This morning I was drawn to an op-ed piece in The Globe and Mail by Calvin White entitled "Our schools need to help boys become men." In it he made the case that, in the pendulum swing towards greater gender equity, schools are becoming less inviting for boys.
There is no question that by the time that boys reach Middle School, the challenge is to keep them engaged and believing that doing well at school is not only essential for later life, it is actually "cool". This necessitates making school relevant to their needs and interests; flexible in offering the options and experiences that will help them learn and grow in both their abilities and, just as importantly, in their confidence in themselves and what they can achieve. In the final analysis, we must give all of our students, girls and boys, the message that being active, involved and successful in school beats out any of the alternatives.
I was reminded of an incident a number of years ago when I was leading a school review at a medium-sized rural boarding school in cottage country in Central Ontario. As part of my usual drill, I was interviewing a group of parents about what they liked/disliked about the school and why they had chosen to send their children there. One mom took me by surprise. She had a son in Grade 10 who was a day student at the school. When I asked her what she would like to see changed, she gave me a shopping list (orchestra, drama, improved technology, etc.). "In fact", she said, "I only wish that this school could offer the range of programmes and extra-curricular opportunities that our local public high school does!"
Needless to say, I asked the obvious question namely, if the local high school was so great, what was she doing paying $20,000 to send her son to an independent school? Her answer has stayed with me all these years. It turns out that the local school, which did indeed have great programmes and teachers, saw only one-third of its graduates go on to post-secondary education. The prevailing culture was to hang out on the local corner, skateboard to the mall, and play video games. Her daughter, a senior at the public high school, was an "A" student, member of the orchestra and on the school basketball team. She had already been accepted to five top universities and was waiting on scholarship offers. On the other hand, she was convinced that her son, left to his own devices, would be a card-carrying member of the 67% standing on the street corner. Their family was making a financial sacrifice to put their son in a school where the culture (98% to university) was about achievement and staying in school.
Three years ago, when I was a Head of School in Bermuda, I invited Dr. Leonard Sax to the island to speak to our parents and work with our teachers on reaching out to our boys. Based on his research as outlined in his book, Boys Adrift, he contended that the "sit still and pay attention" approach to teaching and learning missed the point with boys and, rather than helping them to focus on learning, it made them disengage with the process. Parents, he felt, compounded the problem by giving over too much of their sons' leisure time to relatively passive entertainment rather than active engagement in sports, games, and other hands-on activities.
We see evidence of this at our school every day. The majority of our students are boys, and many of them arrive having felt stifled in their home school, expending more effort in sitting on their hands than actively participating in the learning process. With OT, SLP, counselling and mentor support, we try to help all of our students to "fidget" or move around as a normal part of their learning environment. This helps considerably, but it is still a broken front and we continue to need to do better every day and in every classroom to make all of our students know that school is for each of them and not just for somebody else.
As Calvin White observed:
Schools across the country must begin paying attention to what boys need in order to grow into confident, caring human beings. On a regular basis, girls in every school are encountering frequent and sustained messages, programs and treatment to build their identity. They are encouraged to play rugby, box, weld, wrestle, play hockey, aim for careers in medicine, take math, fix cars, consider politics, assert themselves, save the world. We don’t talk to boys about what it means to be a boy, what it means to be a man. We don’t talk or teach about manhood. There is no conscious or concerted effort to reach out specifically to boys and to build them. We do nothing to nurture their confidence, their well-roundedness, their purpose in life. The consequence of this vacuum in our schools will be generations of lost souls. And sometimes, lost souls act out in powerful ways.There is no question that by the time that boys reach Middle School, the challenge is to keep them engaged and believing that doing well at school is not only essential for later life, it is actually "cool". This necessitates making school relevant to their needs and interests; flexible in offering the options and experiences that will help them learn and grow in both their abilities and, just as importantly, in their confidence in themselves and what they can achieve. In the final analysis, we must give all of our students, girls and boys, the message that being active, involved and successful in school beats out any of the alternatives.
When boys are "adrift", school should put the wind in their sails, not be an anchor to hold them back!
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