ploy: as one staff member told me, ‘That just means we have letters on the blocks’.)
In preschool or nursery, it will become clear which boys are ready for school – they are happy to sit and do work in books or craft, and are able to talk happily – and which boys are still needing to run about, and are not yet good with a crayon or pencil. Most boys will fall into the second group.
Based on your own observations, on discussion with the preschool teacher, and perhaps checking out what is expected of children going into primary school, you will soon get an idea – ready, or not ready yet. By taking another year in preschool, your boy has a whole year more to get ready to do really well in primary school. For most boys, this would mean that they move through school being a year older than the girl in the next desk – which means they are, intellectually speaking, on a par with the girls. By the late teens, boys catch up with girls intellectually but, in the way schools work now, the damage is already done. The boys feel themselves to be failures, they miss out on key skills because they are just not ready, and so get turned off from learning.
Holding boys back is also much less unkind. Sitting still at a desk is often hard and painful for small boys. In early primary school, boys (whose motor nerves are still growing) actually get signals from their body saying, ‘Move around. Use me’. To a stressed-out Grade 1 teacher, this looks like misbehaviour.
A boy sees that his craft work, drawing and writing are not as good as the girls’, and thinks, ‘This is not for me!’. He quickly switches off from learning – especially if there is not a male teacher anywhere in sight to give that sense that learning is a male thing, too. ‘School is for girls’, he tells himself.
There is much more that we can do to make school boy- friendly. This is explored in the chapter on schools, ‘A revolution in schooling’. But the first question – is he ready yet? – is perhaps the most important place to start.
In school, the same help is needed. One young female Maths teacher I know rarely lets a lesson pass without using some practical, hands-on example of what is being studied – often going outside to do it in a practical way in the playground. She found that the less motivated of her students could get a grasp of the concepts if they could see them in practice and do physical things with their bodies to comprehend the idea being taught. They were getting right-brain concepts to link to their left-brain understanding – using their strengths to overcome their weaknesses. This teacher’s boy students loved learning from her, she was adventurous, keen and cared about them.
Boys are not inferior – just different
Having a well-developed right side of the brain, as boys tend to do, has many pluses. As well as having Mathematical and mechanical abilities, males tend to be action-oriented – if they see a problem, they want to fix it. The right side of the brain handles both feelings and actions, so men are more likely to take action, while women tend to mull over something to the point of total paralysis! It requires extra effort for a man to shift into his left hemisphere and find the words to explain the feelings he is registering in his right hemisphere.
Germaine Greer has pointed out that there are more male geniuses in many fields, even though many may be imbalanced characters on the whole, needing someone to look after them (usually a woman)!
In an era when advertising and the media mostly portray men doing bad or stupid things, it’s important to remember (and to show boys) about the men who built the planes, made the art and music, laid the railroad tracks, invented the cars, built the hospitals, discovered the medicines and sailed the ships that made our world so wonderful, safe and interesting. There’s an African saying, ‘Women hold up half the sky’. But, clearly, men hold up the other half.
A new kind of man
The world no longer needs men who can wrestle with buffaloes or cut down trees with a flint axe. In the modern world, where manual or mechanical labour is less and less needed, we need to take that masculine ability and energy and redirect it to a different kind of heroic effort. This means adding language and feeling skills to the thinking and doing skills of boys – making a kind of ‘superboy’ who is flexible across all kinds of skill areas.
If you think about it, the great men of history – Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Buddha, Jesus – actually were like this. They had courage and determination, along with sensitivity and love for others. It’s an unbeatable mix, and it is certainly needed today.
IN A NUTSHELL
The gender differences created by male hormones and male genes need to be handled in practical ways. The following sums up what you can do with your boy to help him be a ‘new kind of man’.
| BECAUSE BOYS OFTEN: | WE NEED TO: |
|---|---|
| …are prone to separation anxiety … |
|
| …have testosterone surges, making them sometimes argumentative and restless – especially around age fourteen … |
|
| …have growth spurts that make them vague and disorganised, especially at age thirteen (this applies to girls too) … |
|
| …have bursts of physical energy that need to be expressed … |
|
| …have a slower rate of brain development, affecting fine-motor skills in early primary school … |
|
| …have fewer connections from the language half to the sensory half of the brain … |
|
| …have a need for a clear set of rules and knowing who is in charge … |
|
| …have a more muscular body … |
|