Real Boys

by William Pollack

  Fortunately, recent research suggests that some boys’ schools may provide just this kind of protective environment. In 1997 Diane Hulse, head of the Middle School at Collegiate School in New York City, completed comparative research on boys in the fifth through eighth grades at two premier independent schools—one coeducational, the other just for boys. Utilizing a broad array of empirical testing measures, Hulse showed that boys in the all-boys school seemed less defensive and less susceptible to peer pressure, more comfortable with their “aggression” as well as their relationships with girls, and more egalitarian in their attitudes about male and female roles than their counterparts in the coeducational institution.

  These findings, in my view, imply several things. First, much as Richard Hawley would probably argue, students at an all-boys school are likely taught in a manner that recognizes and encourages their unique learning styles and tempos. Such schools are more flexible and less defensive in attitude, in comparison to institutions that seek to fit boys into a rigid traditional coeducational curriculum that ignores individual learning styles and paces. Even more important, I believe, these findings suggest that at a well-run boys’ school a peer culture evolves in which boys feel more comfortable about themselves, are more confident about their abilities, and therefore do better in their class work. Especially for boys ages ten and older, with no girls around there are fewer reasons to feel they must brag, tease, and bluster. In the absence of girls, boys don’t feel as competitive—or as vulnerable—and thus tend to be less tough on one another. They do less to shame their compatriots. All in all, they each tend to feel more self-confident and less dependent on a mask of bravado to cover their insecurities.

  In coed environments, by contrast, many boys fear that teachers or other students will ridicule them if they behave in certain ways that might not be seen as fully “masculine.” They may become anxious about discussing emotions evoked by a story or a poem, avoid answering teachers’ questions so as not to look “stupid” by making a mistake or appearing effeminate by getting it right, and steer away from subjects thought of as “feminine.” When boys get to school, gender stereotypes are often vigorously enforced by students and teachers alike, and boys feel obligated to conform to them. This gender straitjacketing disrupts boys’ educational experience. It leads them to “overcompensate” by being disruptive in the classroom, harassing other students, or intentionally “acting dumb” in courses like English and social studies where showing even a scintilla of passion or intelligence may lead others to condemn them.

  To be fair, as these results from Hulse’s study are based on observations at only two schools, they probably require further corroboration. But even if we cannot come to conclusions about the advantages of all-boys schools with scientific certainty, I believe this study provides compelling initial evidence that, at least for some boys, being at an all-boys school provides important benefits.

  Of course, the vast majority of boys—just as the vast majority of girls—will continue to receive their education in some type of coeducational environment. Our solution cannot and probably should not be to make all of our schools separate-sex schools. But I believe that we must try to apply the positive things we’re learning about boys’ schools to how boys are taught and treated in coeducational schools. For instance, just as some public schools have set up special “girls only” programs in math and science—a kind of single-gender academy within the coed environment—I believe that similar experiments for boys, especially in areas of reading and writing, have tremendous promise.

  To cite one successful example of this concept, I should share the story of Jean Ellerbe, a teacher in a coed public school, who serendipitously ended up teaching an all-boys English class. By chance, all the students in her high school freshman English class in one semester were boys. At first it upset her and she tried to force the school to dissolve it, but slowly she came to realize the unique possibilities it offered. While in her coed English classes girls were more motivated and articulate, in the single-sex class the boys appeared to her “more at ease” and “not as embarrassed to speak up.” The class, however, was looser and rowdier, something it took her a while to appreciate and value along with her boys. As one of the boys in her all-guy class commented to her: “Sometimes it can get a little rowdy with all guys, but it’s easier for them to say what they want to say. If girls were there, you’d be scared of looking stupid.”

  Indeed, as this comment reflects, even in a traditional coed school, boys placed in an all-male class that is empathic to boys’ typical learning styles and tempos may feel freed to take off their armor and sound their authentic voices. Among the boys I interviewed who either attended an all-boys school or had the chance to take key subjects in a single-sex class within a coed environment, many confirmed the freedom they felt to shed their masks.

  Seventeen-year-old Liam explained: “When I’m in a class with girls, sometimes I feel that for girls to like me, I have to be cool. And being smart isn’t cool. The guys who everybody considers the most cool don’t do that well academically. They never raise their hands in class.”

  “But in an all-boys class, I can really concentrate on academics,” Liam continued. “I don’t have to feel uncomfortable about how I am perceived by the girls in the class, and I don’t have to worry that they think I’m a geek or a dork or something like that. Now I work hard, and I am definitely doing my best. I feel good when I get a good grade.”

  When I talked with Toby, a bright-eyed fifteen-year-old dressed in a wrinkled shirt and jeans who attends an all-boys school, he described a number of benefits to receiving an education in a single-sex institution. “Academically, I’ve been able to strive because there haven’t been girls around to impress or anything. In class I can raise my hand and say whatever I want to say, because I am not going to be embarrassed by talking around girls. You don’t have to worry about the normal things, like how your clothes look, or ironing. It’s just a lot easier to work with no girls around. I can see girls on weekends, but I’m not distracted by their presence at school. At a boys’ school, I can just go out there and take chances, I guess. I can be the best student that I could be.”

  Toby also observed teachers bonding with male students more when girls are absent from the environment. “Teachers, especially women teachers, always like girls better. Here you get to be closer to your teachers [male and female] even if you’re a boy.”

  He contrasted his current experience with his earlier years in a coed school. “I think people expect girls to be smarter. So it’s hard for a guy to excel academically, just because of the situation they are in. When I was in a coed school, a lot of little things would embarrass me, like answering a question wrong in class or making a mistake on the athletic field or having one of my friends make a wisecrack about me in front of other kids.”

  Teachers and administrators corroborate what these boys are saying. For instance, two formerly single-sex schools that merged into coeducation years ago, St. Stephen’s/St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia, have experimented with keeping some math and science classes segregated by gender. The results have been positive. “All of the advantages we see benefit both boys and girls,” one administrator commented. “Teachers can tailor the way they teach their classes—the amount of group work and the amount of individual learning.”

  The experiment that these two schools implemented is a good example of the kind of creative problem-solving I believe is critical when it comes to developing successful schools for boys. Even when its resources are tight, a school—public or private—can implement innovative programs and approaches to help boys thrive emotionally and academically. What I find sad is schools not taking this extra step, when they simply rest on their laurels. For I believe it’s just this kind of complacency that has led so many boys to rebel in the classroom and that has triggered our schools’ epidemic overdiagnosis of behavioral disorders in young and adolescent boys.

  PRESCRIPTION: HOW PARENTS CAN
HELP CREATE SCHOOLS

  FOR BOYS’ VOICES

  To alleviate the negative impact of gender stereotyping and anti-boy bias, I urge parents to take several steps:

  Praise your boys’ school achievements. Just as it’s vitally important to affirm girls’ unique talents and strengths, I believe boys—as tough, invulnerable, and confident as they may seem on the outside—desperately need to hear our words of praise and encouragement about what they’re doing well at in school. We need to reinforce all their successes at school—not just those typically thought of as “masculine.” A kindergarten boy who successfully mixes together the ingredients for cookies in the kitchen play area yearns for and deserves a compliment just as much as the one who builds a four-foot tower with building blocks. The boy who writes the best essay on Chaucer merits praise as much as the one who aced his geometry exam.

  You simply can’t give your boy too much positive reinforcement. When parents or teachers see a boy’s mask go up—when our sons begin to act tough and self-reliant—there’s a tendency to want to respond in the same way. We often feel we’re going to humiliate the boy in some way if we don’t reflect back the same kind of cool, dispassionate attitude. While it’s important not to pressure your boy to discuss things if he’s not yet up to it, you should not feel you need to match his macho stoicism with your own. Instead, try to contradict his masked insecurities by giving him lots of love, support, and affirmation. When he comes home from school and grunts when you ask him how his test went, tell him that no matter what grade he got, you believe in him.

  Look for opportunities to be specific in your words of approbation. For instance, if you read a story he wrote and you notice he’s got an impressive authorial flair, tell him how much fun it was to read his story. If he completes a scientific experiment for his biology class and prepares a report with handsome graphics in it, tell him what a great job he did in putting together the report and that you especially noticed the neat graphics. Even if he shrugs off your positive comments, continue to share them with him. It’s this kind of consistent warm praise that goes a long way in helping your boy endure the many less positive messages he’s bound to receive at school.

  Get involved, stay involved. Observe and monitor the progress of boys in your particular school system. How are boys faring? Do the teachers and administrators have a modern understanding of boys’ dilemmas in our society and understand how those dilemmas affect boys within a learning environment? Call meetings, sponsor workshops, attend after-school programs, and make sure that the school is evaluating itself regularly and is being creative about developing approaches for boys that work. Demand that schools recognize your boy’s unique learning style and pace. If he needs extra help in English, make sure he’s getting it. If he learns writing best by using an interactive computer program (rather than copying paragraphs from a textbook), lobby for him to get sufficient time with the computer. If he has a hard time sticking with any one activity for more than a certain length of time, make sure he’s given all sorts of projects to work on.

  Observe and monitor his emotional life. Third, in addition to monitoring how well he’s doing based on report cards and other similar evaluations, try to keep an eye on how you think your son is faring emotionally at school. Try your best to create safe spaces for him at home and advocate that his school do the same. Ideally no boy should have to spend an entire school day without having anywhere he can go to express his vulnerable emotions free from attack or ridicule. As often as possible, when your boy comes home after school, ask him what he likes about school and what he doesn’t like so much about it. Inquire who his best friends are. Ask him what teachers he prefers. If he doesn’t open up right away, tell him about your own school experiences. Talk about the exam you forgot to study for. Tell him about how some of the other kids drove you crazy. Tell the story about that fifth-grade teacher you couldn’t stand. By showing your own vulnerability, your boy may grow comfortable showing his own. And by finding out what he’s truly feeling about school, you can do your best not only to confirm that he’s being treated properly but also to discern whether he feels positively about how well he’s doing as a student. If we are to redress the crisis of low self-esteem among so many of our sons, we first need to give them a place to tell us how they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing.

  Don’t let schools misjudge your boy. Fourth, if there are deficiencies in your boy’s academic performance—or any shortcomings in his conduct—make sure they are not rashly treated by his school as though he’s pathological. If he suffers a severe learning disability or legitimately has attention deficit disorder, obviously he should meet with a knowledgeable educational specialist, psychologist, or psychiatrist to explore appropriate options. But before any rushed judgments are made, it’s important to spend as much time as possible with your son to give him the chance to open up and tell you what school is actually like for him. In so many cases, when your son reluctantly reveals his poor test result or low grade or confesses to having gotten “in trouble” at school with a student or teacher, the problem does not stem from the boy’s pathology.

  As discussed above, it may well be the school that is deficient, often because it hasn’t created an atmosphere in which the boy can succeed. Sometimes a school is too rigid with a boy who needs a more open exploratory classroom experience. Sometimes a school doesn’t address his particular pace and style of learning, going too fast or too slow, requiring too much passive listening or too many rote exercises; and sometimes, because of gender stereotypes and biases, a school either restricts him from participating in activities he genuinely finds interesting or prematurely writes him off as a troublemaker. If your boy begins to behave inappropriately at school, I strongly suggest speaking not only to his teachers but also to other parents with kids in the same school. You may very well discover that it’s not just your boy who is struggling at his school or with a particular teacher there. When behavioral issues arise for your son, it’s terribly important to explore all the possible factors contributing to the situation before allowing the school to dictate a quick-fix solution that may actually serve the school better than your boy.

  Help shape the mission of the school. Try to ensure that your boy’s school is thoughtful about the unique needs of all boys. For example, it’s important for parents and teachers to interrupt situations where they see boys being put into gender straitjackets as students. If a teacher overhears one boy telling another that “poetry is for wimps,” ideally that teacher will intervene and explain that not only is reading and writing poetry appropriate for boys but a good number of our most favorite poets are actually men. If a parent learns that the elective courses in a junior high school (such as tech art, chorus, drama) are designed to be gender-segregated, I hope that parent will find the courage to approach the school administrators and insist that boys and girls be made to feel equally welcome to try out these courses.

  I think it’s particularly helpful when parents, teachers, and school administrators meet regularly—at PTA meetings, special workshops, and so on—to study how boys are being educated to ensure that the school’s curriculum is structured in a manner empathic to boys. Boys must not become a political football, the target of a backlash against the ways we fail to meet girls’ rightful entitlements. Rather, boys’ specific educational needs should be reviewed as closely and carefully as the needs of girls.

  I also believe it’s important for us to figure out when traditional schools simply are inappropriate or ineffectual for a particular boy. Less conventional academic teaching methods such as Outward Bound or other group-team activities that build on boys’ physicality in a more open setting may help both to expand our view of intelligence to a larger range of skills, as Howard Gardner has so aptly argued, and to capture more of boys’ interests as well. The use of media—such as videos or CD-ROMS—with fast-paced activity may capture the interest of many a boy stuck in more traditional literary text. Integrating sports activities and coa
ches, arts programs, and specialists may be just the ticket to spark the sagging interest of an educationally “turned off boy or to discover the hidden talent of one of our sons buried beneath the sense of shame and failure emanating from his frustration within an all too traditional, all too rigid curriculum. Whatever the creative intervention aimed at boys—and there are many more than space allows me to mention—when we don’t probe what it really takes to meet boys’ needs, they, in turn, lose interest, don’t perform well, and begin the downhill slide into feeling bad about themselves.

  WHAT SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL SYSTEMS CAN DO

  Whether or not parents prod them to do so, schools need to develop and implement innovative approaches to address boys’ specific needs as students:

  Boy-friendly subject matter. Just as any adult who goes into a bookstore tends to select books that mesh with his or her personal interests, it is critical that our schools teach courses that cover subject matter interesting to a wide range of boys. We all know that there is not just one kind of boy, and thus there cannot be a simple answer to what topics and what materials will stimulate every boy. But a school can be creative in developing eclectic classroom materials and covering a broad range of topics that will spark the interest of many boys (and many girls). For example, in English, this means covering poems, stories, novellas, novels, and other literature by male and female authors and on traditionally “male” and “female” topics. In a subject like history, making the class stimulating for boys might mean reading and telling stories not only about men but also from the perspective of men. It’s so easy for schools to make classes interesting to our boys in this way, I believe it is truly unacceptable for them not to take this simple step.