Boys Can Read, Too…
Hodgetts, K., & Lecouteur, A. (2010). Gender and Disadvantage in the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Education of Boys Feminism & Psychology, 20 (1), 73-93 DOI: 10.1177/0959353509349601
When I was a child in the early 1970s, growing up on a huge public housing estate in the western suburbs of Newcastle (an atrocious, racist/sexist/homophobic backwater of an industrial pit, 150km north of Sydney), our teachers had pre-determined that we were all white trash going nowhere. And so, in our final year of primary school, they had us boys out digging holes in the garden while the girls were inside, sewing. Life chances are seldom doled out fairly. To demonstrate that nothing has changed in the 35 years or so since, just look at the Australian Federal Government’s ‘My School’ website (www.myschool.edu.au). School by school, region-by-region, educational attainment and socio-economic status (SES) are positively correlated across the entire country. The egalitarian myth is just that, a myth. Australia is a country that pours billions of dollars every year into an elite, private school system while it condemns those at the poor end of the spectrum to tightly constricted opportunities like prison, homelessness, or welfare. In that context, this latest contribution to the ‘war on boys’ by Hodgetts and Lecouteur (2010) (see also, for example, Raewyn Connell’s 2008 article on this topic), puts on show Australia’s obsession with the much-touted claim that boys are falling behind academically because girls are getting ahead. Why are girls getting ahead? Well, never let the truth get in the way of a good conspiracy theory. The chain of reasoning goes that the school curriculum has been hijacked by feminist interests and now panders to the innate qualities of the female (Hodgetts & Lecouteur, 2010, p89). That sounds ridiculous, right? Meanwhile, out there in the sticks there are boys digging holes and girls, sewing…
Update: I have heard some pretty sensible people suggest, even colleagues of mine, that there is a crisis in masculinity and a war against boys and men. Wrong on both counts. But wanting to prove that the male sky is indeed falling means grabbing onto some pretty thin straws and running with them as fast as you can. You can hardly be pushing the view that boys’ brains are ‘hard-wired’ differently to girls and that boys are better at math than girls and girls, better at English (wrong on both counts) and then squeal like a pig: why can’t boys read? They can. They do. Maybe not always out of a book, but reading and comprehending and expressing none the same. I think that one essential element of reading, ‘wonderment’, that engagement with the text that takes you to another place, is a quality at odds with those oppressive masculine ideals foisted upon boys. Others have their own ideas about how to get over this nonsense that boys can’t read (see link, below)…
But the vast majority of the illiterate on the planet are women and girls! The “boys can’t read” trope is ridiculous when we still have places where boys are two to three times more likely to be able to read a contract that girls, for instance. Apparently the fact that literate, relatively privileged boys prefer to, i dunno, play video games rather than read “classic literature” somehow becomes a more important issue than the fact that millions of women cannot write their names.
Yes, I know, women are markedly disadvantaged and discriminated against, both in developed and developing nations. Even in a rich, prosperous country like Australia, where girls are now on par with boys in terms of education levels but still, where the heads of most major companies are men, where women are all but absent from company board rooms, where top government posts are mostly held by men, where the disparity between pay rates for men and women is actually widening and where for all sorts of reasons, women are effectively locked out of full-time, career advancement opportunities. I could on. So, whenever I hear ‘war on boys and men’ or ‘crisis in masculinity’ I immediately think, ‘delusional!’