Gender agenda, Kevin Stannard Boys Don’t Try? by Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts

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 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

place. This is denounced as ‘timetabled segregation’. Tellingly, the chief argument against separating the sexes is the evidence that boys’ behaviour can deteriorate in the absence of girls. They register discomfort in expecting girls to adopt ‘caretaking roles’, but argue that this is for the greater good. It amounts to a reinforcement of gender stereotyping of the kind that is rightly denounced in other chapters.

The authors appear to have a rather antiquated view of girls’ schools, assuming their purpose to be to protect girls from, rather than prepare them for, the real world. They assert that such settings increase awareness of gender differences. True, but awareness of gender does not amount to acquiescence in inequality – quite the reverse, in fact, if the focus is on preparing young women to navigate and transgress an unequal world. The authors touch only very lightly (and in a different chapter) on the irony of girls’ success at school, whereby the very dispositions that win laurels at school seem to create disadvantages in career progression and remuneration.

Setting by sex is not a strategy to protect girls from particular subjects or pedagogies. But the book’s blanket argument that girls don’t need protection doesn’t address the asymmetry of aggression in schools. What are we to make of the data in the chapter on sexism, that more than a third of female students at mixed-sex schools have personally experienced some sort of sexual harassment at school; and 24% of female students at mixed-sex schools have been subjected to unwanted physical touching of a sexual nature? The authors do not trivialise these issues. Their answer is, however, not to protect girls, but to change boys’ behaviour. A worthy aim, but how long-term are we thinking, given the deep roots of behavioural differences such as those evidenced in the chapters on violence and on relationships? Meanwhile, girls continue to be expected both to supervise and to suffer in what might amount to highly toxic environments.

Of course boys are not always aggressors. Many boys who exhibit the typical characteristics of girls quickly learn to conceal them, or live with the consequences in terms of bullying and teasing. Boys, the authors argue, feel greater pressure to conform to stereotypes, and this can literally be a killer. They point out that male mental health is in crisis: 75% of suicides are male, and suicide is the biggest killer of men under forty. They call for far greater efforts in schools to engage boys in reflecting on their mental health, and in respecting alternative masculinities and gender identities.

The chapter on peer pressure rests on the classic, but now very dated, study by Paul Willis of subcultures of nonconformity among ‘lads’, who disengage and disrupt school because they see little point in it. This ‘self-sabotaging behaviour’ creates a cycle of disadvantage which ends up reproducing social inequalities. Reference might usefully have been made to the use that the sociologist Tony Giddens made of the Willis study in his theory of structuration. The book looks at evidence that such behaviour is not unique to disadvantaged and marginalised boys. They point to research that suggests that middle-class males, too, are less likely than their female peers ‘to achieve their full potential because of the influence of a dominant strand of masculinity that sees schoolwork and high achievement as effeminate and uncool’.

There is a powerful indictment of the part played by teachers in reinforcing gender stereotypes, and creating milieux in which poor behaviour and disengagement become normalised. Sexually-charged ‘banter’, and actual sexual harassment (of staff as well as students) are too often not followed up, and sometimes just put down to high spirits and ‘boys being boys’. The authors are consistent and clear on the need to call out behaviour that demeans others on account of sex. Each chapter suggests practical ways in which schools can change the culture, and teachers can change the rules of engagement in lessons.

Nevertheless, many teachers continue to base their expectations of pupils on prejudicial stereotypes. Research shows that a lot of teachers still see girls as typically hardworking, and are predisposed to give them better marks. On the other hand, some teachers see girls as naturally less good at some subjects, like maths. Gender stereotyping leads to biased judgements that affect pupil outcomes. The authors argue that conforming to stereotype actually benefits girls, because the higher expectations lead to improved outcomes. But for boys, the feedback loop means that low expectations simply reinforce underachievement.

This book is an effective antidote to the snake-oil sales pitch that schools and schooling should be gender-blind. Boys and girls benefit from the creation and cultivation of genderconscious classrooms. The needs of both boys and girls are best met not by avoiding gender, but by bringing it to the fore. The challenge is that girls’ and boys’ needs are different in this regard, not because their brains are different, or because they have fundamentally different learning styles, but because society still treats them differently.

Boys (and society) would benefit from their being educated in ‘tender masculinity’, and having their stereotypical behaviours moderated and mitigated, as this book proposes. But it is not achieved by teaching boys as if they were girls. Educating girls needs as much thought as educating boys, and is explored in another recent book, Teaching Girls.

Boys Don’t Try? begins with a mea culpa about an earlier belief that making education better for girls had gone too far. But the revised version of male disadvantage still rests on an unarticulated assumption that girls are predisposed to succeed at school and so have an advantage. This may be so, which makes it all the more remarkable that in the long run, males overtake females when it comes to career trajectories and remuneration. What boys lose in the sprint, men win in the marathon.

We are not just treating boys badly, but girls too, if the emphasis is on rewarding the typical girls’ characteristics of hard work, rule-following and organisation. In How Girls Achieve, Sally Nuamah argues that teaching girls must involve focusing on developing ‘achievement-oriented identities’, namely increasing confidence, developing strategies for dealing with obstacles, and a willingness to transgress them. This is a deliberately gender-conscious agenda.

So let’s hear it for the boy(s), and the girls too. Pinkett and Roberts have very effectively made one half of the case for gender consciousness in schools. Kevin Stannard is Director of Innovation and Learning at GDST

Other books cited in the article: Peter Kuriloff, Shannon Andrus and Charlotte Jacobs (2017) Teaching Girls: How teachers and parents can reach their brains and hearts. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Sally Nuamah (2019) How Girls Achieve. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press