Book title: Boys Don’t Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools (2019)
Authors: Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts
Reviewed by: Neil Jones, Lead Practitioner for Most Able Students, Impington Village College, Cambridgeshire
Synopsis:
The book aims to draw teachers and school leaders into subtler thinking about how and why boys, as a group, can fail at school. It also provides tips on how to improve the situation, pastorally and academically. There are different ways of being a boy, just as there are different ways of being a girl, when learning to manage one’s experience as a learner. Indeed, the authors argue that gender is a less important lens through which to view underachievement than are class perception, views of what constitutes mental health, curriculum and pedagogy. The book urges all teachers and school leaders to focus on making meaningful achievement possible for all students; and to avoid ‘what’s not wanted’: essentialist, low expectations of any group.
Why should NACE members read/be aware of this book?
Members should read this book as the dominant theme running throughout its 10 chapters is the need for challenge for all students. The authors take the firm view that cultures of underachievement are not transformed by ghettoing more able and talented learners away from the others. Challenge needs to run through every aspect of a school community. The authors argue from first principles and give examples to demonstrate that a culture of challenge and excitement works by infection. Divide-and-rule on the basis of baseline ability, on the other hand, reinforces failure in lower-achieving groups, and it is boys as a group who tend more to be negatively categorised, and who end up fulfilling teachers’ and leaders’ prophecies of failure.
What’s new?
Rhetorically, the authors carefully unpack how their views on ‘the boy problem’ have changed. With humility, but not the masochism that sometimes goes with teachers’ blogs, they trace the changes that experience has required of their thinking and practice. What is new for teachers thinking about more able and talented provision is the urgency with which we are persuaded to be gender-blind in our judgements, which should make our assessments of need and ability more responsive.
Key takeaways:
- There are no specific techniques for teaching boys well.
- Teachers’ high expectations of themselves and their students, in subject knowledge and behaviour for learning, trump gender considerations (such as single-sex classes, or male students being taught by male teachers) every time.
- Setting by ability is more counterproductive than productive. The implication is that it should be avoided wherever possible. (For more on this, see NACE Trustee Liz Allen CBE’s review of Reassessing ‘Ability’ Grouping: Improving Practice for Equity and Attainment.)
- Pastoral care should acknowledge that some boys swallow cultural stereotypes of masculinity, and schools should challenge these.
- We need to change the negative labelling of ‘masculinity’. The phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ is counterproductive and highly charged. Instead, the authors advocate language such as ‘tender’ and ‘non-tender’ masculinity. Tenderness carries with it connotations of sincerity, vulnerability, openness and strength. Too often, anti-social behaviour is described away as being ‘toxically masculine’, whereas it is simply anti-social.
Final thoughts:
Written in 2019, the polemic of the book is of interest in the context of the culture wars in North Atlantic cultures following the financial crash of 2007/8. Gender is a point of contention in wider polarisations in identity politics, between, at the extremes, a pessimistic and anxious liberalism and a boorish and know-nothing authoritarianism. These authors know their purpose and appear to hold both sides of this shrill argument in equal contempt. Their focus is on getting the best out of all young people in schools.
At times, this is a flaw. I would have welcomed the authors’ views on how the British educational establishment has viewed this issue, and how this might overlap or differ in other countries. This is a pretty a-historical account, and there is much written elsewhere on the issue of boys in education, from at least Socrates on! But, taking the book on its own terms, as being the fruit of two excellent teachers’ research and day-in, day-out practice in schools, this is an invigorating call to break out of gender stereotyping and fight hard for every learner to go as far and fast as they can.
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