported reading more comic books, Web pages and newspapers, while girls read more novels.)

"Boys love adventure stories with male heroes," says Hoff Sommers. "Many would love books by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Clancy. Since they are so far behind in reading, why not give them texts they enjoy? Some teachers are promoting political correctness at the expense of the basic literacy of their male students.

"My own son had to struggle through Amy Tan's 'Joy Luck Club' when he was in the 10th grade," she adds. "It has some attractive features, but it is full of annoying psychobabble about women and their self-esteem struggles. He disliked it. If teachers are going to assign books in popular literature, they should consider the needs and interests of boys."

Another advocate of "guy lit" is Jon Scieszka, author of such children's books as "Stinky Cheese Man" and founder of Guys Read, a nonprofit literacy program for boys. On his Web site, Scieszka writes, "There are literacy programs for adults, for students of English as a second language, for women, and for prison inmates. There are no literacy programs for boys."

Scieszka goes on to recommend what he considers to be "guy books." His choices for elementary school boys include David Macaulay, the author of the "How Things Work" series, classic authors of the strange, like Roald Dahl and Daniel Pinkwater, and Lemony Snicket, author of the wildly popular new series "A Series of Unfortunate Events." Teenage boys are advised to read Alan Moore, the author of popular literary graphic novels like "From Hell" and "Watchman"; while adult men get, of course, Gurian and William Pollack. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Scieszka lamented the popularity with English teachers of books like "Little House on the Prairie," which he says boys find boring.

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