School
Gate: do boys need boys schools?
In early 2007 a 14-year-old boy hit the headlines for being the youngest
person to sail single-handedly across the Atlantic. Michael Perham was
taught to sail by his father, who was also his trainer for the 3,500-mile
solo voyage (and, being a devoted dad, followed a mile or so behind in his
own boat, just in case). On the same day, the Daily Mail carried a
story about another 14-year-old boy famous for something very different. As
he entered his teens, Dale Carter became the youngest child in the UK to be
given an ASBO (antisocial behaviour order) for causing a string of
disturbances in his local neighbourhood, throwing stones and insults,
starting fires and so on. By 14, he’d graduated to theft and joyriding, and
was now on remand in a young offenders’ institution.
His mother told the paper how he’d been a happy, sporty boy during his primary
years, but spiralled down into criminality when he hit his teens.
Both these lads, as high-energy risk-takers moving from childhood to manhood,
would have been in their element on the Stone Age hunting grounds. A
14-year-old male in prehistoric times was an undoubted asset to his tribe.
He was approaching the peak of physical development and fitness and primed
by nature to pursue quests and face challenges. Even though, as a
hot-headed, hot-blooded youth, he still had much to learn and would need the
calming influence of older, wiser hunters, this was clearly the time to
initiate him into the world of men.
Ten millennia later, in a culture that no longer acknowledges the world of men
(as in any way distinct from the world of women), our systems don’t take
account of the long — and extremely consistent — human tradition for
channelling boys’ energy during the turbulent teenage years. Boys on the
verge of manhood today are caged in school, treated like children and
expected to prove themselves by sitting at a desk pushing pens around on
paper. Until 2009, 14 was the age when English school pupils sat a
pettyfogging test known as the Key Stage 3 SAT, which checked how far they’d
progressed since the Key Stage 2 SAT three years earlier. Like all the SATs,
this was primarily an exercise in teacher accountability — certainly not a
meaningful or motivating task for a full-blooded, testosterone-driven male.
If a boy has been well brought up and well educated, and if he’s lucky enough
to have parents and/or teachers catering for his personal needs and
interests, then like Michael Perham he’ll probably be well supported in
steering through the storms of adolescence. But if his teachers are
preoccupied with their own accountability and the other responsible adults
in his life leave him to make his own way in a world of ever-cool market
forces, he may, like Dale Carter, drift into “bad company” . . . This leaves
adults with an eternal quest of their own. How do we help boys channel this
surge of male energy productively in the overheated, overcrowded, supposedly
“unisex” culture that they inhabit today?
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a growing number of working-class
boys were struggling to contain their adolescent demons in an industrial
landscape, with little access to sporting or outdoor pursuits. Concerned
adults devised new systems to draw them into organised teams. First came the
Boys’ Brigade, offering fellowship and discipline through brass bands and
boxing.
Baden-Powell devised the scouting movement, with its emphasis on the ancient
male skills of living off the land and campfire camaraderie.
And there were the Army, air and sea cadet forces, teaching military skills,
including the use of weapons.
Then came two devastating world wars, and the invention of weapons of mass
destruction.
In the flickering light of countless newsreels, the trappings of systemised
masculinity suddenly lost their appeal. The postwar recognition of man’s
inhumanity to man — and of his newfound potential to annihilate the species
— spurred a reaction against masculinity in general. It was widely agreed
that male aggression must be reined in before it destroyed the whole human
race. Feminist thinkers (female and male) went farther, claiming that male
culture as a whole was at fault, and every aspect of “patriarchy” should be
questioned.
Postwar freedom has involved the rejection of traditional male values. Those
newsreel memories meant many people now view uniforms, marching, flags and
salutes with deep suspicion, so uniformed organisations for boys have fallen
out of favour — most are kept afloat only by their preteen membership. And
as feminist views spread via the schools and universities, all-male clubs
and other organisations were condemned as sexist. There was also a
widespread collapse of self-confidence among men about their traditional
strengths, especially in terms of raising boys. In a secular, sexually
equal, anti-militaristic society, the ideals men urged boys to strive for —
such as “disciplined manhood” or a “code of honour” — now sound faintly
ridiculous. Feminist scorn for patriarchal values has transformed noble
aspirations into a bad joke . . .
The very idea of extracurricular “discipline” became laughable in an age of
freedom, and as the century wore on the thought of older men helping
adolescent boys to channel their male energy began to seem quite suspect.
Young people wanted to do things their way, and they had no shortage of
support from media and marketers, who recognised the economic potential of
the age group. It was marketing men who devised the unisex word “teenager”,
and helped to drive the growth of youth culture, defined by music and
fashion, quite distinct from the adult world.
Half a century of abandoning young people to the mercy of the market has not
turned out well. There are problems with teenage misbehaviour across the
developed world, but it’s particularly bad in the US and UK, where
consumerism is particularly aggressive, and the influence of the family in
many teenagers’ lives has been almost completely eroded. According to a
recent report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, many young people
are now “on the verge of mental breakdown, at risk from antisocial
behaviour, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse”. In inner cities, peer
pressure has resulted in a violent gang culture. Attempts to lure youngsters
off the streets into unstructured youth clubs have proved worse than
useless.
The essential element during the transition from boy to man, as at all stages
in a boy’s life, is the attention of other human beings. Human role models
are important from the moment of birth, as parents unconsciously provide
examples of social behaviour, language and life skills. And boys need the
consistent presence of a father figure, providing examples of acceptable
male behaviour as they grow up. But as boys enter their teens, there may be
tensions between father and son — hence the recognition across all times and
cultures that adolescent boys need to move beyond the family and spend time
learning from other men. Perhaps the most significant difference between the
lives of adolescent boys in the past and teenage boys today is the company
they keep. Until the second half of the 20th century, boys over the age of
about 14 lived and worked with men.
The two most widely respected international authorities on raising boys, Steve
Biddulph in Australia and Michael Gurian in the US, both firmly recommend
that families find a male “mentor” — not the father — when their sons enter
the teenage years.
Many successful recent educational research projects have involved “mentoring”
schemes, where male teachers or older students counsel boys with educational
or behavioural difficulties.
But on the whole, school today isn’t the best place for a boy to find a suitable
mentor. Apart from anything else, the majority of secondary teachers now are
women. While boys growing up in a sexually equal world benefit from mixing
with and learning from women as well as men, female teachers — for obvious
reasons — can never act as male role models. Even male teachers seldom have
the opportunity for the sort of personal relationship with pupils that
characterises the relationship between master and apprentice.
Sadly, in a society low on trust and high on risk aversion, I can’t imagine
many British men being prepared to volunteer as a role model. Our society’s
growing “fear of boys” means that most older citizens now steer clear of
youngsters. According to the Good Childhood Inquiry, the British are more
wary of children and young people than any country in Europe. This fear runs
alongside another distinctly unhealthy and widespread “fear of men”. A
combination of feminist rhetoric and media obsession with paedophilia has
turned every man into a potential child molester. In the words of one male
interviewee, who gave up running an athletic club: “People think you’re a
weirdo if you want to hang about with boys.” Indeed they do, to the extent
that adults must now be cleared by the Criminal Records Bureau before even
spending time in the same room as children.
So, apart from frazzled teachers, the only adult male role models currently
available to many 21st-century boys are the ones they meet on screen.
Decency and responsible behaviour aren’t likely to be on show here, since
these characteristics don’t draw in the punters. Instead young viewers meet
male celebrities illustrating the joys of narcissism and excess, actors
modelling the full range of male anger, bullying and violence, and reality
TV performers plumbing the depths of human misbehaviour. If they turn to a
sports channel they won’t find many lessons about sportsmanship: today’s
high-stakes commercialised sport is concerned mainly with ruthless
self-interest and winning at any cost (professional fouls,
performanceenhancing drugs, bribes, bungs and corruption).
As for male politicians and other figures in news programmes, they’re far less
likely to be in the public eye for acts of heroism than for dishonourable
conduct of some sort or exploitation of power.
It’s a strange way for a society to prepare its young men for manhood —
depriving them of rights and status; surrounding them with temptations and
restrictions; separating them from the daily influence of older, wiser men;
leaving them to the mercy of their peer group; and exposing them on a daily
basis to all the worst excesses of human frailty . . .
We haven’t even mentioned the topic usually uppermost in the minds of
hot-blooded young males: sex. Here too, 21st-century boys (and girls) have
been largely cast adrift by the real-life adults in their lives.
The seismic changes in gender roles at the end of the last century took men
and women into uncharted waters, and many 21st-century adults are still
struggling, often painfully, to steer their own way through the flood . . .
Twentieth-century feminist sneers at men’s protective behaviour towards women
(including condemnations for opening doors, carrying bags and so on) were
more than a graceless rejection of good manners. They were dismissing honour
as stupidity, downgrading attempts “to do the right thing” as old-fashioned
claptrap, and writing off altruism as pointless human waste. Sisters may
indeed be perfectly capable of doing it for themselves, but their
breathtaking lack of grace has left the current generation of young men with
no reason to behave honourably to women.
For the sake of the next generation, it really is time to get over this fret
about gender. Admitting that boys still need mothers, fathers and male
mentors is not a denial of sexual equality. It’s a recognition that men and
women bring different strengths to the enterprise of raising their young.
The achievement of sexual equality shouldn’t make acting like a competent
adult any more difficult than it ever was — 21st-century men and women are
still human beings with the DNA that makes them “good enough” to take on
their part of the task. But before they can get down to work and sort out
the mess, men have to rise above the graceless feminist scorn and cynical
commercialism that have made them doubt their better nature. And women have
to recognise that, in terms of raising boys, there are some things sisters
just can’t do.
© Sue Palmer 2009
21st Century Boys by Sue Palmer, to be published by Orion Books on
Thursday at £14.99. To order it for £13.49 inc p&p call 0845
2712134 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
