Disturbances of Difference: Lessons from a Boys’ School

Several decades into the postmodern moment, men wrestle with the gendered nature of our lives. First there were Books about Men (Carrigan, Connell & Lee, 1985), an outpouring of polemic and scholarship re-imagining men’s lives in a post-feminist world. More recently boys have been a subject of preoccupation, publishers tripping over each other to produce the male Mary Pipher (1994). Where Kimmel (1996)) detailed the historic bounds on masculine possibility and Gilmore (1990) the cultural, Connell (1998) has suggested that it is an emerging world gender order which lies behind the new focus on boys’ lives. How boyhood is represented - in research, media and institutions - is in contest and up for grabs.

An Historic Turn at a Traditional School

At The Haverford School, an independent school for boys aged 4-18 in Philadelphia’s suburbs, a century of commitment to educating boys was re-leveraged during a period of enrollment decline into a strategic decision to become "both a laboratory for providing the best practices for the education of boys and a beacon whose leadership in teaching them will be a model for other schools" (The Haverford School, 1993). Confronted with market research indicating that many families had reservations about single sex schools for boys, the school seized its own history and the historic opening, recommitting to boys and their education. An aggressive campaign to reach out as a boys’ school was launched - to the broad community of less privileged boys in and around Philadelphia and to the world interested in educating boys. As part of the new campaign, the Board of Trustees encouraged the school to create an "On Behalf of Boys" Project, intended to serve as a center for research, discussion, self-reflection, and advocacy. Inviting national gender scholars onto a Research Advisory Board, conducting a survey of the past 30 years’ graduates, organizing symposia for parents on raising sons, and supporting teacher research as a means to self-renewal were some of the project’s early moves.

Lessons about change and its limits came quickly. The survey of alumni provoked a minor storm of reaction. Many of the men perceived a foreign tone to the research instrument; one respondent scrawled in the margin, "This question must have been written by a woman!" There was outrage that the school would ask graduates questions, for example, about sexuality and relationships with women. Such matters had never been discussed publicly before, and there were many who felt strongly that the school should remain as it had always been.

But there were also many who responded to the survey and to the project with hope that "at last" the school’s gender regime might be opening up. One man, 49 years old, wrote:

"My own experience at Haverford started out very badly…I'd been pulled from the comfortable womb of a coed public school where I seemed to do well enough, socially and academically, without much effort, and thrown into the totally uncaring, all-male, stiff-upper-lip, cold-showers-in-the-morning, violent, almost brutal world of the British upper-class public school. As a 12 year old, I was dismal at sports and Haverford required us to do sports. My parents - mostly my mother - contributed to the misery by becoming verbally abusive every time I did poorly or admitted weakness or lack of comprehension. Happily, the misery described above lasted only a year, although bits and pieces of it came back to haunt me every time I failed to "measure up" in one way or another. By and large, with the development of friendships among peers and mentor-type relationships with a rare and revered handful of excellent teachers and coaches, Haverford became a very comfortable world in which to live. I remember the deep satisfaction of walking into classes knowing I was prepared for anything they could throw at me. At the end of it all, I graduated a "winner" and that gives the Haverford experience a nice, rosy hue in memory—for the most part. I am proud of this project that my dear old school has taken on. If it results in insights that will relieve just a little of the suffering of some future bewildered 12 year old wondering why they are making him play football, it will have been worth many times its cost."

As the school moved to fulfill the call of its strategic plan with new emphasis on recruitment and outreach to new student populations, there were further lessons. Growing numbers of graduates were returning to their families and to the school with stories that they found a much broader racial, economic, and cultural diversity after high school than they had been prepared for. This 26 year old, for example, commented on his college experience: " My freshman hall looked like the United Nations. And you compare that to this school which is as milky white as you can get, your eyes are opened to a lot of things once you leave this school."

These graduate stories and the school’s market surveys and experiences with a new generation of parents shopping for their sons’ futures created a powerful pressure on the school. New admissions practices emphasized the school’s intent to welcome a wide variety of students from non-traditional backgrounds. As financial aid rose beyond the million dollar mark, new boys were attracted to the school, in numbers and scope well beyond the traditional pool.

How this elite school wrestled with the unintended effects of introducing boys from new backgrounds into what had always been a remarkably predictable experience is the story of this research. It is a cautionary tale about the potency of difference and about pitfalls which can occur when communities innocently launch themselves on a more democratic trajectory. It is also, I hope, a tale about possibilities which can flow from a careful effort to attend to the rich, irrepressible and vivacious quality of children’s imaginations for the spaces they inhabit.

New Boys, Old Rules

In the throes of its diversity fervor, the school was thrown into an unexpected crisis when a group of boys from blue collar families, many recruited by coaches to enter the 9th grade, collectively refused to cooperate with cherished school traditions. Powerful antagonisms developed between old and new groups of students in the upper school. Teachers were at a loss to deal with this surly, defiant gang of blue-collar students - the "gauntlet", they were called - and parents of "Lifers" (more affluent families who had attended the school since elementary school) complained mightily. The headmaster responded to clamors for help by commissioning a Diversity Research Project, consistent with the school’s new commitment to research. Groups of students from various backgrounds - blue collar, Asian, African-American, Jewish, "Lifers," "Recruits" (black and white students who enter the school in 9th grade) - were interviewed in focus groups. Four years later, some of the boys who had been freshmen were re-interviewed just before they graduated.

Immediately, the interviews revealed an aspect of boys’ lives that had seen little exposure: school life at the ground level was a churning sea of competing masculine identities. The boys in the focus groups were stunningly aware of their contrasting and often conflicting notions of manhood, turning on axes of class, race, religion, and other differences. Lifers, for example, spoke at length about classmates "whose families have economic struggles." They called this group of boys "Recruits," promoting the stereotype that they had been brought to the school simply to fill out athletic teams. They marked the moral superiority of their own approach to work and achievement by contrasting it with the other group, distinguishing themselves from the "kids from poor backgrounds who make little effort:" "They’re angry tough guys with different morals and no regard for the rules. With their spitballs, snowballs, food fights, they intend to be malicious."

For their part, on the other side of this conflict the recruits were also quite conscious of their identities. Previously unnoticed differences—where they lived, how they talked and dressed, what cars they drove, or didn't, and what work their parents did - became definitive of them: "People look at you as if you were an alien. There’s lots of snide looks as if to suggest, ‘Get out of here’. We feel like Blacks must feel walking through a White neighborhood." They responded defensively, marking difference as well, especially in terms of their masculinities. Referring to the "lifers", they commented: "In grade school, when we would have a sissy in our class, we were the majority. Here its just the reverse. The sissies are in the majority". "Never seen anybody run away from a fight before." "We’ve been brought up not to rat on each other; they’re brought up to kiss ass and tell on others."

Schools’ masculinity regimes, Connell (1996) asserts, are typically characterized by hierarchy and hegemony. Boys’ collective identities - their masculinity politics - yield social positions in relation to each other. For example, in his English school, Mac An Ghaill (1994) found several classic identities - Macho Lads, Academic Achievers, New Enterprisers, Real Englishmen - which struggled among themselves for dominance and control in the school. Boys did not choose among such identities casually. Their choice of identity, driven by biography, culture, and opportunity, represented hope for social position within a hierarchical order. How they expressed themselves, whom they associated with, how they dressed - these and the many other facets of public gender identities were strategies for claiming the various rewards and other resources of attention and recognition in the school.

In this elite school, high-minded changes in admissions policy had the unanticipated consequence of inducing a new competition among groups of boys for coming out "on top" in the school’s distribution system. While the administrators and faculty of the school may not have understood what all the turmoil and unhappiness—the confusing failure of gratitude—was about, there was considerable clarity among the newer groups of boys and their families. Financial aid, athletic attention, and greater numbers notwithstanding, the school had invited these boys into their community but had not otherwise opened itself up to them. The deck, in the eyes of the recruits, remained stacked in favor of the traditionally privileged identities. Apart from their physical inclusion, the school expected little else to change in its curriculum and practice.

The Diversity Research Project’s focus groups revealed a serious contest, vicious and at times physical. There was threat, fighting, name-calling, exclusion, and jostling for attention. Many people were upset and stumped. Yet as we learned in our interviews, amidst all of this noise and heat Lifers registered little feeling of displacement. They continued to feel generally endorsed by the school’s values and norms and enjoyed a sense of entitlement and ownership. They trusted that the school would not cede their place nor fundamentally alter its hallowed space. As the Diversity Research Project reported: "There was consensus among lifers that they felt at home here and looked forward to coming back at the end of summer and seeing old faces" (Bergh, Reichert, MacMullen " MacMullen, 1993). These boys emerged from their years at school with an identity like that calmly and confidently described by one lifer:

"Cocky, confident, almost arrogant. Sort of elitist in a way. People who can and do excel. Self-important people. And that’s because, in our own minds, we are the best."

Recruits, in contrast, were ever-conscious of being overlooked and under-valued, on foreign turf. In their focus group comments, these boys were often quite bitter at the ways they felt disadvantaged in the school, that they were always being evaluated in areas of comparative weakness. They felt left out of the school’s narrow band for valuing boys by the fact that the achievements that conferred status and yielded appreciation were not generally their strong suits. For example, with respect to the school’s formal reward and recognition structures—grades, honor societies, awards, college admissions—they commented: "Yeah, there’s awards. It’s so obvious who’s going to get them. You can predict it. I could put $10 on who is going to get the next award, and I'd win."

Far from being grateful for their educational opportunity, these boys felt invited to dinner but denied a full place at the table. Children’s hunger for social validation - for recognition (Mann, 1994) - left them vulnerable to feelings of deprivation as they participated in a public life "handicapped" by background and culture. Schools, we appreciated anew, provide children with real, material rewards around which they develop identities. Yet they do not do this idly or incidentally. In her study of a comprehensive high school in New York City, Fine (1991) observed how deliberate schools can be in this regard, expending their capital, lavishing resources in certain directions, to insure desired outcomes. The direction in which resources were spent was quite precious in her school, swaddled in rhetoric, custom, and explication. Such elaborate rituals of public assertion, in fact, that she sought for a metaphor to convey their worshipful quality: "This high school, perhaps like other comprehensive high schools, was occupied and organized by a series of what I consider ‘fetishes’ which effectively order the experiences, beliefs, rituals and behaviors known as public schooling"(p. 180).

Rhetoric about "excellence" invites comparison, suggesting such a precious discourse in the lives of boys - with its own hidden underside. Organizing boys into hierarchies of merit by measuring and ranking particular behaviors succeeds primarily in privileging such behaviors - and the social experiences which produce them - and discounting others. In Fine’s study, absent or hidden in the elaborate ritual of attending to the "responsible few" students who did not drop out was the school’s failure with the rest of the students in its care. Similarly, in this boys’ school the lavish attention to the boys at the top obscured the experience of the other boys, which is thereby deemed irrelevant. Institutional fetishes set the parameters of discourse: of what can be acknowledged, puzzled over and cared about, and of what must be hidden.

Experiences with grades were a case in point. Being evaluated by teachers seemed a sore subject for many of the boys who shared the perception, across class and race lines, that teachers’ often "pegged" boys for style and fluency of written expression and graded thereafter with abiding prejudice. One boy put it this way: "Sometimes its just reputation. I know one kid who can write anything. He could write his name backwards for a paper and he would still get an "A-" and it’s not because he was writing good papers, it’s because he is so and so and he is going to get that grade no matter what".

Feelings of arbitrariness and inequity were reported by many boys in our study. But it was the recruits who felt particularly excluded by the warp and bias of the excellence discourse. One of the recruits, a young man who was ultimately selected "Key Man" for his academic accomplishments, related stories of encountering abiding prejudice during his years at school:

"It’s that kind of feeling that people were sort of, that you are expected to fail. At one of my Mom’s parent teacher conferences, with one of my teachers, I was doing really well and the guy, when it came out that I wasn’t a Haverford student my whole life, he goes like, "Wow, I can’t believe that your son comes from some other…", I don’t remember the quotation but it was, like, he was astonished that someone was doing well who came from another background."

Coming to the school community with considerable strengths which were relevant to their experience - strengths of character, intelligence, judgment, and wisdom, of family connections and a capacity for love, of insight into the human condition - boys such as this one found little interest in, validation for - what Gilligan (1993) terms "resonance" with - what they had learned and achieved. Their voice, mirrored back to them in grades and critical comments about their writing, needed "refinement." The fetish of excellence succeeded primarily in banishing discussion of other ways of valuing men, of other meanings to a man’s life, from open consideration in the public life of the school community.

And banished also were the consequences for all of those boys who learn that their existences will be dominated by a pressured competition to look and act in very particular ways under the regime of such a precious and lavish attention to particular qualities. Lifers as well as recruits found themselves jammed through a narrow passage to manhood, forced to make sacrifices to gain the privileges conferred by the school. A lifer, asked to look back on his experience within the school culture, described his years in this way:

"Like I was scared, very scared, about everything. I didn’t really know what was going on, what I should be doing, what was expected, how aggressive you should be, how hard you should work, who you should be talking to, even."

The crucible through which boys had to pass deployed a wide variety of pressuring and sanctioning practices to produce preferred identities. As we realized the indifferent and impersonal, systemic nature of this practice, it occurred to us that the struggle underlying the lifer/recruit tension was not merely over tradition or even maintenance of preferential status but, more importantly, over the soul of the social space that was this boys’ school, for its impact on the generations of men yet to come into it, over whether the school would merely reproduce privileged men or whether it might assist boys to imagine new possibilities for being male.

Identities and Polarities

"You’ve got to leave some things at home to make it here. If you come to this school and bring the baggage of your background, you’ll likely meet with more failure than success. "This comment came during the Diversity Research Project from a lifer who happened to be Jewish, a young man for whom religious calendar and rituals informed family life. He was a popular young man and generally successful. When questioned about how much his schoolmates knew of his religious practice, he answered that he had told almost no one. Matters such as these, he explained, matters of family or culture, matters of the heart, had no place in the public life of this private school.

All of the recruits and lifers we interviewed, it turned out, had come to accept that school life was not a place for self-disclosure about such aspects of their lives or experiences. They accepted that this was the price they and their parents had paid for the possibilities offered by the school. Across the focus groups, boys from very different experiences yielded to the mandate that they dissociate personal from public, hiding everything but what might enhance their position and standing.

This finding was the strongest of our study. The display of personal differences was prohibited in the school’s community life. Differences were presumed deficient. They became secrets. All boys we met strove to project a public self which reflected the dominant ideal. Yet we also noticed from the focus groups that some boys had no chance to follow the advice of this Jewish Lifer, to submerge parts of themselves, for the simple fact that their differences from this ideal were too obvious, too much a matter of skin color, clothing, or manners, to hide. Some, for reasons that were perhaps even more idiosyncratic, simply could not make the choice to hide. This default left these boys particularly vulnerable, without common retreat.

Forced to be visible, their experience was caricatured as "other," unwholesome or unnatural. Among the different focus groups in the Diversity Research Project, none was more subdued than the group of African-American boys. In the report of the DRP:

"Of all the groups with which the task force met, the African-American students seemed least spontaneous. They were generally quiet, mannered, studied, careful and cautious. There was a pronounced lack of emotional expression in their responses. It seemed their reluctance to talk stemmed from the fact that the business of conforming, assimilating and fitting in is so demanding, it’s hard to relax and break loose from (Bergh, Reichert, et al., 1993, p. 3)."

These males, in particular, seemed to be in an extreme position in the politics of the school. Like everyone else, only more, they tried to keep their difference to themselves, huddling with each other at lunch tables or in hallways, passing through the school day unobtrusively. They expected little from the school’s peer culture, attending Haverford for the credential they would be presented upon graduation. And in marked contrast with the White working class group, these African-American boys were not overtly or even consciously angry, rebellious or in contest with the dominant school identities. They stated that they were simply trying to make it through. There were too many examples of boys of color who had not. Life seemed even more precarious, their difference more consequential.

As we noticed this position occupied by African-American boys, we realized that boys’ silence and loss of voice, their dissociative separation of personal from public, had to do with their group identities - and the position these conferred within the hierarchy - as much as with individual experience. Resonance, recognition - in extreme form, simply safety and protection from hazing and humiliation - determined what boys managed to show of themselves. The claims boys would make on the public space of the school for personal expression depended upon social invitation, granted in certain, careful ways to boys from majority groups, withheld or simply absent for boys from outside the center. African-American boys "fit in," with a silence donned as manners, to an unfriendly or indifferent school culture. The presumed "difference" of their identities disappeared behind a veil of assimilation and marginalization. Voice is socially accomplished.

For the less obviously different boys from White, blue-collar families, this process of centering certain identities while marginalizing and exoticizing others produced a heightened consciousness of their group position. In one interview I asked, "What are you a group of?" They answered:

Student 1: "A lot of us, I guess, coming into the school really don’t have the money at all. As compared to what some of the people have here, you know.’

Student 2: "Speaking for myself, I mean, I wasn’t given everything these people out here were given at birth. I think that is the main separation."

Student 3: "I like a lot of these kids. I’m friends with a lot of them. But they don’t have the same concerns like, you want to talk about neighborhoods, I mean, you have to watch yourself sometimes where I live, at night. You have to be careful. Out here you don’t have to worry about anything. I don't feel, like, any animosity towards these people but I just feel, I can see the differences like when I go to people’s houses, some people have maids and stuff like that. I’m like, the maids like live in the kind of neighborhood I live in, you know what I mean? So I feel kind of awkward at their houses sometimes. I think economically is like the biggest, biggest setting, the biggest difference."

Despite whatever personal friendships they may have formed, in the school community they found themselves so distinguished by this othering process, in fact, that the recruits ultimately clung to each other, offering understanding and resonance to themselves. By their senior year, just half of the original recruit group remained. In exit interviews, those who survived acknowledged their dependence upon each other:

Student 1: "I definitely wouldn’t have made it without these two guys here. These two guys were probably the most important ones to me, that helped me through."

Student 2: "It was just understood pretty much, like, that there were four or five of us who are always together and we always just stayed together and associated with ourselves not because we didn’t want to associate with other people but sometimes I didn’t feel like, I never felt like a real part of my class."

And their separation from the Lifers:

"They don't want us around. They want us around when we are teammates and stuff, but for the most part, like, if the people went to, say, a party, I tell you they wouldn't call any of us. It’s like N. said, they just don’t, some of them don’t call. They don’t see what you are doing or who you are."

Boys’ identities, these recruits suggested, are forged in contexts in which social meanings derive from group membership quite independent of any personal agency. Class, in this case, but certainly also race, sexuality, and, in fact, almost any conceivable difference can signify to boys an opportunity to "other" and, thereby,gain some advantage in a competition for recognition. "You are the company you keep," some have said of children’s peer groups (Jacklin, 1989). From the experience of these boys, we might rather say, "you become" - willingly, reactively, somehow - "the company you are presumed to keep.". In social contexts so intent upon excluding and differentiating as a basis for distributing rewards, boys are sorted into identities which reflect who they are thought to be and bear upon who they may become.

The Surging Tide of Difference

Children, the work on behalf of girls has revealed, are both resilient and remarkably sensitive. While schools and communities have labored over the past decade, certainly since the research of Sadker and Sadker (1994) and the AAUW (1992), to ensure fairness and equal access to resources for girls, the common experience in classrooms—of girls deferring to assertive boys, of teachers recognizing boys more readily, of girls following curricular pathways which track them toward the humanities and domestic arts and away from math and the sciences—suggests that fairness and access is as much psychological as structural. Or better, it teaches that the spaces relevant to children’s sense of imagination, identity and possibility are relational and psychological as much as they are concrete and material. Spaces are under-girded, configured, and circumscribed by practice, often unconsciously serving power and historic privilege, and by the meanings it enables and excludes.

We speak of the "co-construction of gender," an interplay between the overt and hidden curricula of our institutions and the choices of children. Children may do a variety of things with the gender "offers" available to them: they may collude with them, resist them, conform their lives to them (Connell, 1996). With respect to girls, works such as that of Pipher (1994), Brown and Gilligan (1992), and Fine (1988) have drawn our attention to the limits we impose on girls’ choice by the force of our systems of recognition and regard. Our work suggests the constraints imposed on boys’ freedom by the practice and politics of difference in their institutions and social spaces. Finding themselves in systems of recognition which are hierarchical and which pressure them to prefer certain kinds of masculinities and to hide, forswear, and even war with others, instead of learning that uniqueness is a rich and wonderful condition of being human, boys learn that being different can make or break you. Boys develop such views in schools in which they never know what may be cause for victimization. Their harshness toward each other is entirely arbitrary and unpredictable on an individual basis. What boys learn to depend on is that position in the hierarchical system of their school community is what confers relative safety. Who am I connected to and what power do we have? Who has clearance to show what? How much dare I risk to be myself?

Schools which hope to enable boys to imagine and live their own lives must assume more responsibility for the way they "do" difference. They must become more self-conscious, more sensitive to the power of groups and identities to occupy a space, must develop pedagogy and curricula which can de-center the narrow hegemony of exclusive identities. Fine, Weis, & Powell (1997) describe this as the work of building "communities of difference," and everywhere schools now wrestle with the task of re-creating a public life which invites the many selves floating through children’s gender practice into the public eye.

At The Haverford School, of the original group of recruits interviewed, half remained 4 years later to graduate. In their exit interviews, while optimistic about the futures they had earned with their diploma, these boys also voiced regret at the compromises they had been forced to make to succeed at the school. In exchange for an educational class upgrade, for opportunities and privileges unavailable to their parents, these boys felt they had been forced to collude with a system which they found fundamentally unfair. Their embrace of the school, accordingly, was half-hearted and ambivalent. In fact, the community’s polarizing attention to the difference of their experience reaffirmed their connections to these values and ideals. As one graduating recruit explained:

"I don’t think any of us lost our identity, of who we are and where we came from, at all. I mean, I can see that in these two right here. They haven’t lost where they came from. From the neighborhood, from the family. There is a way they keep you at home. They didn’t change like some kids who pretend to be who they are not. A lot of kids do that to fit into the crowd. But I think among us all we have made it clear that we are not going to do that and who we are is who we are and if they don’t like that they can stuff it."

Supporting each other, validating their experience not just of the school but of the neighborhoods and families which had sent them out as emissaries, these boys achieved the difficult task of referencing their worth by maintaining alternative, counter-hegemonic standards, supporting each other to do so.

Their success revealed the limits of their recruitment to the school’s predominant masculine identity and the inherent fragility of the school’s reproductive project in this historic time. As schools respond to a postmodern surge of inclusion and diversity ideas, the assured reproduction of predictable identities and relations becomes more and more problematic. It seems harder to recruit boys to the narrow ways which had predominated before.

Even more hopefully, these boys hinted at actively imagined alternatives to the system of recognition and the gender, race and class hierarchies it established, revealing also the disruptive force their different experiences, and the imaginations borne within, held for the school community:

"I think one problem is that this school gives a lot of academic awards and prizes to the kids who excel at the academics, you know, because the way the kids are getting real high SAT grades and stuff like that. When I think there should be more emphasis, a lot of times, on, on kids who put a lot more effort, you know, and do within the best of their ability. ’You did a good job‘. ’You got through‘."

Reflecting a yearning for fairness, for a school in which recognition might be based more broadly, more inclusively, in ways which acknowledged, embraced and accommodated difference, these young men’s political vision had been sharpened. Recruited to fit into a system which prided itself on producing men with a focused and restrictive sense of masculinity, enduring years of a competitive crucible which excluded those who could not yield, these boys were pragmatic, focused on getting where they wanted to go, and yet were also able to withhold some part of themselves from the bribes and bullying of the school culture. They had grown but not been remade. If anything, their experience had confirmed their faith in the worth of their fathers and families. They had come close to power identities, been invited to assimilate them, and yet had treasured something which did not offer them much reward in the school community.

In recent work to update this Diversity Research Project, a new group of freshmen recruits were interviewed. From their comments, we learned that the school had indeed been moved by these earlier struggles, that the recruits had not only stood their ground but had gained in the battle for recognition, inclusion and change, to the point, in fact, where student identities were no longer crudely dichotomized into "Recruits" and "Lifers." Leveling programs such as weekend outdoor challenge retreats had been added to the school’s standard curriculum for all freshmen. Faculty had been hired and advanced expressly to offer boys from backgrounds new to the school models of success more likely to mirror their own experience. Support services for boys from many different educational backgrounds and learning styles grew tremendously, creating a new logic for more individualized pedagogy. Overall, boys who might just a few years earlier have thought of themselves as recruits now laid claim to the resources and support of the school, even emboldened enough to request of the school that it "be partial to us" as it takes account of the non-level playing field of academic preparation.

The findings from this study may encourage those who wonder how boys will stand up to pressures for a more equitable distribution of resources, how they will deal with their de-centering in an era of postmodern justice and multiculturalism. We found boys here who valued something in addition to getting ahead: belonging and a sense of loyalty seemed to lie behind their layered participation in the school’s community. These blue-collar boys, in particular those who graduated, certainly achieved goals and rewards. Yet, perhaps because of their experiences of exclusion and prejudice, they did not merge themselves fully into the traditional mold. Like the Jewish boy - or the Black boy, the Asian boy, the gay boy - they participated in public life guided by instincts of personal survival and values of integrity. Their participation hinged on axes of flexibility and defiance, a determined decision to define themselves.

References

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