Rethinking Boys’ Lives: New Ideas for Schools

Around the world, there are concerns about boys’ educational achievement, their health, their relationships with each other - to the point that a collection such as this book seems warranted. Where before such dimensions of boys’ experience resisted scrutiny, schools today grope through the darkness of hopelessly inadequate theory to recalculate their curricula for boys. As Connell observed: "It is clear from the responses to current debates about boys that many teachers and parents see these issues as urgent. Schools are launching "Programs for Boys" whether researchers and policy makers give them guidance or not (1996,p. 207)." Such new concern about boys, however, does not assure improvement in their lives. Lavish attention has not historically produced boys who are better off. Lefkowitz’s (1997) chronicle of the most popular and darling boys in a New Jersey town’s high school, who parlayed the town’s indulgence towards them into permission to abuse and rape, reminds us that attention alone does not necessarily free boys for healthier or more just lives.

In fact, the obscuring myths of biological determinism, on the one hand, and of corrupting privilege, on the other, have kept us from appreciating the degree to which boys’ lives develop within institutional structures that are carefully, if often unconsciously, arranged to produce particular outcomes. From conception on, male children are embraced and enfolded in an unremitting system of allure, control and punishment, in which certain ideas have blanketed and suppressed all alternatives (Miedzian, 1991; Silverstein, 1994; Pollack, 1998). The point of this curriculum is the production of men prepared to uphold traditional identities and systems of relations (for example, Heward, 1988). No price seems too high to ensure its success.

However, at a boys’ day school in Southeastern Pennsylvania, historic commitment to boys was leveraged following an enrollment crisis by 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, 1994). The Trustees and administrators of the school created an "On Behalf of Boys" Project, designed to serve as a center for research, discussion, self-reflection and advocacy. A psychologist serving at the school at the time, I was asked to direct this effort. Inviting national scholars onto a Research Advisory Board, conducting a survey of the past thirty years’ graduates (Addelston, 1995), holding symposia for parents on raising sons and encouraging teachers’ inquiry into the effectiveness of the tacit curriculum were some of our early moves. Spotty, fraught with contention, resistance, projection and misunderstanding, the school’s pursuit of this mission nonetheless permitted experiments for rethinking masculinities.

This chapter chronicles the story of the early years of this program, during which boys outlined their co-construction of identities and positions as men and the school endeavored to respond with new initiatives intended to support their imaginations and lives. In the first section, we consider the story told by one young man, the consummate "winner" and a "lifer" at the school, of his travels from age 5 to age 18 through the highly evolved, carefully patrolled and deeply affecting program for boys. In the second section, we expand the focus, taking into account the relations boys construct among themselves, viewing the school less as an agent and more as a "site of gender production" (Connell, 1996) which facilitates certain types of interactions among boys. In the final section, we tell of the efforts of the school to respond to insights derived from this ear to boys’ stories, to create opportunities for them to imagine new destinies.

A Boy and his School: Where the Hallways Lead

I met in 1994-95 for a series of interviews with a graduate of the school. This young man, whom we may call Ed, then a junior at a highly selective Eastern U.S. university, had been a "Lifer" (attending from kindergarten through 12th grade) at the school. He had been a success from most viewpoints, an awarded student and athlete, popular, well-respected, and seemed a good starting point for our inquiry into the school’s man-making. At the outset, Ed outlined certain features of the school’s design which had influenced his thinking about himself as a boy. These "masculinizing practices" (Connell, 1996), as well as their purpose, were vivid features of the school in his memory:

"There was a definite point from 3rd grade to 4th grade where at 3rd, and all before 3rd grade, you had all woman teachers, sort of mother figures almost. And that’s very much what they were. They were very kind to you and everything, you know, like they did your homework with you, they explained it very nicely and concretely. They treated you like children. And then 4th grade came, where you had all male teachers. From that point on it was all male teachers."

The message to him conveyed by these school practices was neither subtle nor solicitous. The idea that boys simply must manage an abrupt transition from childhood to boyhood was infused into all aspects of school design and structure:

"There was even a separate hallway. But the 3rd, 2nd and 1st hallway went north-south and the 4th, 5th and 6th went east-west. There was this sharp corner, you turned this corner and there you were. And everything was bigger, brighter and stronger. You know, more pressure. It was all, sort of, denoted by this all-male environment, where it had been a male-female environment before."

The school’s physical design, its teacher assignments and its vision of the purpose of boys’ lives were all premised on ideas about difference and dissociation: that males are distinguished from females, that the way to manhood involves a repudiation of the "other" and a willingness to assume male duties, constraints and prerogatives:

"But it was at this point where we were expected to grow up just a little bit. We sort of moved away from being mothered to being taught and being pushed along these paths. That’s the point where we were expected to start taking notes in class, to understand everything without being shown it every single time, pulled through every single time."

In Ed’s story, we hear of early childhood encounters with a ubiquitous and powerful prescription for manhood. As Martino (1999) found in his study of adolescent boys in an Australian school, separating boys from the feminine is often a powerful substrate in the design of a school, signaling a series of distinctions and obligations about the trajectories boys are expected to follow. This prescription is often taught to boys in many ways, on many levels, in an emotionally compelling discourse about manhood and valor. In an address delivered to students at Ed’s school by a popular teacher, lessons about boys’ lot were persuasively argued:

"Perhaps more than any other human endeavor, trying to learn something teaches the hard but precious lesson that nothing of value in this life can be ours without hard work - with the sole exception, perhaps, of our mothers’ love. Real learning is a difficult business, and if the life of the mind is increasingly rewarding and fulfilling, it is also always taxing, enervating, and just plain hard. It is also usually lonely."

Innocent, trusting and dutiful boys, led to manhood; social spaces filled with custom, design and practice: these were basic ingredients in the formation of male identities remembered by Ed. School cultures invent, develop and fine-tune such recipes in their work of channeling children’s choices, striving to make the dominant conception of possibility - "hegemonic masculinity", as Donaldson (1993) defined it - a matter of "common sense". The point seems to be an overdetermined social practice within the school which compels and dominates imagination. As Dale explained: "Hegemony is not so much about winning approval for the status quo, winning consent for it or even acceptance of it. Rather what seems to be involved is the prevention of rejection, opposition or alternatives to the status quo through denying the use of the school for such purposes." (1982, p. 157)

Thus, we found many other ingredients to the recipe for helping boys to manhood at this historic school, each contributing to the goal of occupying the minds and hearts of those in the community. Role modeling, for example, was an idea used to explain the gendered division of labor among faculty. Ed spoke of the arrival on center stage, upon the departure of the ‘mother figure’ female teacher, of the male role model teacher: " the intellectual giants of the community. People who were very intelligent, very involved, very assertive and strong:"

"We were the ones who were being told all this whole way that the greatest people in the community were the assertive, strong people, confident people. And when you’ve got this leader in the room who sort of keeps you in control, it helps you. Everybody recognizes that teacher in the front is the one who’s supposed to have the power and control, that he’s the aggressive person, he’s the person in control at the time."

Such ideals of manhood not only point the way forward. They also suggest what a man should not be, what failure would involve, what alternative views of manhood boys should eschew. Donaldson characterized this curriculum, found at Ed’s school and many others, when he wrote of hegemonic masculinity: "It is exclusive, anxiety provoking, internally and hierarchically differentiated, brutal and violent" (1993, p. 646). Boys are assiduously instructed not just in what to emulate but also in what to avoid. Ed remembered an experience which taught him lessons about the intersection of power and identity:

"Chemistry I didn't learn a single thing. The teacher was like a joke. We ruled on him all the time. We set fire to things, burned stuff, chairs, people’sÝprescription medicine, smoke would be everywhere and we’d have to clear out the class for a day, people were getting sick. He just had no control whatsoever because he wasn’t the assertive type, he wasn’t the, you know, hammer everything down and make sure he’s in control. We immediately took control."

Through the domination of such normative ideals and their embeddedness within practices, structures and roles, schools manage to direct and limit boys’ sense of what will be okay and what not. Ed characterized the ideal in this way:

"It was all about how the outward self creates an image onto the inward self which is one, almost, of superiority. The clothes - the tie, the jacket - are all part of this grand idealized picture of the intellectual, competent, aggressive male. You know, the high-powered Wall Street accountant, in his power tie and all that jazz. It was all about creating that image and being part of that image, building that image for yourself and building those characteristics for yourself."

In the same way, sports were prominent in the life of Ed’s school. And, again, Ed appreciated their contribution to the construction of the finished product, the "Haverford Man":

"Athletics, just like every other activity, was a way of finding something you were good at and excelling at it. And using that to build confidence for yourself and build this feeling that you can rule the world if you want, you can do anything you want to, you are good and you are able, you can do it. Part of this whole abstract male thing is being good, being good at something or other, excelling at it. Being superior at it. And that’s what Haverford tries very hard at, is excellence. Sort of strives for this model of excellence, which includes all of these things, which includes athleticism and artistic talent, intellectualism, music. And people who excel are all held up on these pedestals as great people, as who you want to strive to be."

The school’s lavish attention to its masculinizing ideals, as we have said, directed attention away from as much as toward. Ed spoke about the pressures for conformity implicit in this curriculum, his realization that well before he could imagine being a man himself he sensed a controlling destiny held for him:

"When you are 12, 13, 14 years old, masculinity is not something you can begin to comprehend or know what it is. You're just trying to go through school, essentially trying to fit in with everybody else, the whole idea."

In the face of this destiny and its sanctions, like many boys Ed opted to play it safe, accommodating himself to the preferred ways for comporting and expressing himself:

"Getting along in the world is not hard. There’s a couple of rules you’ve got to follow. It's not hard to follow the rules, you know, to fill the roles. Roles and expectations are something we fill out every day, regardless of whether we believe them or not, unthinkingly, you know."

And while the rules and roles were quite clear to him, the ease with which he handled them and managed their cost was far more uncertain:

"You know, you've got to be good at sports, you know, strong, blah, blah, know a lot of girls, you have to be kissing a couple, and all that. Even after all that, even after I became good at sports and started kissing girls, I was still very insecure. 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."

Pressured, bewildered and desperate, boys like Ed absorb the lessons implied in the structures and curriculum of their schools, families and communities. Sometimes their choices reflect a noble effort to be themselves, to determine despite their destinies what they want their lives to mean. More commonly, however, young boys like Ed simply strive to "fit in" and, thereby, avoid the punishing sanctions meted out to those boys who cannot. If education at its best is about the "formation of capacities for practice" (Connell, 1995, 239), the constraints which impose upon boys within traditional curricula such as Ed described surely limit their adaptability for modern life.

The Part Played by Peers

Boys’ relationships with each other are also organized by this curriculum. Observed frequently to be exclusive, harsh and crude, boys’ peer relations are seldom acknowledged as reflections of the deep man-making structures they are contained and encouraged by. Under the noses of adults who lament their punishing harshness, boys enact relationships with each other which begin as Ed recalled:

"There were always alliances and lines that little kids form. And that becomes evident in, like gym class, when people pick teams and during recess when you set up teams for - we played some crazy games, jailbreak, that was the name of one game where we all set up teams and people were, like, ‘Ok, you’re a fast runner, you’re on our team’, or ‘You can dodge like anything’. There were all these alliances being formed all the way through which are relatively still true today."

In the context of a school culture which defines manhood as being about production and prowess and which offers vivid examples of what should be as well as what should not, boys discover that they are measured, sorted and played against each other. Being valued in school depends upon running fast, acting cool, being good at things as well as by not being unathletic, uncool, inept: boys quickly learn the behaviors and the attitudes which will earn them rewards (and spare them the negative sanctions) of the curriculum. As Martino (1999) put it, boys are "incited to adopt certain practices of masculinity and to display themselves as particular kinds of boys" (248).

In addition to life history interviews with Ed, we conducted a series of group interviews with adolescent boys (Reichert, 2000). These interviews revealed the organization of boys’ peer relationships within the priorities and values of the school’s curriculum. We heard, for example, a great deal about boys’ efforts to master their public face so as to fit in. One boy, a Jewish student at a time when the school was predominantly Christian, expressed a key theme, echoed by most boys in the group interviews: "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 young man explained how it had been that, absent from the school for several days, none of his friends or teachers had known that he and his family were at home celebrating the High Holidays. He simply believed that there was nothing to be gained by displaying his religious commitments publicly. For boys in all of the groups we interviewed, there was a marked observance of distinct borders between personal life and public persona. Matters such as these, the Jewish boy explained, matters of family or culture or of the heart, matters of difference, had no place in the social life of the school.

In the context of an institutional curriculum which promotes a specific, purposeful identity, boys enact social relations rigidly separating those dimensions of experience, family and self which offer no public advantage from those which might gain them position. They travel together through the gender landscape described by Ed, somehow reckoning with this abiding logic: they are in school to develop certain habits of work, style and attitude, symbols of a hegemonic masculine identity. And they enact these distinctions both within and between themselves.

We interviewed groups of boys who were distinguished from each other by wealth and economic privilege: "Lifers", whose families had the means since kindergarten to attend the elite education offered by the school; "Recruits", presumed to be on scholarship to fill out athletic teams in the 9th year. We observed broad efforts to mark differences, especially in terms of conflicting concepts of masculinity. Lifers evidenced a smug certainty about the absolute value of their approach to work, achievement and morality, condemning "those 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." On the other side, Recruits were quite conscious of being different from Lifers: "We feel like Blacks must feel walking through a White neighborhood." And as they reflected on their differences generally, these Recruits had their own reactions to differences in masculinity:

"In grade school, we all had a sissy in our class and 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."

"The kids I hang out with don’t act like and aren’t like the kids here. They dress different, look different, talk different."

"When I came here someone gave a talk and I couldn’t understand half the words. If I ever used a big word with my friends, they’d get right on me. You can’t sound smart."

Among these groups of boys, rival postures of manhood developed in relation to the institution’s masculinity curriculum. Lifers conformed to the school’s values for hard work and were rewarded with status in the school’s hierarchy: they won the prizes at Honors Day and graduation, achieved entrance into the Ivy League colleges. Recruits struggled for a footing in a social practice which discounted and derogated them. The results of the competition for recognition and attention between groups of boys were not seen as arbitrary or deliberate by Lifers; they were,in fact,loudly and frequently reified as moral and absolute. But,to the eyes of the Recruits, this practice of rewarding those most successful at posing as the "Haverford Man" was quite obviously prejudiced. They felt both excluded and generally alienated by the whole deal:

"I think one problem with this school is that it 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 on kids who put a lot more effort, you know, and do within the best of their ability. Not the highest level the school has, like getting 95’s and 99’s, but if the kid’s highest potential is an 85, an 80, a 75, give him that kind of award: "You did a good job", "You got through"."

Set against Lifers in the contest for recognition and institutional attention, Recruits found their choices for position polarized. One option was to conform to, even to beat the more privileged at their own game. For example, one young man we spoke with, a Recruit to the school in 9th grade, had been voted "Key Man" by his teachers and classmates. While he relished his victory over a prototypical Lifer rival for this honor, he regretted what it had cost him in his relationships with other Recruits:

"I came in as a freshman from a school that was 100% different into a school of basically really privileged kids. I was a financial aid student so that first year was really difficult. I was labeled a "Recruit" mainly because I was coming in to make the basketball team better. I started getting good grades early on and no one else did and when that happened I was sort of ostracized from all the kids who were also labeled "Recruits"."

But in the context of the school’s peer relations’ hierarchy, the choice seemed to be either to win or to lose. He explained the meaning of being represented as a "Recruit":

"It’s that kind of feeling that people expected you to fail. At one of my Mom’s parent conferences with one of my teachers, I was doing really well in my classes freshman year and the guy, it came out like halfway through the conference that I wasn’t a Haverford student my whole life and 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 who was doing well came from another background."

Propelled by determination and resentment, carrying his families hopes and ambitions, this student went on to win on all levels, climaxing at graduation with the school’s ultimate honor, the Key Man award. Yet all the while, he explained, he felt "that when I won, half the people there would have been just as unhappy that I won as the people who were happy."

For other Recruits, perhaps those who had less sense of competitive possibility, the other choice was an oppositional identity, in which their outgroup status crystallized as unalterably distinguished from Lifers:" don’t want to talk with my hands, look like a fag - guys flicking their hair out of their eyes. Never saw weird haircuts like this. I want to have money but I don’t want to act like them." For these young men, the traditional practices of gay bashing and homophobia were weapons deployed to gain some advantage in a competition for centrality and the meaning of difference.

Group relations for boys, as the contest between recruits and Lifers illustrated, are driven, teased and shaped by the logic of masculinity politics. From the school’s masculinizing practices - dress codes, teacher models, athletics, even space design - boys learn the ideals and parameters for being male. In their relations with each other, they reenact these lessons, responding to the recognitional structures of the school as they vie among themselves for centrality, validation and reward. Their competitions seize upon differences of all kinds - size, color, ability, religion, family background - to provide an edge, whatever might provide a boost over top of the other boys scrambling for survival. What is assumed - or taken for granted - by this deliberate and cherished system for reproducing identities is that, in their scramble over top of each other for advantage, somehow good men survive.

Programs for Boys

It is important to highlight that despite these institutionalized regimes of masculinity, at this boys’ school, The Haverford School, there was also a commitment to exploring new ideas for schooling boys. While many teachers find themselves unconsciously playing a collusive role in the reproductive work of the school, there are many others - "transformative intellectuals", as Giroux (1997) referred to them - consciously yearning to break free, to follow the minds and imaginations of the children they serve for new ways of being male. As the work of The Haverford School’s research progressed, new ideas were hatched and new programs and practices tried out. It is worth outlining some of these, if only to describe the arc of imagination inspired by the project’s invitation.

Addressing Gender Equity

Gender awareness programs were developed and tried out with boys from The Haverford School and girls from two neighboring girls’ schools. The aim was to help boys, on the basis of their close relationships with friends and intimates, understand the force of gender relations (Connell, 1996; McLean, 1996). A series of opportunities for boys and girls to inform each other about the experience of being male and being female began in 1995. The first program, which students titled the Gender Awareness Workshop, included 80 young men and women in a 6 hour series of discussions and exercises which aimed, as a male member of the planning group wrote in his school’s newspaper, "to look at the role gender plays in dating, sex, friendships, families and education, with a particular emphasis on the stereotypes society has developed for each gender (Levinson, 1995)".

There was much anticipation and trepidation about the day; boys came fearful of "male-bashing" while girls came expecting to have to fight for a voice. The same male student explained the hope of the planning group: "We are all single-sex schools and felt it was important to be exposed to the opposite sex in an open discussion, to clear up misconceptions about the other gender, to learn the other’s viewpoints, how they think (Levinson, 1995)." Largely student-driven, the workshops evolved to include dialogues, skits, exercises, talks by male and female facilitators and opportunities for the boys and girls to listen closely to each other. Perhaps most thrilling to the participants was the consciousness which emerged from each others’ stories and from the collective effort to "name the plot" of their communities’ and schools’ gender regimes (Denborough, 1996).

In the closing circle of the first workshop both boys and girls expressed the satisfaction that they had joined hands to resist gender’s limitations. One powerful outcome for the workshop was an organized effort by boys to challenge sexist comments and assumptions at their school more vigorously. Several students addressed themselves even to teachers in a commitment to the spirit of the workshops. One boy made the following the comment:

"Never before has an effort been made to integrate the Haverford community with the neighboring girls’ schools in an organized manner to study the effects of sexism, and the day was a complete success" (Levinson, 1995).

Emotional Literacy and Peer Support

Several years ago, in response to a suicide note, Ed’s school initiated a peer counseling program for its upper schoolers, hoping that students themselves could provide a front line of support and assistance to each other. Behind the program’s creation was also an unspoken hope for a sanctuary within the larger school masculinity regime in which safety and connection could be promoted. Under the tyranny of masculinity politics which encouraged dissociation of personal from public and boys to humiliate and hurt each other, a program of mutual support and personal expression offered a determinedly alternative opportunity.

In its initial phases, the meetings of students struggled with the sarcastic and combative postures boys had adapted in school. But encouraged by the young adult leader, himself a graduate of the school, they managed to relate to each other in more respectful and supportive ways, quickly creating a social space for the personal, eventually telling each other about their families and loves, fears and struggles. From their first meeting together, this alternative community mattered as much to the program’s participants as any of the skills or counseling experiences. As the leader wrote:

"By caring about the welfare of the entire group as well as each individual, and more importantly by fully opening up and showing their own personal struggles, this group of young men have built the safety and trust of the group to a high level and have inspired newer members (Gallagher, 1998, 11)."

Overall, the boys in the group agreed. As one reported:

"There are certain things I need to be able to say, simply to get hard feelings off my chest. If I don’t let them out in a constructive format like Peer Counseling, I end up carrying them around and feeling bad or blowing up at somebody, and I hate that. When I get a chance to vent, I can be me again, it’s as simple as that (Gallagher, 1998, 11)."

From these glimpses of alternative ways of relating to each other, boys developed perspective about the arbitrary nature of their school’s culture and their own ability to influence outcomes in it. Another boy, quoted in the same report, said:

"Not only do I feel good when I get a chance to emote, I feel good and useful when I can help someone else express their feelings. I get the sense of the group having a larger purpose that is inclusive of, yet larger than, the individual (Gallagher, 1998, 11)."

Within the context of the groups’ norms for honesty and voice, the young men in the group spoke to each other about many of the dimensions of their experience which were banished from the public life of the school. For example, they addressed difficult cultural and racial issues. An Asian student, for example, was able to relate for the group the stereotypes and misunderstanding about Asians he encountered, sufficiently motivated following this step to initiate the school’s first Asian Cultures Club. Recruits in the group came to rely on the community of the group to challenge the Lifer/Recruit oppositions which dominated school life. Within the context of their new relationships, these boys established new social practices which naturally spilled over into the larger school community, upsetting the personal and social silences of the school.

Teacher Critique

Among many teachers there abides a fear that schooling can devolve into "a technology of power, language and practice that offer human beings particular views of themselves and the world (Giroux, 1997, 226)". Many teachers reject the role of mere technicians; they prefer an active role in partnership with their students. Where encouraged to lead, teachers often resist pressures to conform and can actually be counted on to challenge traditional practices which may not fit with their students’ needs. The teacher researcher movement in schools has been one mechanism schools find to mobilize their faculties’ passions for justice. (Lytle and Cochran-Smith, 1990; 1992).

An opportunity for teacher leadership developed at The Haverford School in response to the Lifer/Recruit tension. In response to incidents in which this tension erupted into public conflict, a group of teachers and administrators created a Diversity Research Project, charging themselves with generating an understanding of the roots of the tension. Groups of students, present and past, were interviewed in focus groups. The results were reported in written form and an oral presentation was made to school Trustees and fellow faculty. As the different focus groups were interviewed, faculty researchers discovered that among all of the groups interviewed, the group of African-American boys was singularly quiet. In the words of the their report:

"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 at al, 1994, p. 3)."

These males, in particular, seemed to the teachers to be in an extreme position in the gender politics of the school. Unable to hide, these boys kept their difference to themselves, huddling with each other at lunch tables or in hallways, passing through the school day rather unobtrusively. Through their interviews with various groups of boys - Lifers, students of color, Recruits - the teachers became convinced that this school’s culture for dealing with difference adversely affected all of the boys at the school. What flared between the Lifers and the Recruits silenced the African-American students and caused religious minorities to dissociate their personal lives from their public participation.

Discovering this unhappy dynamic in boys’ relationships to the school, it was quite natural that teachers followed the discoveries from their research with action. They imposed on the administration, other faculty and trustees to intervene and as a result of their persistent advocacy, the school began aggressively to pursue faculty of color, pursuing a "critical mass" of numbers, images, and opportunities for its students of color (Slaughter and Johnson, 1988). New outreach was made to families. New programs to facilitate the adjustment of all students socially and academically to the school, including a "Bridge" program for Recruits. As these results witnessed, in supporting teachers to critique and to imagine, the school unleashed a reliable resource for reform. The clear view of the professionals who have dedicated their lives to their students has helped refine its program in myriad ways.

Conclusion

Still, the strength of the investment institutions make in their masculinity curricula cannot be overestimated. We discovered that efforts to advocate for boys in a manner which transcends the "recuperative masculinity" approaches, described in the introductory chapter to this volume, aroused a hornets’ nest of reaction and mobilized a school system well able to defend its investment. Powerfully threatened by programs which seek to dislodge the unexamined predominance of particular masculinity practices and discourse, forces of resistance surrounding the dominant masculinity play to fears, promote distortions and fantasies, and make quite personal attacks (Sokolove, 1997). Our experience taught us how precious and central these masculinity regimes can be to the schools historically created to reproduce them (Cookson and Persell, 1985). Our experience, in fact, suggests that a veritable fetish for the production of certain types and identities of boys develops in schools. As Fine found in her study of NYC public schools, the production of privilege tends to be surrounded by "echoed beliefs" and "entrenched behaviors and resource allocations" most closely resembling the fervor of fetishism (1991, p. 184). The posture and rhetoric of those defending tradition mimicked the zealotry of worship.

Ultimately, few of the programs initiated by this new boys’ project at The Haverford School ultimately survived the various conscious and unconscious strategies for resistance mounted in response to their introduction. In these times of "turbo capitalism" (Luttwack, 1999) and greater than ever winner-take-all economic rules (Frank and Cook, 1995), there seems to be even more incentive for families and schools to rely on tried and true strategies for producing winners. The programs described here, as well as others, were not obviously opposed. They were, more simply, regarded as irrelevant or, even more commonly, appreciated but not embraced by a school staff struggling mightily to keep pace with the runaway careerism of students and families.

Still, the school accomplished something for its effort. Boys’ lives at The Haverford School are not the same as before. There is a new sensitivity, inarticulate and often unaware, on the part of those connected to the school and a new hope on the part of the boys themselves. The simple existence of such a deliberate effort perhaps signaled a legitimate challenge to ideas which had held sway for generations before. Perhaps it is as Bhabha suggested, that those challenging a schools’ gender practice aim "not to deny or disavow masculinity, but to disturb its manifest destiny (1995, 57)". Or, as Greene suggests, we offer hope not so much by our successes as by our reach: "People trying to be more fully human must not only engage in critical thinking but must be able to imagine something coming out of their hopes; their silence must be overcome by their search (1995, p. 20)."

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