Education > Articles
Boys Will Be Boys
published in the Times Educational Supplement, 2009
Mea culpa. As a headteacher back in the 1980s, I berated the reception teacher for putting pictures of rockets and tractors beside the boys’ coatpegs, and flowers and fluffy bunnies beside the girls’. And in the early 90s, I was general editor of a reading scheme for which authors were instructed to include ‘strong female protagonists’ (with the unintended consequence that almost all the male characters were weaklings, villains or buffoons).
You see, I was a baby boomer, just the right age to expect as good an education as any man and the right to lifelong economic independence. So of course I went along with most of the feminist lines of the times (although I’m glad to say I drew the line at boiler suits). But after spending the last three years researching a book on boys, I’m feeling a tad shamefaced about these earlier attempts at social engineering.
Isobel, the reception teacher, argued the toss about the peg pictures. ‘Honestly, Sue,’ she said. ‘They’re different. Little boys like rockets, and little girls like bunnies.’
‘Well, of course they will if that’s what we give them,’ I replied.
It’s been a bit of a facer twenty-five years later to discover that, despite all our gender equality policies, little boys still have a marked preference for things that go brrm brrm, and little girls for soft furry animals.
As for the reading scheme, I’m now wondering how many boys we switched on to feminist values with our strong female protagonists. Or, whether our zealotry just convinced them that reading was a girly skill so they might as well not bother. Certainly boys’ literacy skills haven’t kept pace with girls’ over the last fifteen years. And that might help explain why the professions in the UK are today awash with strong female protagonists (medicine, veterinary science, the law and secondary teaching are all now predominantly female) while the dole queues are full of sad, buffoonish male NEETS.
It’s not that I’ve ceased to support the cause of female equality – I certainly want my daughter, and my daughter’s daughters to have all the opportunities that were open to me. It’s just that, after wading through the research and interviewing scores of boys and men, I’ve become just as committed to male equality. Isn’t that what equality’s all about? And in 21st century Britain, I think boys have been getting a rather worse deal than girls.
It starts from birth. Baby boys are developmentally behind girls from the start, and probably need more ‘mothering’ to help initiate them into the human race. But changes in working patterns, family structures and attitudes to childhood mean we don’t value early childcare much at all. By failing to recognise what women contributed to the social mix in the past, we’ve actually ceased to value care (and it’s not just boys that suffer from this cultural change – it’s all of us).
Then, as babies turn into toddlers and preschoolers, boys’ play is very different from girls’. No matter how hard liberal middleclass parents and teachers try to make them act the same, children insist on behaving naturally. This means boys feel the need to run and jump and scramble and play-fight – but there’s seldom much space for this sort of activity in an urban nursery school, not to mention the miles of health and safety red tape with which we now tie down our children.
Lack of opportunity for active play compounds the developmental differences between young males and females. So once formal learning starts – ridiculously early in this country – boys are at a disadvantage. Asking them to read and write before they’re physically capable of sitting still, hold a pencil or track their eyes along a row of print is frankly cruel. When they very reasonably object to this treatment, we call them failures, give them catch-up lessons or – if they really can’t hack it – diagnose special educational needs. Four times as many boys as girls are labeled with ADHD and last year half a million prescriptions for Ritalin were written in the UK.
It’s not just school’s fault, of course. Society as a whole becomes less and less boy-friendly as the years go by. The more built-up and traffic-ridden our city streets become, the less welcome children are to indulge in the free-range outdoor play that used to be every young human being’s birthright – and which is particularly important for an active, risk-taking young male.
Instead, they lead a screen-based, sedentary existence which is bad for both physical and mental health – and many boys appear to have adjusted to it. ‘I love being a 21st century boy,’ said one of pasty-faced little interviewee. ‘I sit in my bedroom and watch TV or play computer games. And if I get hungry, I text down to my mum and she brings me up a pizza.’
So they’re being battery-reared at home – ready victims for the media and marketing influences that increasingly target the least desirable psychological traits of each gender with their culture of 21st century cool. And at school – that evermore female dominated environment – they’re subject to a regime based on tests, targets and league tables which, thanks to the government and Ofsted, is often more about ticking boxes than the development of creative thinking and intellectual curiosity. Not surprisingly, in the battle between cool and school, most boys find cool infinitely preferable.
Teachers try, of course. I’ve lost count of the number of studies I ploughed through on ‘Raising Boys’ Achievement’. But the last three years have convinced me it’s time to stop obsessing about raising boys’ achievement and concentrate on raising boys.
And to keep the girls on their upward trajectory, we need to consider how we raise them too. Male and female are different. Equality means recognizing these differences – especially in very early childhood – then helping both male and female develop ‘roots to grow and wings to fly’.