A New Look at Boys: Extending the Conversation about Gender and Justice

A special issue of a scholarly journal devoted to youth perspectives on violence offered a telling rationale for the edition: since generational difference can skew the adult perspective on the experiences of children, looking at social phenomena like community violence from the perspective of the young people it affects can shed light in new and important ways. This observation—about the common absence of children’s perspectives from theory and research on their lives—seems particularly relevant to education and schooling. When it comes to identity formation, for example, we know that how boys and girls imagine themselves—who am I and who can I be?— is strongly shaped by looking-glass images reflected to them within schools. But who controls these images and the hidden curricula that generate them? How do students understand them, engage with them? How consciously can schools manage their impact in positive ways? To answer such questions requires that we look at the level of students’ actual experience.

With regard to girls, we have learned how to recognize the effects of our assumptions and biased preconceptions in science and math classrooms, in athletics, and in social interaction. Greater awareness has meant greater control over the expectations and images we offer girls in our schools and, ultimately, greatly enhanced experiences for them. Though not nearly complete, the "revolution" in girls’ education over the past several decades represents a huge advancement in children’s rights and social ethics.

During the past several years, we have seen a host of findings pointing out that boys struggle in a number of important areas and that these struggles are related to the narrowly defined gender opportunities available to boys within schools, communities, and families. Health outcomes, mental health outcomes, and educational outcomes, taken together, paint a picture of male development compromised by violence, insufficient and inappropriate nurturing, and a largely unexamined curriculum that subjects boys to Darwinian, winner-takes-all hierarchies. Compounding these outcomes, race and class dynamics result in a disproportionate number of poorer white boys and boys of color at the bottom of such hierarchies.

There has been a great deal of controversy about the nature of these outcomes and the gender opportunities they stem from. Some have argued that because boys co-construct their identities and make compromising choices based on their privilege relative to girls, such outcomes are the "costs of patriarchy." Others portray boys as victims of an overarching code or culture, depicting a kind of psychological determinism that allows boys little room to flourish or make healthy choices. Despite the controversy among these and other theories, few argue about the negative dimensions of the outcomes.

Ideally, this is where boys’ perspectives could help. Why do so many boys struggle with substance abuse, for example? Or with other risky behaviors? Or with learning, language arts, or achievement motivation? We still have very little sense of what boys themselves would have to say about these phenomena. We are still, despite all the press of the last several years, at a very early stage of discovering a "grounded theory" of boys’ development and education. We have largely missed the boys themselves as we have jockeyed over the political meaning of their problems.

The Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives

At the Haverford School (Pennsylvania), following a strategic planning process in which the school recommitted itself to understanding the needs of boys, a program called "On Behalf of Boys" was launched. Initial steps included inviting national scholars onto a Research Advisory Board, conducting a survey of the past 30 years’ graduates, and holding symposia for parents on raising sons. The program also focused on boys’ peer support and on their relationships with girls. Spotty, fraught with projection and misunderstanding, the pursuit of this exploration nonetheless helped the school to rethink its role in preparing boys for manhood.

Reflected in these efforts was an ever-growing willingness on the part of the school to recognize boys’ non-academic needs. "Preparing boys for life" was a consensual goal that emerged from a new strategic planning process. In 2001, the school joined together with four other independent schools—coeducational, coordinate, boarding, day—that had similar aspirations to understand and to serve boys better. Together they created a new consortium, the Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. The mission of the new center is "to conduct research, encourage public discussion, and advocate on behalf of boys. Using research tools that give voice to boys’ lived experiences, the center will strive to promote the widest sense of possibility and greatest hope for integrity in boys’ lives."

Still quite young, the center has succeeded in mobilizing each member school to ask questions regarding its boys, create teacher-initiated and teacher-led research projects to explore these questions, and come together annually with teams from other schools to share findings. The hope is to create a community of inquiry in which different schools, and their attendant perspectives, can inform each other about work with boys. The point, of course, is not research in any detached or objective sense. Rather, the premise of these research projects is that teachers and schools themselves stand the best chance of improving the lives of boys within their communities.

Roundtable Discussions

Although the center publishes original research, has created a website to serve as a forum for ideas about boys’ lives, and plans additional opportunities for schools to join with each other for conversation about boys’ education, gathering teams of teacher researchers from member schools for presentations and conversation remains central to its efforts. The recent roundtable event, held in Philadelphia, featured a pre-roundtable dinner talk by Richard Hawley, headmaster of University School (Ohio), on the subject of boys at risk. Hawley’s talk, "Icarus in our Midst," based on his 35 years working with boys in school, focused on his concern with boys tuning out, and living lives "on the edge." Hawley offered a memorable, and, at times, disturbing meditation on the "deep structure" of boyhood. Borrowing from Jungian psychology the notion of "purere spirit," Hawley described boys in a way that all recognized, laughed at, and, for those who are males themselves, remembered. For boys encountering the pressures and performative expectations of adolescence, Hawley described a number of alternative routes available they can take to negotiate their developmental passage. He discussed the "imposture" of many males who surrender their spirits to the oppressive requirements of schools and families to conform, perform, and serve. "The educated adolescent," he asserted, "is systematically schooled to lose heart." He also described the boys who resist passage into adolescent responsibilities, preferring the world of video games, cartoons, and the unending party. Drawing on the myth of Icarus, Hawley gave new meaning to the role of Daedalus, his failures with his son, and the import of his injunction that Icarus must fly "the middle course."

The next morning’s session focused on issues related to boys’ school achievement. A team from The Shipley School (Pennsylvania) offered their summary of a research process which has included focus groups with students and faculty, individual interviews with students, a survey and a review of key archival records such as senior citations, grades, and test scores. Following this were shorter presentations by two other schools whose projects are in earlier stages. The team from Saint Paul’s School (New Hampshire), headed by Academic Dean Rodney DeJarnett, presented a systematic description of an ambitious research process, currently mid-stream, that includes a stratified sampling process for focus-group interviews with male students, interviews with a matched sample of successful and struggling male students, analysis of the chapel talks of Sixth Form boys, a ten-year academic audit, and surveys on risk behavior and positive youth development. The team from Episcopal High School (Virginia), led by Assistant Head Jackie Maher, focused on outcomes research, particularly on a long-term audit of comparative academic outcomes of male and female students.

Later, the upper school team from The Haverford School described their research on a new program targeting boys’ emotional intelligence and leadership. Two shorter presentations followed, one by a middle school team at The Haverford School on a new intervention that utilizes a self-survey to enhance boys’ learning and to enrich their relationships with their advisors. The team from Chestnut Hill Academy (Pennsylvania) followed with their presentation of an ambitious school-wide examination of character education and the creation of a curriculum, informed by a process of focus groups and individual interviews with students, that can be successfully implemented in the upper school.

Evidence-based Practices for Boys

Conversations among practitioners working with boys, based on common efforts to understand their lives better, is satisfying in itself. But the action research approach taken by the CSBL schools leads, importantly, to a time when insights from the discovery phase are tested in new programs. Two schools in the consortium have been at this work long enough that they have taken significant new steps in their work with boys.

The first, Episcopal High School, was drawn to reexamine its curriculum for boys following its successful 1991 transition to coeducation, after 151 years as an historic school for boys. In its effort to create a more inclusive community, the school changed on many levels: physical space, funding and hiring priorities, new traditions and new types of students. By the late 1990s, the school noticed that it had developed an unexpected problem: higher than usual attrition rates for younger boys. In response to this problem, the school elected the course of evidence-based programming for boys. Exit interviews, focus groups and surveys of both faculty and students led to key insights into the problem of attrition among boys. The school’s inquiry drew attention to the phenomenon of "connection": "What emerged for us was that, in all cases, we witnessed participants speaking about characteristics, issues, and concerns that were relational. All wanted to connect with others," the school team noted in a report about the research presentation at the annual CSBL Roundtable.

The team recommended significant changes in the organization of boys’ lives at the school. And, over the past several years, the school did just that, creating a comprehensive plan, synchronizing admissions, academics, athletics, and student life. Key elements of the new program for boys include:

Freshman Boys’ Dorm Project. The school has reengineered the residential experience for first-year boys, housing them together in a single dormitory. The project includes integrated mentoring, academic monitoring and advising system, strong policies to insure a new boy’s sense of safety, as well as significant architectural changes in dormitory and other facilities ó new commons areas, smaller groupings on floors—to support these programmatic changes.

Academic Support. For those boys who struggle academically, the nature of the school’s response has shifted from an "old school" approach of shame and punishment to one of support. Mandatory study hall no longer adds to the pressures or worries of such boys already struggling with diminished self-concepts. These students are assisted to understand their learning styles better and are provided with encouragement and resources to succeed.

Student Recruitment. Admissions policies that emphasize diversity have had the effect of broadening the concept of the ideal "Episcopal Man." He is no longer so exclusively athletic, Southern, or white. He finds it permissible to miss his mom, enjoy caring for younger students, embrace the arts, and excel in his studies.

Faculty Recruitment. Along with these changes in the student body, there has been a parallel change in the prototype of the Episcopal faculty member. There are dynamic and powerful female faculty members as well as males who publicly model a real passion for teaching, learning, drama, and music.

Gender Audit. A new project, a comprehensive accounting of broad quantitative student outcomes, will enable the school not just to know how boys are doing at the school, but will launch a new round of inventive pedagogy aimed at capturing what boys care about and can handle. The audit compares boys and girls not as a zero sum, but rather to monitor what actually results from the current instructional, evaluation and reward patterns of the school.

Taken together, these changes have had a dramatic impact on student life. With respect to the initial problem of attrition, rates have fallen from 17 percent (just above the national boarding school average) to 7 percent (half the national average). Girls flourish at the school, excelling in sports, academics, and leadership roles. And the school has opened itself up to welcome new populations of students from all parts of the country and, indeed, the world.

The Haverford School has also developed programs based on inquiry into boys’ actual experiences. Haverford began its research focus with a wide-ranging survey of alumni of the past 30 years and learned from this and subsequent research that there were particularly important gaps in its social and emotional curriculum. Like many schools’ curricula for boys, this school excelled in helping boys with mastery of hard skills like writing, critical thinking, and study skills. But such "high touch" skills critical to life success—such as learning to monitor oneself in relationships, listening deeply to others, or cultivating an expressive and authentic voice ó were less carefully developed. Guided by its mission of "Preparing boys for life," the school was drawn to findings by Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, who wrote that "…much evidence testifies that people who are emotionally adept ó who know and manage their own feelings well and who read and deal with other people’s feelings ó are at an advantage in any domain of life, whether romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organized politics."

The school selected emotional intelligence (EI) as an organizing framework for a more explicit emotional curriculum, observing that many of the skills required for emotional intelligence were inherent in, but not clearly explicated by, the school’s peer counseling program. A more explicit syllabus for the program was developed to make sure boys were taught to read and manage their own emotions better, to listen and understand those expressed by their peers, and then to think hard, after much practice, about how they might take their developing skills out into the rest of the school.

After working with this curriculum for the past two years, the school conducted an evaluation of its results using qualitative analyses of the peer-mentor interviews, a quantitative measure of emotional intelligence, questionnaires, and unstructured interviews and found that boys who had been in the program for two years scored higher on the evaluation than boys who had only been in for one year, suggesting improvement in these skills over time.

But the most interesting findings came in comments the boys themselves made about the program—describing how the program helped them to move from becoming more emotionally literate themselves to incorporating their new skills with other boys in the broader school community as well as with others in their lives. As one young man explained:

This year, peer counseling has affected my life in many ways, first of all it has made me truly a better listener, I am no longer the person who thinks of ways to solve someone’s problems, instead I think of ways to help them solve their own problems. Second, it has brought things into perspective for me - what my faults are and what isn’t my fault. It has basically given me a mentality that it doesn’t matter what people think of me, only what I think of myself, and because of that I have much more confidence. Third and finally, I care more and want to help people.

Doing Justice to Boys

Robert Connell, an Australian researcher, wrote several years’ ago that boys can be expected to care about issues of fairness and justice to the extent that their own interests in these issues can be made manifest to them. Connell was not suggesting that boys can only be expected to care about themselves; he pointed out that they have powerful interests that things be right and fair for their girl friends, sisters and mothers, for example. But, he argued, schools’ "gender regimes," as they affect boys, are powerful, unforgiving, and deeply defended ("vehement," as he put it), and they teach boys lessons about being misrepresented and mistreated. Boys can empathetically care about justice for all as they perceive their own negative experiences of prejudice and unhealthy restrictions on their range of choices.

By helping schools excavate their "hidden" masculinity curricula through a process of school-based action research, The Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives hopes to help them correct the long-standing hypocrisy of advocating for fairness while keeping a blind eye on boys’ experiences of having to submit to misguided and sometimes punishing school regimes. The fondest desire of the educators in the schools that have joined together is that by doing justice to boys themselves, it becomes easier in turn for boys to care that things be right for everyone.

Michael C. Reichert is the executive director of Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives. Peter Kuriloff teaches in the Graduate School of Education at University of Pennsylvania and serves as the Center’s research director. For more information about The Center for the Study of Boys’ Lives or the work cited above, visit www.csbl.org.