Reviews
Gender agenda Kevin Stannard reviews… Boys Don’t Try? Rethinking masculinity in schools by Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts Routledge 2019 ISBN 978-0-8153-5017-0 I recently undertook online training on GDPR, as required by the organisation for which I work. Rather than diving directly into the quiz, I dutifully watched and made notes on the presentation, pausing and rewinding several times to make absolutely sure that I’d captured everything. Then I readied myself mentally and took the test. At one point I Googled to confirm an answer where two possible responses seemed equally correct. Up popped my score (95%) with a ‘Congratulations’ message and a certificate (which I printed off); but I felt deflated. Which question had I got wrong? I steeled myself against the temptation to re-take the test. Behaviours like this epitomise what many see as typical of a girl’s approach to learning – meticulous, risk-averse, perfectionist. (About the only ‘male’ behaviour in the whole sorry incident was that I had delayed doing the training until the last possible moment). Of course, dispositions towards learning spread out along a continuum, and males may be found nearer the typically female end. But the ‘typical’ boy and ‘typical’ girl remain the polarised poster children for what are often presented as mutually exclusive categories. It is generally believed that school best suits those at the typically girl end of the spectrum. The typical boy just does not seem to be as engaged in learning as the typical girl. Boys Don’t Try? does not question the ideal-types invoked in these characterisations; rather, it deconstructs what we do with them in the classroom. The fundamental gender issue that the book addresses is difficult to ignore: boys underperform at all stages of primary and secondary education. Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts set out to show that most of what we think we know about how to engage boys in learning is not just wrong, but damaging. And by ‘we’, the authors include their former selves. The error was to try to engage boys by playing to their interests, making lessons competitive and topics more relevant, for example pitting groups against each other in knock-out quiz rounds, and choosing literature or topics involving sport or cars that boys might be more interested in. These boy-friendly strategies might work for a few and for a time, but they are unsustainable because boys who fear failing
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in public simply do not compete; their survival strategy is to withdraw. Instead of playing to perceptions of boys’ interests and enthusiasms, the authors appear at times to underwrite the assertion that we ought simply to teach boys as if they were girls, i.e. through high challenge and high expectations, without gimmicks or shortcuts. But the book is predicated on the reality of a gender dimension to learning; rather than ignoring it, it offers practical guidance, based on a lot of research, on how to address the deficit in boys’ learning positively and productively. For decades the response has been to treat boys as problems, to be dealt with by special strategies that play to masculine interests and identities. The use of gimmicks and the adaptation of content to engage masculine interests and identities risks diluting the education offered to boys. And in so far as it reflects and reinforces an ultimately self-defeating stereotype of masculinity, it has proved damaging. Instead, the authors argue that teachers and schools should do everything possible to promote what they call ‘tender masculinity’. Most of the chapters are focused on an aspect of education that would benefit from a different approach to boys: mental health, expectations, sex and sexism, violence, and relationships. Each follows a pattern: setting out the problem; rehearsing the research evidence; and suggesting strategies at school and classroom levels. Pinkett and Roberts take turns in contributing chapters, but this authorial alternation disrupts the rhythm of the book. A chapter on disadvantaged students is uncomfortably wedged between chapters on myths about boys and on peer pressure, and appears out of place in another sense too; it focuses on disadvantage rather than gender and, while both interesting and disturbing, it doesn’t really contribute much to the book’s central problematic. A later chapter, ’In the classroom’, also breaks out of the thematic pattern, and serves as a foot in the door for the author to rail against single-sex settings. This is arguably the weakest chapter, resting on a partial reading of the evidence, its argument more ideological than empirical. The main target is the ‘diamond’ approach whereby for some subjects in some key stages in otherwise co-ed schools, single-sex setting takes
