What Do Boys’ Schools Teach Boys?

Craig Hildebrand-Burke
Nov 5 · 8 min read

‘I wish that all the ladies

Were holes in the road.

And if I was a dump truck,

I’d fill them with my load.’

*

I’d like to think this was the first time I’d heard this song. But it isn’t. I’d like to think it was the first time I’d heard it sung by a bunch of male students on public transport. But again, it isn’t. Partly fuelled by alcohol, partly by the ever-escalating brinkmanship that seems to occur when boys or men gather in large groups, the goal of this song seems not only to challenge by being offensive in public, but also to fill up the space with one’s, well, boyishness. Masculinity, I guess.

*

I taught in my pre-service teaching rounds at the school in question, the school that taught the boys in last week’s incident on a Melbourne tram. Later, I went for an interview for an as-yet undefined role at this same school, keen to begin my teaching career. I don’t recall much from the interview, except for one question:

‘What do you know about teaching boys?’

What could I offer to this?

Then, as an unemployed, unproven graduate teacher, what I hoped for was to provide the kind of education that I had worked well for me, someone who once was a boy. I hoped to teach, and learn to teach; the fact that this was a boys’ school didn’t really change anything for me. Nevertheless, to teach boys — they said — was singularly unique, and called for a specialised approach. There was a wealth of literature — they said — about how to engage boys specifically. Like a rare species.

This is the approach boys’ schools take, particularly those in the independent sector. To teach boys is to possess knowledge that is both arcane and enigmatic, bequeathed only to the few. What does this say about all the boys in co-educational schools, many of them under-funded government schools? Do they not fulfil their capacity as growing young men because they’re in classrooms with girls?

*

Response to last week’s incident from the school was unusually swift, with the headmaster addressing the ‘offensive behaviour’ and ‘misogynistic attitudes’ in a letter to the school community, later posted on the school’s website. The headmaster acknowledged that the school’s position on the incident would be reiterated to their Year 12 students that night during their Valedictory celebration. Unfortunately, that celebration was followed by a repeat performance by some students while on a pub crawl, in a direct challenge to the headmaster’s apology on behalf of the school.

Is this part of the school’s culture, despite teacher and student protestations? Or was this a small group of miscreants, acting in defiant confidence to both the school’s and society’s norms?

The notion that boys’ education is a specialised program is reinforced by the proliferation of independent schools for boys in Melbourne and around the country. Increasingly, the last decade has seen these schools champion their values and educational approaches as something fundamentally arcane and enigmatic, that only their environment can get near. ‘We teach boys’ said one school’s promotional material, as if this wasn’t just a reductive statement but something yearned for by the community. Regardless, the education offered here wasn’t enough to avoid the codification of objectifying and victimising teenage girls on social media. This was followed by students from yet another elite boys’ school participating in a mock boot camp, designed to ensure boys were adhering to acceptable levels of, once again, objectification and misogyny. And more recently in Sydney, students from — sigh — an elite independent boys’ school filmed and circulated an alleged sexual assault perpetrated by another student, repeating the circumstances of another case from the same school only a few years earlier. Last week, at a Catholic boys’ school in Melbourne, a letter was circulated written by a student, peppered with misogyny and homophobia, and alluding to accounts of sexual assault.

What, exactly, is being taught at these schools?

*

At a time when independent girls’ schools are seeing a decrease in student numbers or a shift to a co-educational model, single sex school environments for boys seem to be a holdout at the change of times. Studies into the supposed benefits of single sex schools on a child’s education against that of co-educational schools fail to offer any evidence, suggesting that whatever benefits might occur are either minor or undetectable. And yet boys’ schools remain, possibly as a retort to the re-evaluation of traditional gender roles and masculinity that society is currently undergoing.

Make boys great again, they seem to be saying, and yet here we are. Another muck-up day, more public displays of teenage misogyny.

*

The world was never a school, and it never could be.

Government schools reflect their communities, diversity and inclusion is built into their nature: everyone is welcome. Independent schools — and Catholic schools, to a similar extent — are a corruption of their environment. They skew the data, they manipulate the intake. They get to pick and choose and cultivate a gated community behind their walls that bears no resemblance to the world except in the rewarding of privilege. They become satellites of bygone eras where boys wear trousers and girls wear skirts and never the twain shall meet. These independent boys’ schools often tout how they teach not just the student, but the whole child. The whole person. Only, it’s the whole person as the school sees it, as they allow. How can this child be whole when they are removed from context? Removed from a world that would see them as but one of many, rather than one of the same? These schools barricade themselves in, defying the world around them, and then send their emissaries out at the end of Year 12 to show us how they think a person should be.

The whole child should be so much more.

*

To be a student is to learn. To listen. To reflect and engage. A recent study investigating the relationship between reflective behaviour, empathy and aggressive, rule-breaking behaviour found that greater levels of reflection were likely to result in greater levels of empathy, whereas lower levels of reflection results in more aggressive behaviours. But how do we encourage reflection? How do we cultivate empathy?

*

I can’t claim to say I succeeded where others didn’t in teaching boys. I can’t claim that. I do know that I struggled, not only in my own interpersonal connections with male students, but also with the restrictive cultural stereotypes that breach classroom walls. Foundational studies into classroom dynamics between male and female students established that not only did boys talk more in the classroom and dictate the educational direction to greater degrees, but that teachers unwittingly enabled this by calling on boys for contributions and spending more time in one-on-one discussion with male students. And yet we, as teachers, had to ensure we were sending students into the world beyond school in a way that left them prepared. It would be a failure not to.

As an English teacher, the standard line to encourage students to read the set texts is that, if nothing else, it would increase their capacity for empathy. ‘Put yourselves in someone else’s shoes. Learn their needs, their desires. Understand what it is to not be you.’

Of course, this only works to some degree. There needs to be a willingness, an openness to the text. To be receptive to someone else’s life, welcome it in, and let it become part of you. In a 2017 essay written in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, writer Angelina Burnett talked about stories as empathy machines, but machines for so long dominated by singular narratives.

‘Across thousands of years of western culture we have been relentlessly repeating stories that revolve around men. It all begins with him and it is to him all our empathy flows…These stories insist our institutional choices are the order of things, the way of the world, that all this air was already here. But it wasn’t. We dreamt it up, then forgot it wasn’t true. We bent reality around us.’

Boys’ schools tell the story that there is something fundamentally different about boys and masculinity in education that needs protecting and preserving. The story that only in this monocultural environment can they learn to be a man. All the tropes of masculinity are rife here: to bury emotion, to interact through conflict and aggression and competition. To see pain and hurt and failure as a weakness and inherently unmasculine. Their uniforms bind them together, not just through gender but through identification with the group. The school, the uniform, the gender, all of it, this is who we are.

Beyond Blue’s Beyond the Emergency study into mental health emergency presentations laid bare the stark numbers that nearly 80% of suicide deaths in 2016 were men, with numbers highest for those aged 18–44. Loneliness, an incapacity to ask for help, an overwhelming feeling that mental illness was unmasculine and weak were all contributing factors.

We attend these schools and we grow up, learning no capacity to express emotion through our words, no ability to connect empathically with other individuals. We have no language for male friendship other than jokes and insults and bullying that calls itself banter. Emotion and vulnerability and closeness are only allowed in the confines of competitive sport, the pride and joy of independent boys’ schools.

*

These days, I speak to students at different schools. We talk about friendships, and relationships, and the stereotypes that are gifted to us from birth that we either struggle against or follow — blindly or willingly, it doesn’t matter. Some of these are boys’ schools, but again, it doesn’t matter. In all of them, I’m speaking only to boys. This is their chance to listen, to think, to reflect about how masculinity has shaped them.

There’s a point in these workshops when the mood changes. When I can sense the shift from open, receptive engagement to a bristling resentment at a particular piece of information. One day it’ll be the gender wage gap, another time it will be a discussion of domestic violence. Sometimes it’ll be feminism, or predatory behaviour on public transport, or objectification in films and TV. It doesn’t really matter.

What matters is the arguments. The challenges. The blanket refusal to listen, to engage, to empathise. The same students who are invested in discussions about male depression and suicide refuse to consider that negative facets of masculinity can harm others. Particularly women.

Because how could they?

Theirs is a life where they can go anywhere. Wear what they want. Say what they like. Go on public transport and express wishes of sexual assault in the form of a song, and do it again a few days later because they know that this world was made for them.

They don’t finish their time at any one of these educational institutions ready to enter the world. They finish it to go and make the world theirs. To write and rewrite the world to fit their story.

This is what boys’ schools teach.

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