Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

THE WELLESLEY REPORT 179politics? More generally, who would benefit most from the millions beingrequested for the Gender Equity in Education Act? Would it not be thosewho insist that gender equity is our foremost educational problem? Oursystem cannot handle much more pressure from these muddled but determinedwomen with their multistage theories and their metaphors aboutwindows, mirrors, and voices, their workshops, and above all their constantalarms about the state of male-female relations in American society.Which leads us back to what is most wrongheaded about the WellesleyReport: its exploitation of America's very real problem as a nation educationallyat risk. Despite its suggestion that solving the "problem of genderequity" will somehow help us to bridge the gap between American childrenand the educationally superior children of other countries—whatthe education researcher Harold Stevenson aptly calls the "learning gap"—the report never says how. The reason for the omission is obvious: theauthors have no plausible solution to offer.In 1990 the Japanese translated into English the mathematical sectionof their college entrance exam. American mathematicians were startled bywhat they saw. Professor Richard Askey, a mathematician at the Universityof Wisconsin, spoke for many American scientists and mathematicianswhen he said, "The level at which [Japanese] students perform onthese [exams] is just incredible." 67Science magazine recently printed a sample question from the entranceexamination to Tokyo University. To solve it would require a lot of"vertical thinking": "Given a regular pyramid, there is a ball with its centeron the bottom of the pyramid and tangent to all edges. (A regular pyramidhas four isosceles triangles adjoined to a square base.) If each edge of thepyramid base is of length a, find the height of the pyramid and the volumeof the portion it has in common with the ball." 68The Science editors point out that this question is being asked not offuture math and science majors but of Japanese high school students whowere planning to major in the humanities. They noted: "When U.S. mathmajors might trail even lit students in Japan, there's a lot of catching upto do." 69American educators sometimes explain away the discrepancies bypointing out that only the best students in Japan take the test. In 1987,for example, 31 percent of American college-age students took the SAT;in Japan the figure was 14 percent for the Japanese equivalent of the SAT.But even our very best students had a hard time matching the averagescore of the Japanese students. 70Studies by Professor Jerry Becker, ofSouthern Illinois University, and by Floyd Mattheis, of East CarolinaUniversity, tell the same story. Becker reports that the problem is not