Boys in Crisis

Boys are struggling more than girls in Canada’s current Education system. A plethora of rambling articles and video blogs are popping up to expose the problem and propose solutions. As usual when it comes to delicate social issues, I’ve found some helpful and some not. Many are offensive, qualifying their overarching essentialist gender claims with statements reminiscent of the tried-and-true schoolyard immunity idol, “No offense, but…”

The majority of commentaries on this topic blame our “feminized” Education system. Some even expose a cloak-and-dagger “War on Boys.” To me, that sounds a lot like all those white men out there who are convinced that they (we) are a threatened minority with less and less voice, power, money, and political clout. I hear most of this is as just whiny noise from the system’s rusty gears, which are finally—finally—starting to move the needle on the equality meter somewhere other than the 100% male dominated everything that it’s been stuck on since at least the Old Testament.

No offense, but here are my two cents: there’s a causal link between the status of Education in our country and the struggles that boys are having within that system. Patriarchy teaches men they are entitled to respect, and since teachers are not respected, most men don’t want to become teachers. As a result, there are fewer and fewer male role models in the schools and an increasing percentage of boys are struggling and acting out.

In many other countries around the world, the standard list of ultra-respected/wealthy/enviable jobs includes teachers alongside lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. In Canada, teaching is often considered a cop-out for people who graduate from University with an Arts degree and suddenly realize that the only value to everything they’ve just been taught for four years lies in passing it on to teenagers. I lost track a long time ago of how many people, after hearing my major, stated (not asked): “So you’re going to teach.”

In my last semester as a Teaching Assistant up at SFU I got to know an aspiring teacher from Sweden who was appalled at how poorly we treat our teachers in this country. Back home, he said, teaching is one of the most respected professions, bar none. The way one established teacher put it to me recently was, “everybody loves their kid’s teacher, but most dislike and won’t support teachers in general, especially when it comes to labour disputes.” This lack of status is reflected in Canadian teachers being chronically underpaid and increasingly stripped of their basic rights in the workplace.

So what is the “feminization” of the education anyway? Most people who make this claim point to how women easily outnumber their male counterparts in the school system. Basically there are way more female teachers out there. From here, though, things get fuzzy, really quickly. Common “Step 2”s to this argument include: women are biased towards girls, men are also biased towards girls, girls are easier to teach, girls don’t need a reason to learn whereas boys do, boys have more energy, boys need less structure, and there aren’t enough male role models, both in the media and the classrooms.

Some of these reasons have more merit than others, but I’m most interested here in this last point about role models. My own experience growing up in the Education system as a boy taught me that it wasn’t “cool” for boys to be smart. Out of thirty kids in my grade school class, six were girls. These six girls had the highest grades in the class, all the way from Kindergarten to Grade 8. Part of that was just that they were all very intelligent, motivated people, whereas most of the boys were bent on being farmers like their fathers and so had little interest in performing well academically. Another part of it, however, was that there was an unwritten social code - upheld in various ways by the teaching staff - that in order to be accepted, us boys had to underperform as a pack. I’m convinced that I restricted my intellectual development for years, trying to fit in with my male peers. I actually had quite a few male teachers (it was a private, super-patriarchal, Christian school, after all), but I don’t remember any of them ever directly addressing the stereotype that boys are less intelligent than girls. The behavioral mold we all just kind of fell into was that for girls to find us attractive and our fellow boys to accept us as cool, we had to make jokes, slack off, and act as though we didn’t care about anything to do with school besides Gym class and playing sports at recess.

This is just one story among millions, of course. But I can’t help but wonder: what if a dynamic male teacher, leading by example, had managed to convince us that it was cool to be passionate, intelligent, and motivated? How might that have affected our journey as students and our development as men, as people? What if there were teachers of both genders convincing us of this all the way through the educational system? Perhaps instead of proposing wild essentialist theories about how boys and girls learn in different ways, we could just acknowledge that everybody learns in different ways and instead turn the lens back on the social power structures that everything boils down to anyway.